Moors for the Future: Social Media Marketing for Environmental NGO
Spreading awareness about wildfire risks for Moors for the Future
As part of our ongoing commitment to 1% For the Planet causes, we teamed up with Moors for the Future to spread awareness about the risk of wildfires in the Peak District, to a less outdoor-aware audience. 2025 saw a long, hot, dry summer, meaning the Peak District was a tinderbox waiting for one stray disposable BBQ to set it alight.
The Moors for the Future team wanted an innovative way to spread awareness and educate a relevant audience. We proposed working with our roster of our social-first content creators to produce bespoke, engaging and informative social first content. All content was made for use on organic and paid social media, in campaigns that would reach people in the surrounding areas of the Peak District.
This meant the Peak District team could get more for their budget rather than investing it all in one big shoot. Essentially, the more varied content allowed more exposure to more varied audiences.
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Maximising reach and engagement with content creators
Our aim was to make content that was informative but didn’t come across as a lecture. To do this, we tapped into our network of social-first creators. We chose different types of creators, so we could target a range of audiences. We worked with Instagram and TikTok experts and filmmakers to create native feeling video content hosted directly on the Moors for the Future account. They ticked all the boxes we needed: informative, engaging and entertaining.
All videos had highly bespoke briefs that were tailored to the social audience. They were tailored to speak directly to people who were most likely to end up on the moors, but less likely to know what might cause a wildfire.
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Using science to explain wildfires
A key protagonist in our content creator lineup was Big Manny, a London-based science communicator. He’s one of those people who can break down complicated topics and keep them digestible. Everyone who hangs out on social media has probably seen one of his videos whether they realise it or not.
His video was a visual explainer of how wildfires can spread underground. Manny also demonstrated why stamping a fire out overground doesn’t mean it’s really gone. This Reel was almost instantly successful, reaching millions of organic views in just a couple of days. This was the highest reaching and engaged post of the year for Manny–and what was even more impressive was that it didn’t have a paid media budget behind it at this point.
Alongside the high reach, the engagement was high too with 210k likes, and more than a thousand positive comments.
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Targeting young families in the Peak District
The Peak District is the busiest national park in the UK, a factor likely influenced by its multiple bordering northern cities. To help us find the urbanites and young families, we decided to work with Isobel Cummins, a Manchester-based family content creator.
She created an aspirational and informative day in the life video. We made the tactical decision to post this towards the end of the school summer holidays, when families might be running out of ideas for activities. We kept the wildfire messaging quite light with this one. Isobel wove the advice naturally into her voiceover, meaning the content still felt authentic and not like one of those ads where you just know the creator is reading off a script.
We arranged to post this Reel collaboratively, so it tapped into both Isobel’s and the Moors for the Future audience. Her piece got a really strong number of impressions, with a decent engagement rate, serving as a gentle heads-up for the weekend crowd.
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Performance data for future campaigns
We wanted to increase awareness and, in turn, audience size for Moors for the Future. Using content creators, collaborative posts and paid media campaigns all helped make this happen. Instead of preaching to the converted, Moors for the Future were able to reach up to 99% unaware audiences through the content strategy.
The ads were seen on 3.4 million occasions, with a really even split in impressions by age category. Certainly a good sign that we were hammering the point home from all angles. Moors for the Future’s Instagram following increased by nearly 25% thanks to the campaign.
The partnership now has a bank of performance data, content insights, and audience learnings to build into any future campaigns they’d like to run. We look forward to iterating on the success of this campaign and partnering with them on our future 1% For The Planet contributions.
