What was the project background?
With drought events increasing by 29% since 2000 and half of the world’s population being affected by land degradation, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) wanted to capture the world’s attention and raise awareness about the impact of drought on livelihoods.
Protecting and restoring land could be a way to address multiple SDGs, and drought, while inevitable, could be mitigated if countries and citizens started taking action and preparing early for them. UNCCD wanted to make sustainable land and water management part of the political agenda of governments, while also educating the public about misconceptions surrounding drought such as being caused only by insufficient rainfall. Parallel to this, they wanted to reinforce UNCCD’s positioning as the global vision and voice for land protection.
UNCCD had different milestones planned for 2022, including the launch of the Global Land Outlook Second Edition, COP 15, Desertification and Drought Day, and other conferences, through which they wanted to take advantage of to spark conversation about the key issues of land restoration and drought, and needed a campaign that could be aligned with and unite the storytelling throughout the different milestones.
How did we work through the challenge?
After conducting interviews with subject matter experts and UNCCD staff, as well as reviewing desk research, we identified that the topics of land restoration and drought, while interconnected, were slightly different. In order to talk about drought, it was important for audiences to also have the context of land restoration. We thus decided to split the project into different communication efforts, aligned with the agendas of the different UNCCD milestones:
Global Land Outlook Second Edition Publication
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) produces a flagship publication titled Global Land Outlook in which it underscores land system challenges, showcases transformative policies and practices, and points to cost-effective pathways to scale up sustainable land and water management. For the release of the second edition, UNCCD needed a way to build anticipation and share some of the content and get the key messages in a more digestible format, understanding that many people wouldn’t read the full report.
As a solution to this challenge, our team worked with UNCCD to highlight the key messages of the report, as well as key data to amplify through a workshop. After getting the raw information, our team then worked on synthesizing it and transforming its language to be easily understood by anyone. Our designers then worked on producing a series of key messages and key data graphics that were visually impactful and helped digest the information easily.
We also developed a series of graphic teasers that focused on how land restoration impacts and is related to various dimensions of human life.The graphics were leveraged and disseminated through social media channels, as well as media kits, which different outlets used as part of their journalistic pieces, prior, during and after launch to keep the momentum of the conversation. You can see all assets in this link: https://trello.com/b/sAbqXGl2/global-land-oulook-2nd-edition
Droughtland Campaign
Using humor and irony to avoid triggering “climate doom” or “eco-anxiety”, we worked with UNCCD to create a fictionalized country called Droughtland whose citizens experience life with drought. The campaign launched during COP15 through a series of graphic and audiovisual (English and Spanish) assets, as well as a website that simulates a real tourism page of the country, while educating audiences of the impacts of drought in a lighthearted way. We also worked with an artist to develop a Droughtland mural and audiovisual piece to engage COP 15 attendees.
Later, UNCCD revealed that Droughtland was a way to call the world’s attention to ensure no lands or countries become Droughtland. At this point the narrative shifted to #NoDroughtland, and a second set of videos in which Droughtland citizens offer advice on how not to become like Droughtland were released. The campaign was featured as part of Desertification and Drought Day, hosted by Spain this year, in which we produced offline, experiential activations that brought audiences closer to experiencing Droughtland,
- A “Dry Delights” culinary experience with a low hydraulic footprint in collaboration with the Basque Culinary Center to offer dry land foods to educate people about how drought affects food systems.
- A “Droughtland” tourism center in which the tour guides would provide key info about the campaign, as well as serve as a hub to engage influencers and media.
- For online content and engagements, we produced a series of animated videos of “postcards from droughtland” in which the different citizens of Droughtland wrote stories about how things are improving there because of drought mitigation action.
- We also created a series of Instagram Droughtland visa filters so users could take their picture with them online and help disseminate the campaign.
Desertification and Drought Day Theme Development and Visual Identity
While each year the celebrations of Desertification and Drought Day are hosted by one country officially, all nations have their own activities to reflect on and inspire action for drought. UNCCD asked us to develop the theme for this year’s Desertification and Drought Day (June 17th, 2022) as well as a series of graphic assets that all countries could easily use to promote their own activities and spread the word on social media channels, as well as traditional ad spaces.
After analyzing some of the flagship publications of UNCCD and reviewing past themes of Desertification and Drought day, our team developed a theme that conveyed optimism and hope, focused on drought resilience and collective action, and expressed the idea in a human, non-technical way: “Rising from drought together”, in Spanish, “Superando Juntos las Sequías”, or in French, “Tous Ensemble pour Vaincre la Sécheresse”..
The spirit of the theme was then reflected through a logo and series of graphic assets that included posters, banners, social media graphics, animations, and postcards in different languages that focused on drought resilience, which could easily be used by any country to promote their own DDD activities. We also developed an accompanying visual identity manual so countries could know how to and how not to use these materials.
The theme as well as the graphic assets were used in the lead up, during, and after Desertification and Drought Day not only in Spain, the host country of the activities that year, but all over the world.
The theme was used in various speeches from high-level staff from UNCCD, as well as political officers of various governments to raise awareness about the importance of taking action to be more drought resilience.
What were the outcomes?
- The Droughtland website experienced a significant traffic boost just prior to DDD 2022. This traffic boost led to over 2M event triggers on the website. 7% of the traffic used a translation capability to translate the website, and an overwhelming majority of users used mobile phones to access the site. Given this traffic, the website did experience over 3TB of data transfer which will need to be optimized for future events in order to use less resources per visitor.
- Over the 3 days of activation, a total of 1,164 people passed by the booth and were informed about the campaign, the majority being from Spain, USA, UK, France, Argentina and Italy
- The campaign mentions peaked in the lead up to DDD, during, and the weekend after it. Mentions of #NoDroughtland were global, with the US, India, Kenya, Spain, and Germany some of the top countries with mentions. Eastern Europe, as well as Central Africa were regions with low or no mentions.
- We can see that the hashtag #NoDroughtland got much more prominence. However, #Droughtland was more strictly used to engage around the campaign and #NoDroughtland in general for Desertification and Drought Day. Twitter is the top performing social media channel for our campaign.
- Total #NoDroughtland and #Droughtland mentions on social: 4.07K
- TW: 55,5 M
- FB: 617,3 K
- YT: 416
- As part of the political gains, the efforts done for DDD contributed to the approval of a Desertification Strategy Plan in Spain.
