01 Feb Practical Action: Tech for Poverty

The Rio20 Earth Summit in June 2012 was a one off opportunity to publicly address the issue of energy access, and international development charity Practical Action wanted to ensure that opportunity was not missed.

I devised an influencer engagement programme focused on spreading Practical Action’s message and developing evangelists in the digital and tech online communities. Consistent monitoring of social networks and websites enabled us to contact bloggers and journalists with bespoke stories, while videos and images were fed into Practical Action’s social networks to drive engagement.

In the three months before the Earth Summit, Practical Action was mentioned on 102 topic-relevant blogs and websites including Mashable, Forbes and National Geographic. There were over 3600 interactions about Practical Action’s energy access work on social media, and over 1000 people registered their support online. The campaign gained a reach of around 2 million people.

The campaign won a total of five awards at the CorpComms Digi Awards, the Digital Impact Awards and the CIPR PRide Awards.