An Overview Of Our Solution
Do The Green Thing is a public service for the planet, which uses creativity to tackle climate change. Over the past decade it has inspired 45 million people in 202 countries to live a greener life.
Run by volunteers, the non-profit is a creative venture that is disrupting the often worthy and overly complicated world of environmental communications. It adds a green lens to the planetary damaging norms of modern life with the goal of making sustainable choices as desirable as unsustainable choices. This is achieved through compelling creative that is researched rigorously, argued originally and brought to life vividly through illustrations, films and campaigns.
- Population Impacted: 45,000,000
- Continent: Europe
Last name
Organization type
Context Analysis
Humanity is heading towards a precipice, and we know what to do to save ourselves, which is to tone down our many shades of rampant consumerism. But it’s an everyday struggle to do it, because the consequences are not on our watch, and the ones that are on our watch are not on our patch, and because right here right now we are presented with indulgent and tempting ways to be unsustainable, made delicious by innovation and dazzling by design.
When we look at the principal campaigners - sandal wearers, tree huggers, climate scientists, all telling us what we ought to do, or rather, what we ought to do without, it’s just too easy not to be tempted. Our approach is to use the same invention, design and communication that makes unsustainability so desirable, and use it to make sustainability just as desirable. To ditch the sandals, and walk in the minds and the regular shoes of the vast majority of people who need a choice to be creative and attractive to be able to choose it.
Describe the technical solution you wanted the target audience to adopt
Founded in 2007, Do The Green Thing spent eight years working with a global community of creatives including David Shrigley, Paula Scher and Sir Paul Smith to make films, posters, podcasts and products that have inspired over 45 million people in more than 200 countries to live more sustainably.
In January 2016, we relaunched with a new visual identity, format and angle of attack; releasing an ‘Issue’ every two months that challenges the unsustainable status quo through long-form arguments, illustrations and creative provocations. In little over a year, we have taken on unsustainable actions in films, cars in London, meat eating at festivals, the planetary impact of make-up, hideous overconsumption at Christmas, the carbon cost of casual cocaine use and the Tories’ sub-par record on the climate. With each Issue, it took these cultures, sectors, actions and icons to task and, importantly, offered imaginative, sustainable alternatives in their place.
Type of intervention
Describe your behavioral intervention
Our flag is ‘Creativity vs Climate Change’. Our biggest creative endeavour is to bring humour and its sibling, charm, to climate change communications. Climate change communication often wears its gravity and panic heavily: the need to scream produces a scream.
And while there’s nothing funny about global warming, a film that parodies our laziness in taking energy-greedy lifts, a poster that compares feet favourably to cars, another that asks you not only to cycle to work but to cycle back too; these and many other Do The Green Thing films, posters, poems and stories all bring a lightness to climate change communication that in our view is needed.
Seriousness works on a global level; setting the agenda, raising the stakes. But on an individual level - on the level we’re asking people to take action - seriousness can debilitate. It can cause us to panic, or curl up, or freeze, and feel there’s nothing meaningful we can do, and so we do nothing. But as a resource that’s plentiful as long as humanity’s optimism remains, lightness has the magical effect of helping us to look up, look out, smile and try something. To take that step. In a soft but powerful way, lightness drives action.
Lightness can nudge us to act, but sometimes it takes more than a nudge. Sometimes delightful creativity needs to come at the end of a massive kick in the behind to the industries, companies, institutions and traditions that make it so crazily tough for us to behave sustainably.
As needed, please explain the type of intervention in more detail
We have an approach that adds a different voice to the climate change conversation. Because it’s going to take every possible voice - talking, shouting, insisting, inspiring, singing, whispering and yes even screaming - to get our species to understand what we’re doing to ourselves, and change.
We add a much needed green lens to the planetary damaging norms of modern life with the goal of making sustainable choices as desirable as unsustainable choices. People are influenced by their social environment, we use compelling creative to create social incentives that nudge people towards greener choices. This is achieved through that is researched rigorously, argued originally and brought to life vividly through illustrations, films and campaigns.
For example, our Ungifted campaign re-writes the the social norm that says “you must buy people things to show them you care about them.” This campaign leverages the power of social norms to create a new social norm that says it’s okay to not buy people a gift: https://www.fastcompany.com/90152913/pentagrams-guide-to-giving-a-great…
Describe your implementation
In the last 12 months, Do The Green Thing has argued that screenwriters are ruining the planet by excluding incidental green actions from Hollywood scripts; that London’s cars are as dangerous America’s guns and should be subject to robust car control policies; that UK festivals should stop serving meat; that it is time to kill Santa; and that doing cheeky line of coke at the weekend undoes sustainable weekly day choices.
Do The Green Thing has subverted ridiculous car ads and unsustainable Hollywood cliches; released a pro-veg ad campaign that can be used by veggie food trucks everywhere; produced a film with girls and young women that explores their relationships with make-up, the environment and their own power to change things; and created a provocative anti-Tory election poster which explains why Theresa May’s Brexit means oh shit for our planet.
Do The Green Thing has tools for people to live more sustainably, like Ungifted, an alternative gifting system that saved people from thousands of unwanted candles, bath bombs, novelty ties, socks and other impersonal gifts at Christmas. It's released educational pieces, like Charlie Vs. The World, a tongue-in-cheek coke-o-graphic featuring the world’s first meaning calculation of the carbon cost of cocaine. And it gave people a space to express their pro-planet views at ‘Poster Power’, a supersized workshop at the Tate Modern which was attended by 500 people.
Do The Green Thing has done all of this and more across the last year, through seven Issues and with dozens of collaborators who have all used creativity to combat the biggest problem of our time - climate change.
External connections
As a team, we know what we can do, and we know what needs to be done, and we know we can’t do it all; not even close. So we ask. We ask a far-reaching and ever-widening circle of inspiringly talented and committed collaborators to help us on a more or less voluntary basis. Without them, Do The Green Thing would have done pretty much nothing. With them, we do everything we do.
The nine environmental advisors who created and ratified our programme of actions. The behaviour change thinkers who have helped us promote them. The IAs, web designers and builders who have always been on hand to sketch things out for us and throw them up. The organisations, brands, agencies and networks who have amplified and shared our content far and wide.
Creative agencies and luminaries around the world, including Tracy Chavalier, David Shrigley, Sir Paul Smith, Tea Uglow, Sir Quentin Blake, Sir Philip Treacy, Pete Fowler, Partizan films, Rankin, Dean Chalkley, Rosie Huntingdon-Whiteley, Google Creative Labs, Huntley Muir, Andrew Rae, Sarah Boris, Steven Qua, Justin Hawkins, Patrick Cox, Sophie Thomas, Craig Oldham, Pentagram partners Paula, Natasha, Emily, Michael, Abbott, Harry, Angus, Dom, Jody, Luke, Daniel, Marina, and many other wonderful directors, designers, animators, model makers, illustrators, musicians, painters, photographers, coders and more who have leant us a small slice of their brilliance.
Who adopted the desired behaviors and to what degree?
Our target audience is city dwellers aged 25-34. Our goal is to inspire through direct views & subscribers, and perhaps more powerfully, through other people’s platforms.
Since January 2016, we have been covered by Fast Company, It’s Nice That, Computer Arts and Design Week. It's been given public platforms by the Tate Modern, Design Indaba, What Design Can Do, D&AD and the Edinburgh Film Festival. It's been been invited to share with multiple organisations, including Universal Music, PSFK and the London College of Communications. The coverage has exposed millions of people worldwide to us, presenting attractive & sustainable alternatives to the unsustainable norms of modern life.
Some Examples:
http://www.designindaba.com/articles/point-view/carbon-cost-your-cocaine
https://99u.adobe.com/articles/58984/pentagrams-naresh-ramchandani-do-t…
https://350.org/creative-ideas-for-a-healthier-life/
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
Our primary objective is to use social norms and emotional appeals to nudge people towards taking green actions in their own lives.
We've tackled waste and excess with our Our Ungifted campaign, which presents an alternative to environmentally harmful and thoughtless "stocking filler" type gifts. Our campaign around weddings is an antidote to the princess wedding fantasies peddled by pop culture and stoked by an insatiable wedding industry. We wrote and animated Too Much Wedding, a children’s book for grown-ups that takes aim at our unsustainable (and unromantic) Wedding Industrial Complex. Our most recent issue uses the precedent set by the smoking ban to appeal directly to advertising industry executives, speaking in their language and context to encourage green thinking around the promotion of products that are environmentally problematic.
http://dothegreenthing.com/issue/our-big-fat-ungreen-weddings/un
http://dothegreenthing.com/issue/nice-ad-shame-about-the-planet/
What were some of the resulting co-benefits?
In the past year, Do The Green Thing has spoken to a growing social following of 145,000 people - 79,000 people on Facebook, 63,000 followers on Twitter and 3,000 people on Instagram. It's presented to audiences at Design Indaba, D&AD New Blood and What Design Can Do. It's been covered by Cool Hunting, It’s Nice That, Fast Company, Computer Arts and Design Week.
We have created a creative community that is engaged with green action. Over the past year, We have collaborated with a community of illustrators, film makers, coders, economists, graphic designers, market researchers, animators and girls football clubs to create the richest possible mix of content. If creativity is magic, these people are its cultural magicians, making the counter-spells to counteract the spell - the thrall - that is consumption.
Sustainability
All in all, nearly a thousand contributors who have chosen to help us because the cause is important; who share our belief that only something brilliant can possibly work; who have helped our team create the hugely hopeful and ambitious inspiration that has reached tens of millions around the world - not enough, but not nothing. We are run by a small team of volunteers, donating our time to create the work. We do no rely on grant funding or subsidies, rather this network of collaborators. If creativity is magic, these people are its cultural magicians, making the counter-spells to counteract the spell - the thrall - that is consumption.
Return on investment
Do The Green Thing's objective is to create a creative community that is engaged with green action, and is able to elevate the quality of our output. Over the past year, it has collaborated with a community of illustrators, film makers, coders, economists, graphic designers, market researchers, animators and girls football clubs to create the richest possible mix of content. By engaging them, it is our hope that they will incorporate Do The Green Thing's principles and practices in their creative output, as well as their creative careers.
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
While Do The Green Thing hasn't been replicated in its entirety, its individual campaigns have. Thousands of people visited the Ungifted microsite site over the course of Christmas 2017, leading to Ungifts being delivered from all corners of the globe. The campaign’s popularity in Brazil prompted a Portuguese language version of the site, in partnership with 350. Extra funding would allow us to work on the underpinning technology that powers initiatives like Ungifted, expanding its capability, accessibility and reach.