Shuffle ← Back

Looking Back at Road to Rio+20's Online Communications

Web Design, Web Development, Writing

Road to Rio+20 was a coalition of organizations from around the world weaving together a global youth-led movement to realize the potential of the Earth Summit 2012.

Between May 2011 and July 2012 I lead the initiatives online communications, which were an important factor when it came to its development towards Rio+20 and the various youth mobilisation activities.
This is its story.
Background

Documents

You can read the quick Internal Evaluation on Storify

Road to Rio+20 Vision
Goal:
To mobilise youth around the globe towards the Rio+20 Earth Summit to show that they are ready to lead a sustainable future now.

Objectives:
To inform and engage young people on the work of our partner organisations connected to Rio+20 and to promote the MyCity+20, Earth Summit Watch and Rio+You campaigns
Outreach to young people around the world to join us on the road to Rio+20
Drive traffic to the Road to Rio+20 website, which will in turn drive young people to discover MyCity+20, Earth Summit Watch, Rio+You and organisations working globally or within their country.
Outreach to organisations that can join the Road to Rio+20 initiative
To inform and engage young people on sustainable development issues, Rio+20 news and events and actions connected to Rio+20
To promote the work and leadership of young people around the world within the field of sustainable development

Key Strategy Points:
Being positive in our communications about sustainable development issues and looking forward; instead of back to the original Earth Summit
Write as a fellow young person and not talking to youth
Being a campaign set in all time zones. Not only updating social media platforms between 9-5 UK time.
Conversing with the Facebook groups and Twitter accounts/hashtags centred on Rio+20
Connecting to sustainable development/youth organisations that could form part of the coalition
Setting daily,weekly and monthly minimum targets for online content ( social media platforms, website, newsletter) and being diverse in what we post
Having a strategy for Rio+20 itself.
Youth Involvement
The stuff we did to involve young people with Road to Rio+20, before Rio+20
Walk with us on the Road to Rio+20
Looking Back
It was not an empowering campaign with real outcomes
Though it was simple, a strategy should of been written for this campaign, detailing its short time-length and what the Graphic Designer could have developed at the end of it. (A simple collage, which could have then effectively been used as an image for Road to Rio+20 later on)
It was smart decision to also get stock images of feet & shoes, from colleagues to start the ball rolling on the campaign. Without that, we may of got no submissions, compared to the 21 we did receive.
We should of gave more involvement for the coalition partners - asking them to share the short campaign, or feature a short blog post.

Shared Stories
Looking Back:
What we found difficult, was not getting people interested in sharing their story, but aiming for the stories to be of good quality and diverse. Sometimes, we needed to contact the storytellers and push them to add details or re-edit them ourselves, to make them more interesting or grammatically correct.
If we had the opportunity of having an extra team member, this could of been their own project; collecting stories and making sure they are diverse in location etc.. and format.
This campaign also gave an extra boost to what we posted on our social media channels, and showed off the work of youth and not Road to Rio+20 or our partner organisations; which was a nice little bonus.
As a challenge to join the coalition, the new partner organisations who signed the MOU, should have found a young person connected to their organisation and get them to share their story.
We should of made sure that everyone on the Road to Rio+20 told their own story.
We should of added all the stock stories, only 5 out of 14 were added.

Website Content
Looking Back:
- notable gaps on the website included
  - The Learn section only covered the basics of sustainable development
  - The Take Action section gave brief overviews of each action and sent visitors to the external websites
  - The Events pages were predominantly empty and only linked to external event maps or lists
  - The blogs section was ending up to be only a weekly roundup and featured partner affair, lacking in diverse different types of posts.
- More discussions should of took place on how to develop the pages with limited content
- The team as a whole should have aided the Blogger-in-Chief, concerning content diversity
- We should of reflected on the stagnation of our blog pages within the first few weeks
- We should of set time aside to find the maps and lists to do with events and transfer them to our website regularly
- We could of been more strategic, in thinking about what is missing from the media; concerning Rio+20. and filled in this void.
Coalition Involvement & Promotion
Looking Back:
We should have tried to aid smaller organisations to get onto social media; or discussed with them more, about the actions and work that they were doing to see if blogs or social media posts could be created
Focus and aid them in gaining more recognition in their home country, via the use of Twitter & Facebook
Promoted our Partner pages on the website more; mentioning the countries where we have coalition partners
Being more strategic with the specialized newsletter for organisations. For example if a organisation started to follow us, who were based in country X; the newsletter could have information on the partner organisations that work in X.
Connected them more to the different campaigns, The organisations with no social media presence would then have events/actions to do with Rio+20 which we could then share.
Started the featured partner feature earlier and relaxed our own thoughts on who should be presented on their
The Campaigns

The campaigns we joined and promoted on the way to Rio+20
Earth Summit Watch
Tracked and collected information on what countries and their Heads of States were doing in regards to Rio+20. Using social media tools it is able to give visitors the opportunity to fill in missing information regarding a country or share it down their networks.
http://www.summitwatch.org/profiles.html

Rio+You
A campaign to raise awareness about the importance of the summit and the issues behind it, encouraging people around the world to take action in their own lives and in the lives of their
communities. The campaign climaxed with a Global Day of Action on April 22nd (Earth Day)
www.riomasvos.org/?lang=en

My City+20
A series of Model Earth Summits organized in high schools, universities and cities around the world under the banner MyCity+20 (e.g Paris+20, Amsterdam+20, Rome+20, etc.).
www.mycityplus20.com/

Looking Back:
Should of had more discussions and meetings with those that looked after the campaigners social media, to see if we can develop more varied online content and ways of promotion
Should of had set plans for the collection of photos, videos and blogs taken from events.
The Road to Rio+20 website itself, should have contained the information needed to plan a Rio+You or MyCity+20 event; We would still refer and link to the campaigns websites; but at least this way, the information could of easily be found in two places instead of one.
More support could have been gained online for Earth Summit Watch, ranging from volunteers who could find country information, to us linking countries information to the relevant coalition partners from that country to share down their channels.
Rio+20
Looking Back:
Many of the issues we faced were to do with Rio+20 itself. How it was set up, logistics and youth involvement However having daily team meetings at a set time would of been a good starting point in getting over these complications
Being a larger on-site team (not including those on the rapid response) would of also helped in connecting with other people and complete our work on the strategy
Having a person whose duty it was to connected with other youth and the MGCY itself to find news to report on would of been a bonus
Always have spare digital equipment in case of mishaps
If an crazy action takes place, make sure a meeting takes place after it, to plan what communications will state
If it is a boring affair, what can we do to change it. and show it off as being exciting. - this should have been a discussion point.
The Online Stats
Looking Back:
Did everyone find the information they needed on our homepage, or did they get bored and could not be bothered to check out any of our subpages?
The big gap between homepage visits and our next popular page (take action) was something to discuss as a team. Maybe it was to do with the diversity of blogs, information or lack of passion behind the actually Rio+20 process....
A strong Brazilian following on Facebook was a bit unexpected, especially as no Portuguese content was put up. (Guessing Rio+You aided our outreach to Brazilian youth) Maybe we should have focused on how to increase each countries follow rate, by using coalition partners networks, outreaching to youth organisations in that country and getting those that follow us to spread the word about us, via a set campaign, tools or things worth sharing
Not enough conversation took place over Twitter & Facebook and on most days it felt like a one way conversation. This could be solved by talking to each new follower, asking open questions and having more diverse content. (links, team news, quotes etc.)
Our newsletter open rate went down after Earth Day, and it is hard to guess why, as we did not change the layout or style of email headers. (maybe, that is why though?) We might of also overdone it with having the monthly newsletter + 3 special newsletters that focused on each campaign.
We should of not been afraid of changing the set layout, and the set type of content our newsletters contained. Changing this stuff often could have benefited us.
Though most of our videos were of novice quality, the viewing figures show that it was still a popular medium of outreach. Thus we should have made more & in turn this would have improved our own video editing skills.
Conclusion

Key Successes:
Aiding in creating a coalition of 100 worldwide partners
involving hundreds of youth in 15 youth events around the world, which lead to statements being created, which feed into the MGCY zero text and were viewed by 5000 people
Moving to a new website halfway through our lifetime and benefiting from it and not losing our focus in the process of the transfer
Promoting worldwide events and actions via our coalition partners, campaigns and Rio+20 actions for over a year
Being recognized for our work and our reach by the UN Foundation
Being on top on spreading the news and promoting the Rio+20 youth walkout and the start of discussions to do with going beyond Rio+20.
Website pages being viewed 35,000 times
Having over 7,000 Subscribers
Having over 19,000 Visitors to our website and additional online material

Frustrations Encountered:
Internet issues in Rio effecting our long-term plans of being a go to initiative for news, actions and updates
The need for the main Road to Rio+20 team, to work on other projects, leading to us not hitting our high targets
Finding a variety of Rio+20 news, was difficult before the summit, as it was always concerned with explaining the summit. Whilst at the summit itself, no real news developed due to it all being talk-talk-talk
Own skills at creating creative content like visuals, videos, photos were not to a standard worthy of an international initiative, however much has been learnt on these issues, since joining
Not having a full coalition being social media experienced, leading to some organisations getting more recognition than others
Not hitting points in our Rio+20 plan
A decline in newsletter open rate as we neared Rio+20
Small take up on our website campaigns: walk with us, share your story

Notes for future international youth movements like Road to Rio+20

Go further than just being a coalition, aid the organisations to grow
Always plan ahead with a campaign and get stock images/stories etc to help its growth
Monitor and evaluate the website, and means of communications often, to access changes or developments often
Note what others are talking about, in regards to sustainable development and notice what is not being talked about
Have loads of internal discussions and teamwork opportunities to make campaigns reach their potential
Constantly work on teams own digital skills
Be prepared for UN events and take a larger team to cover all aspects and work collectively.

Thanks for reading -
Simon Howlett