WWF Earth Hour still has low awareness in China. How do we get more Chinese to talk about it and start caring about conservation?

To create a PR buzz, we started the Digital Earth Hour. We replicated the symbolic gesture of turning off the lights to where it mattered most to the Chinese: the digital space.

We convinced China’s biggest portals and social networks to lend us their websites during Earth Hour. We programmed a code that would “Black out” the landing pages of major Chinese websites for an hour. Only the area the cursor was lit, accompanied by a provocative message, “Only light up what you need.”

This let netizens experience the movement. While this experience is symbolic, there’s a link to Earthhour’s website that allows users to learn concrete ways on conserving resources on a daily basis.

China’s biggest portals put aside their rivalries and collectively demonstrated their support. Online media picked up the Digital Earth Hour and featured it on the news.

Results over 50 million PC, tablet, and mobile screens were blacked out. That’s engaging 10% of China’s netizens in just an hour. Or the equivalent to the entire population of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland combined.

People started talking about the Earth Hour blackout online, making the WWF Earth Hour web traffic soar by 630%. All without spending a cent on media.

This let netizens experience the movement. While this experience is symbolic, there’s a link to Earthhour’s website that allows users to learn concrete ways on conserving resources on a daily basis.

China’s biggest portals put aside their rivalries and collectively demonstrated their support.

Results over 50 million PC, tablet, and mobile screens were blacked out. That’s engaging 10% of China’s netizens in just an hour.

Or the equivalent to the entire population of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland combined. Web traffic also soared by 630%. All without spending a cent on media.