Without data, this initiative wouldn’t be possible. It relied solely on delegates using the hashtag, and was measured by adding the total number of shares across social media platforms. The intention of the campaign was twofold:

1) To offset the CO2 created by social sharing at the event. By the end of the activation, we had planted enough trees to create four tons of oxygen per annum.

2) Through real-time data visualisation, we created awareness around unintentional CO2 creation through social media sharing.

In order to get people to contribute to the campaign, we needed a mechanism to highlight their participation, so we designed a visualisation of all incoming data (the real-time root system). To do this, we had to intrinsically understand all incoming social data types (tweets, Instagram posts and Facebook shares) and cater for the differences in content.

Data was integral to the campaign as without it, we couldn’t calculate how much CO2 had been emitted and how much we needed to offset by planting trees.