2020 Winner
2020 Winners
Protect Our Winters Canada
Fact Avalanche
Scientists agree: climate change is real, but climate change denial among the population slows down the adoption of global solutions and better environmental laws, making the fight against climate change harder for everyone who wants to act.
According to studies, climate change deniers get 49% more visibility in the media and online compared to climate scientists, and only 3% of the content regarding climate change on Twitter comes from an expert scientific source. Protect Our Winters Canada, a not-for-profit that unites the outdoor community to take action against climate change, was looking for a way to act on the issue while growing their fan base organically online.
Insights and Strategy
With the upcoming Canadian elections, Protect Our Winters Canada decided it was time to set the record straight, so it created the Fact Avalanche, an online tool designed to #FactBack in real-time against climate change misinformation and skepticism on Twitter while giving all Canadians more science-backed knowledge on the issue.
Execution
During the political campaign, the Fact Avalanche followed the most influential Twitter accounts of climate change deniers and political figures who might have an impact on Canadians’ point of view on climate. When a falsity about climate change was tweeted, the Fact Avalanche sent an alert automatically to all participants, inviting them to respond together to the tweet by shuffling through targeted scientific facts from a custom fact bank built in partnership with Canadian universities and scientific climate partners at IC3 (Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change). Each time, they buried climate change deniers’ tweets under a massive amount of truth from proven scientific sources.
People could join the Fact Avalanche and get alerted through SMS, email and even Slack. Canadian companies were also invited to be part of the movement by adding the app to their company’s Slack, alerting all their employees at once every time a Fact Avalanche was triggered. Fact gifs and stickers were also created so people could continue to #FactBack against climate change denial on other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, etc.
To launch the movement and gather members, we started with an online film that we shared through POW’s social media and POW’s partners’ channels. Then, each tweet became an ad itself for everyone who saw it on their feed and wanted to fight climate change misinformation, organically creating a snowball effect online.
Results and Impact
Avalanches were triggered every single day in the weeks leading up to the election, ceaselessly burying popular deniers, fossil fuel lobby groups and political leaders. After three weeks, over 5K people joined the movement through email and SMS, while more than 100 Canadian companies and their employees added the app to their Slack. By the end of the Canadian elections, with $0 in paid media, the Fact Avalanche organically drove over 25 million impressions and generated a 300% increase in followers on POW Canada’s Instagram page.