Our social campaign brought The Royal Parks’ Mission Invertebrate project to new audiences, motivating them to engage with the charity’s biodiversity drive.
The Thinking
The Royal Parks charity cares for London’s Royal Parks, with over 5,000 acres of free and accessible historic parkland for all to enjoy. The Royal Parks’ Mission Invertebrate project brings together ecologists, park teams and the public to help insects thrive. Keen to increase public engagement with this mission, The Royal Parks turned to distillery. At the time, London was under Covid-19 restrictions, and we understood how valuable parks were to people seeking space, sanctuary and social interaction. Our #morethanbugs campaign was born.
The Making
First, we focused on raising awareness of Mission Invertebrate among new audiences. We created a wide variety of visual assets, including stills, animations and infographics for Instagram and Facebook to illustrate the abundance of invertebrate varieties in The Royal Parks, and why they are so important. We also engaged key influencers to spread the message further.
We then focused on engagement, creating downloadable trail-walk maps and accompanying visuals to encourage the public to visit the parks and discover the diverse invertebrate wildlife for themselves.
The Blowing Up
An initial 3-week paid social campaign on Instagram and Facebook saw our visual assets targeted at all genders aged 18-65 in locations around the Royal Parks themselves, as well as at relevant outdoor enthusiast interest groups. We also paid key influencers to amplify our content in their Instagram feeds and stories, to ensure as many nature enthusiasts as possible found out about Mission Invertebrate.
Based on the reach of this first phase, we then expanded our location to an 18km radius around London for another 3-week paid social campaign, supported by more influencer content to encourage the public to visit the Mission Invertebrate website, download one of our trail-walk maps and explore the parks’ biodiversity up close.
The Positive Impact
Our #morethanbugs campaign reached over 1.4m users in the engagement phase, with the number of link clicks 5 times higher than our target, showing a deep level of engagement, with users keen to learn more.
Positive sentiment saw users leaving supportive comments about the parks, with the statistics we showcased generating questions and comments across both social channels.
The second phase, motivating users to visit the Mission Invertebrate site and go on one of the trail walks, generated over 1.5m impressions. Link clicks were again 5 times the target, reflecting a high level of interest in the posts. Among the positive comments across both channels were many users saying they would do at least one of the walks and others tagging friends to encourage them to take part.
Our carefully targeted influencers reached a further 17,000 outdoor and nature enthusiasts, generating 6,000 likes.