Table of Contents 6 2012 OVATION Awards Winning Entries

Goals/Objectives
To bring environmental issues to the forefront and to engage voters, we outlined four campaign goals:
To execute a humorous and engaging campaign to break through election clutter and engage
Ontarians on environmental priorities for the October election.
To secure positive platform commitments on the environment from all parties.
To increase awareness of environmental issues amongst Ontarians.
To increase Environmental Defence brand awareness.
Executing an engaging campaign that utilized creativity and humour helped us break through the
campaign noise and drum up awareness for our cause. The goals outlined helped us to both meet our
current needs (raise awareness, make environmental issues a key election priority and raise the profile
of our organization), and future needs (building an “army” of supporters, both financial and otherwise,
for future campaigns).
We measured increasing awareness of environmental issues in several ways, which are expanded on
under Question 6: earned media coverage, traffic to Penelope4Ontario.ca, video views, and social media
buzz. To measure increased Environmental Defence brand awareness, we focused on our
communications channels: increased Environmental Defence twitter followers and facebook likes,
EnvironmentalDefence.ca web traffic, and email signups. Specific goals and metrics included: securing
website traffic of 5,000 visits, minimum 10,000 video views, 500 new facebook likes and twitter
followers, reaching 100,000 people with an advertising budget of $5,000, and attracting a minimum of
200 new email subscribers.
Solution Overview
Recognizing that many of the issues we work on were secondary to other top of mind issues (e.g. health
and education) for many Ontarians facing an upcoming election, we proactively planned a campaign
that would bring environmental issues to the forefront in an easily digestible and shareable way. Several
concepts and vehicles were explored to carry our message, but all of them risked being lost amidst the
election clutter. The concept of a mock child candidate who would parody the campaigns of politicians
was both humourous and provocative, a means of grabbing voters’ attention and creating a gateway to
discuss environmental issues on the ballot.
We projected that the impact of creating a “new” candidate, and specifically one that was a child
imploring adult voters to consider her future, would draw media and public attention and help make
environmental issues a top election issue. We strove to inject a positive vision, inspiring people to take
part in the democratic process that can often be cynical and dark. Our messaging intentionally rejected
the negative aspects of campaigns, even making light of them (e.g. Introducing “Penelope’s” political
opponent, "Donald") to appeal to people interested in the wellbeing of the next generations.
The key messages of the campaign were:
“Penelope” is campaigning to make sure the environment (clean air and water, green energy,
and Greenbelt) tops the agenda this provincial election because kids have their future to think
about.
“Penelope” is touring communities across Ontario until the election to make sure party leaders
commit to protecting our environment.