The Diversity of Nature video PSA builds on World Wildlife Fund’s Love It or Lose It campaign, which aims to inspire action over protecting biodiversity, the extraordinary variety of life on Earth.
Scientists and conservationists often talk about the importance of biodiversity—from plants and animals to genes and ecosystems, and the vital roles they play to support all life—along with the impactful role humans play in both its destruction and protection. Humans cannot survive without nature, and nature cannot thrive and continue to provide for us without biodiversity. Yet, many people still struggle to understand biodiversity’s meaning and importance in their own lives.
We wanted to reach audiences across television, web, and social media in English and Spanish. To connect the dots on how biodiversity helps the planet thrive, we leaned into how human diversity—different knowledge, abilities, perspectives, identities, cultures, expertise, etc.—helps society thrive. We wanted people to come away with a greater admiration for nature and all it does for us and to feel inspired to think about how they can tap into their own unique diversity to help protect the planet’s biodiversity. With species populations having plummeted an average of 69% since 1970, much is at risk if we don’t do something. But if we act now to ensure the future of biodiversity, we can help ensure the future of all life, including our own.
This video was a great collaboration among our team that utilized our own diverse perspectives, knowledge, and expertise. With PSAs, part of our process is identifying and addressing the potential challenges of connecting the dots of conservation for WWF supporters. This is especially true when it comes to the public’s lack of understanding around the overall meaning and importance of “biodiversity.” We decided that we’d tackle this challenge in a way that taps into a concept that humans understand well—the diversity of people.
To make the connection between a thriving society being reliant on the diversity of people and a thriving planet being reliant on diversity of nature, we looked at human diversity from not just a few, but its many lenses to accurately portray this parallel with biodiversity. Ensuring that the creative was an authentic reflection of this important connection was a priority, so we consulted with our internal WWF Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team to get their insight and feedback to ensure we were achieving the right tone. Their feedback confirmed that the tone was authentic to WWF and the subject matter, helped us fine tune certain aspects that were potentially unclear, and provided additional ideas to us of inclusive imagery to incorporate that the creative evoked for them. We always want people to feel that they can see themselves in WWF, so we sourced imagery from WWF video assets as well as stock video to have a greater range of assets to work with to ensure we were able to accurately and authentically showcase the breadth of diversity found in people and nature.
A challenge we often confront is how to express the reality of the threats to nature in a way that doesn’t leave people feeling hopeless. So, it was crucial that we found the right balance to successfully achieve this goal. As we took the video from script to screen, we mindfully curated a viewing experience that focuses on celebrating diversity and the connection between people and nature and emphasizes nature’s value as something we can protect together versus leaving people feeling overwhelmed by the challenges we're facing.
We worked with three different voice-over artists to produce one Spanish and two English versions, captioned versions, and both vertical and horizontal versions to appeal to multiple audiences across different distribution channels and carefully selected music to evoke a tone of positive urgency. The pacing of the edit and captions were something we further considered in relation to what types of videos online viewers engage with. We know that short form, energetic, visually engaging videos do well with social and web audiences and mobile users generally experience video content with the sound off making captioned videos more appealing as well as more accessible.
At the end of this process of creative collaboration and strategic execution, we achieved our goal of producing an engaging PSA that inspires hope in the face of urgent threats and leaves viewers empowered to take action to protect biodiversity around the world.
We’ve been thrilled to see the positive reactions to the PSA across all channels since its release. We distributed across local, regional, and national broadcast and cable channels in English and Spanish at the beginning of 2024 and followed with a strategic launch on web and social media in May on International Day for Biological Diversity.
It’s been one of our best performing PSAs to date and has brought in more than $7.3 million in in-kind placement as of August and continues to get picked up across the country. Across our main web and social platforms, at launch the video saw more than 81k impressions, more than 55k views, and posts had a 3.4% engagement rate which is above average for our channels. Our Descubre WWF online channels also saw an above average response with Spanish viewers. Commenters shared messages such as “Love it! We can all do better.” and “Together we are better!” which has been great to see that the intended messages are reaching people.
Between the positive cross-channel exposure and online reactions and the enthusiasm for television pick up in English and Spanish, we feel confident that the goal we set out to achieve in helping people better understand biodiversity, recognize its importance and the urgency to protect it, and inspire hope and action in their lives is well underway. We are excited to see how the PSA’s message will continue to reach more and more people during its lifetime and beyond.
