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Creating a moment of time: Earth Hour, transnational grassroots movement and hybrid organization

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Creating a moment of time: Earth Hour, transnational grassroots movement and hybrid organization

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CREATING A MOMENT OF TIME:
EARTH HOUR, TRANSNATIONAL GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT
AND HYBRID ORGANIZATION

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(STRATEGIC PUBLIC RELATIONS)
May 2016

Copyright 2016 Luping Wang

2
Dedication

This thesis would not have been possible without the continuous support of my family and
friends. Thank you for your love, patience and words of encouragement along the journey.
Mom and dad, you have always inspired me to follow my heart and believe in myself. I
hope I can make you proud. My accomplishments are yours.

3
Acknowledgements

The process to completing this thesis was a long journey. Along this way, I learned much
more than I originally expected, from designing a research to polish my writing. I would
like to thank my thesis committee chair and mentor, Kjerstin Thorson. Her vision for my
research and confidence in my capabilities were driving forces behind the completion of
this thesis. I am so appreciative of her guidance and support not only during this process,
but also throughout my academic path at USC, even my future Ph.D. study. She was
always someone I could turn to and was always there - for that I will always be grateful. I
would also like to thank my committee members Matthew K. Le Veque and Daren C.
Brabham for their much appreciated feedback and direction. Their insights significantly
strengthened this thesis and it wouldn’t have been what it is without them.

4
Table of Contents
Dedication ……………………………………………………………………...…………2
Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………3

Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………...5
1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………..……..6
2. Organization Profile ………………………………………………………………..…9
World Wildlife Fund……………………………………………………………………….…9
Earth Hour and Earth Hour 2015………………………………...……………..…………..10
3. Literature Review……………………………..……………………………………...12
Activism, civic engagement and climate theory of change…………………………….…..…12
Social media and Climate Change………………….…………………………...……….…..15
Hybrid organization and climate change…………….………………………...……….……17
International Conversation …………………………………………………….……………20
4. Methods …………………..………………………………………………………….22
5. Results…………………..……………………………………………………………24
Theory of Change: Transformation to Crowdsourcing Grassroots Movement…………...….24
Hybrid Organizational Structure: From Global to Local……………………...……………29
Messaging Strategy: Global Voice, Local Relevance ………………………………………35
6. Discussion……………………………..……………………………………………..42

References …...…………………………………………………………………………..47
Tables and Figures…………………………………………………………………….…52
Appendix A: Interview with Rucha Naware (Excerpt)………...…………………………66

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Abstract

The Internet has accelerated the transformation of traditional non-profit
organizations. Legacy groups are adapting the trend of open-source and grassroots to
create their own “online based” movements. Claiming to be the “largest grassroots
environmental event in history,” Earth Hour is World Wildlife Fund’s mass engagement
platform for climate change. The thesis asks what is the organizational infrastructure of a
hybrid organization like WWF/Earth Hour? How does the strategy of the Earth Hour
campaign drive their digital media tactics? I explore these themes through a case study,
drawing on interview data and analysis of Twitter content and network analysis of the
information flow within. The research reveals that Earth Hour is successful at mobilizing
people and making the movement international, while the operational infrastructure
behind is still based on WWF’s traditional hierarchy national office mechanism.

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1. Introduction
Earth Hour is an international movement started by the World Wildlife Fund
(WWF). This annual event encourages individuals and organizations to turn off
non-essential lights for one hour, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. local time as a symbol of
commitment to the urgent environmental issues. The conception of Earth Hour started in
Sydney, Australia, 2007. To call for people’s awareness of climate change in Australia,
WWF Australia initiated the signature “lights off” event, with the response from multiple
landmarks as well as support government officials. It soon became an international event
with growing countries participated in year by year. As it gets bigger and more impactful
around the world, the Earth Hour opens its office in Singapore and is seen as WWF’s
mass engagement platform on climate change issues.
Environmental issues are going global. As Earth Hour points out in its latest
annual report, 2015 WWF’s Earth Hour has grown to become the “world’s largest
grassroots movement for the environment.” 172 countries and territories participated in
Earth Hour with more than 1608 supporting individual events (Figure 1). Earth Hour
advocacy not only raises public awareness of climate change, but also brings policy
changes in different countries. As a climate change campaign call for real actions, the
Earth Hour uses social media to make it an international issue and connects different
people around the world to the Internet.
Earth Hour regards Twitter as their main channel for public engagement. During
the three-day campaign period of the Earth Hour, it gained more than 280,000 tweets and
millions of impressions. People joined in the online discussion by using the hashtag
#earthhour, mentioning local/international Earth Hour accounts, sharing the process of

7
Earth Hour around the world and participating offline local events. In that case, people
are driven by a common cause and act simultaneously without geographic restraints.
Especially, Earth Hour is a platform that asks for independent efforts, instead of people
go to one place and act collectively. Is this representing a new grassroots movement trend
online? Different from other online environmental campaigns, Earth Hour maintains a
long-term influence, as they have follow-up events like Earth Hour Blue, a large scale
crowdfunding effort. They also actively involved in COP 21 (2015 United Nations
Climate Change Conference), which indicates that it is transforming role from a single
campaign to a year-long environmental effort.
Social media changed how people participate in the campaign movement. Internet
users can use social media like Twitter and Facebook to show support for the activity and
share their voice in the conversation. Twitter is used by some organizations as a
strategically way to mobilize public (Obar et al. 2012). The usage of social media makes
one campaign possible to become a grassroots event by mobilizing concerned individual
globally (Hestres, 2015). These online actions, then combined with offline activities,
produce impacts like policy changes and global awareness.
Specifically, increased attention has been put on how social media facilitate the
process of climate change communication, and how it helps environmental groups reach to
more audience. These previous research questions inspired me to ask: What kind of climate
change activism is taking place today: grassroots or elite-based strategies? Is this activism
pattern influenced by the organizational structure? If so, does the organization experiences
the structure transformation under the impact of digital age? What is the role of social
media in the path of international activism?

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Traditional environmental campaigns still primarily rely on collective actions,
where people get together and participate in one movement. While in the model of Earth
Hour in my research, local individuals can join in this global effort effortlessly by tweeting
and sharing, via social media. Emerging social media platforms help the process of those
sparsely located individual events goes together and create global impact. Eventually,
policy changes are achieved through the joint effort of WWF (Earth Hour), governments
and residents. Even though Earth Hour views itself as a new engagement experiment of the
traditional organization - WWF, we still see that it still follows traditional communication
strategies as the past several decades. How do we leverage the gap between the grassroots
theory and real situation practice of the case study? What does this mean?
This paper uses the Earth Hour movement to explore the infrastructure behind
global digital grassroots activism campaigns for the environment, and how they exist in
productive tension with traditional environmental organizations that emphasize an elite,
policy-focused theory of change. I explore how the diverse global and local organizational
infrastructures for Earth Hour in particular shape the visibility of a “global movement” on
the social media site Twitter. I draw on interviews, news reports, campaign materials and
the digital traces of the campaign to show how organizational hybridity (Chadwick, 2007)
is enabling environmental organizations like WWF and Earth Hour to combine a policy
focus and grassroots action—but also to reveal the challenges of creating a global,
“open-source” campaign.

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2. Organization Profile
World Wildlife Fund
World Wildlife Foundation is a worldwide conservation organization. Since the
foundation in 1961, WWF has been working hard on enhancing the relationship between
human and the environment. Currently, it operates in more than 80 member countries and
supports approximately 5 million members globally. As an international NGO, its work
includes global outreach as well as local programs. By 2016, WWF runs more than 1,300
projects at the same time.
Organizationally, WWF is an independent foundation registered under Swiss law
1
.
In addition to traditional environmental protection events and campaigns, it also provides
innovative methods to solve urgent environmental and development issues people faces
about nature. Their focus includes but not limited to forests, oceans, fresh water, wildlife,
food and climate. Specifically, the goal of WWF on climate issues is “create a
climate-resilient and zero carbon world, powered by renewable energy.” Besides
organizing individual and independent activities about climate change, WWF also joined
climate change initiatives all over the world like People’s Climate March in New York
City, September 2014.
As one of the concentrations of WWF’s work, it works with companies and
governments to find solutions to urgent climate issues
2
to reduce pollution and raise
public awareness. Samantha Smith, the leader of WWF global climate and energy
initiative addresses the current situation
3
:

1
http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_quick_facts.cfm
2
http://www.worldwildlife.org/initiatives/climate)
3
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/aboutcc/

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WWF’s climate and energy vision is a response both to the science and to new
economic and political realities. We will work for a safe and sustainable future for
people, places and species, based on an equitable low-carbon society that is resilient
to climate change.

Earth Hour and Earth Hour 2015
From 2007 to 2015, the number of countries and territories participating in the
Earth Hour has increased from just one country (Australia) to 172. According to the
WWF, a total of 620,000 actions were taken to call for the environmental protection on
the day of Earth Hour in 2015. Earth Hour is also about policy changes. In 2012, Russia
passed a law, which calls for protection of sea from pollution. This law was directly
related to the online petition movement Earth Hour Russia initiated. In the year of 2015,
more than 10,400 landmarks and monuments switched off their lights on the night of
earth hour, like Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House and other places. Currently, there are
six countries are working towards legislate changes started by Earth Hour. Earth Hour
also calls attention from a younger generation. More than two thousand schools engaged
globally for climate action via webinars.
Digital platforms are seen as the major outreach method for Earth Hour 2015. By
using hashtags #earthhour and #yourpower, Twitter users can join in this international
conversation online. As a summary, Earth Hour has 2,263,020,876 impressions on
Twitter between 27 - 29 March. It also has more than 7.8 million digital interactions
across multiple platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Google
Plus.
Earth Hour also has support from high-profile personalities such as Lionel Messi,
Gisele Bundchen, Jared Leto, Li Bingbing, astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and many
more. In addition to high profile celebrities’ engagement, Earth Hour also targeted at

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people by selecting “Earth Hour Champions” as a communication strategy. The
communication effect is almost the same for these grassroots heroes when compared to
celebrities. In the year of 2015, Earth Hour, for the first name, called on followers and
concerned people worldwide to join a global network called “Earth Hour Champions.”
This is a select group of loyalists and committed to protecting the Earth by using their
own power for the earth. The member of the team comes across the world for one cause –
changing climate change, as Rucha Naware, the communication manager of the Earth
Hour described. As Earth Hour ambassadors, they add supplemental life oriented details
to the campaign and make it more easily accessible to people. Earth Hour Champions not
only provide first hand insights from their local communities, but also play as local
coordinators for events and initiatives. As a mutual communication process, they
exchange information with Earth Hour global team, which makes the messaging of the
event locally generated and globally broadcasted.
Beyond the night of Earth Hour, it has a year long campaign called Earth Hour
Blue, which dedicates to bring more accessible climate change information to the public.
On the website of Earth Hour, there is also a designated blog posts section where
environment specialists regularly post articles for website audience. All these efforts of
Earth Hour bring it a large number of online engagement audience. The content strategy
of Earth Hour, no matter it is during the campaign period or the off-season, is to provide
accessible and understandable information to the concerned public. Users just need to
type in the name, select country and register email then they’ll become a subscriber of the
Earth Hour newsletter. Under the take action button of the landing page, the audience can

12
choose either to donate or add voice to the Earth Hour event. This easy-to-practice design
allows people to join in the movement in just several seconds.
Besides efforts from Earth Hour itself, strategic relationship and cooperation are
other key factors in the communication of the movement. Sponsorships secure billboards
and media coverage of the movement. We see Earth Hour retweeted messages from
sponsors and the comment is mostly positive. As Earth Hour pointed out, the ultimate
goal of the event is to reach to as many people as it can. So international and local
sponsorships help the event reach to a much wider demographic, including the loyalists
who belong to these brands.

3. Literature Review
Activism, civic engagement and climate theory of change
The rise of digital and social media has brought changes to the way environmental
advocacy organizations work. There are many different types of climate change
campaigns happening around the year. Some focus on more traditional forms of civic
action, while others are more contentious actions, like protests. 2014’s People’s Climate
March was regarded as the largest climate change mobilization in history (Dastagir, 2014).
It is a protest-type campaign. More than 400,000 participants (protesters) marched to raise
the public awareness of climate change (Thorson et al. 2015). It also received millions of
online impressions from social media. People’s Climate March took the protest approach
to call for attention, and translate the message of climate change into the world’s largest
march ever to realize their goals. That is the same situation as in London 2009 when G20

13
was held (Fanenbruck, 2009): activism is one of the ways to engage with the concerned
public.
Earth Hour describes itself as a mass engagement platform on climate change
issues, which means it calls a large scale of public participation. As Adler & Goggin (2005)
pointed out, “civic engagement refers to the ways in which citizens participate in the life of
a community to improve conditions for others or to help shape the community’s future.”
Lichterman and Eliasoph (2015) update the concept and describe civic engagement action
as a coordinated action to improve some aspects of common life in society. The
participants, the “civic actors”, are expecting that they will be part of something “ongoing,”
not a purely one-time event or spontaneous happening. Also with the development of Web
2.0 and social media, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are used to encourage civic
engagement (Rheingold, 2008). Researchers like Obar et. all (2012) also did qualitative
interviews to examine the role of social media in advocacy groups. They found that most of
the organizations use social media and believe social media are effective tools for
“facilitating civic engagement and collective action” (2012). For the Earth Hour
specifically, as it mobilizes millions of concerned people who care about planet Earth, it
falls to the civic action type campaign, and it is social media based.
Scholars have been studying environmental activism for a long time (Wapner,
1995). The key concepts of the environmental activism for mobilization are: 1. strong
identification within a social group (Shelly, 1993; Seguin, 1998) and 2. attempting to
change manners and policies (Huebner&Lipsey, 1981; Seguin 1998). The Earth Hour itself
doesn’t have strong political implications, but it achieves several “activism” goals like

14
policy changes. The definition of Earth Hour thus becomes the priority question I’m going
to ask before further research.
Along with the trend of global civic movements, NGOs are playing important
roles in climate change movements (Schafer 2012). Newell (2008) explains that NGOs
and civil society groups are seeking ways to influence policy making through new
communication channels like online media. Social movements, when under certain
circumstances, can impact global environmental politics (Takahashi et al. 2015, Betsill &
Corell, 2001; Betzold, 2010; Humphreys, 2004). Takahashi et al. (2015) examined how
online platforms changes the climate policy and how the Internet enhances public
engagement. He uses “Intercambio Climático” in Latin America to further explain the
relationship, in which the NGO shaped the decision-making agenda and helped the
message reached out to more people. However, it is difficult to standardize how to
evaluate the impact an NGO brings to the climate change conversation, especially when
considering the results. For Earth Hour, it is more than an online grassroots movement.
According to its report, it leads to six countries to work towards legislative changes this
year or next year, directly. Hestres (2014) argues that climate change advocacy
organizations can influence policy by mobilizing publics, shifting issues to more favorable
public attention, and reframing information in ways more relatable to their causes. Obar et
al. (2012) also did research and conducted a survey of 53 advocacy groups to see whether
there is a pattern to motivate public. They found that a majority of these groups, regardless
of the size, are using social media to “strengthen outreach and collective action efforts,” by
directing individuals “closer to the advocacy community”.

15
In addition to the extensive research on climate change protests, scholars also
introduce a conceptual category called “lifestyle movement.” The “lifestyle” means what
the organization promotes is easy to do and daily based (Haenfler et al., 2012). The
lifestyle movement is more loosely-bound when compared with traditional political
movements, but more daily life oriented. He also mentions that lifestyle movements
promote individual action instead of large scale collective action, which then describe by
Bennett and Segerberg (2012) as personalized communication - connective action.
Instead of traditional membership restriction, nowadays organizations allow individuals
to use social media to develop personalized agenda in a movement. By aggregating
individuals’ efforts together, the goal of the movement is achieved. The concept of group
identity is not stressed in connective action discussion.
By reviewing different kinds of climate change activism types, and examining the
role of NGOs in environmental communication, this research is hoping to find out the
mobilization pattern of the Earth Hour and focusing on how it fits into the global
conversation of environmental activism.
Social media and Climate Change
Anderson (2009) points out that from the 1990s, there is an emergence of a range of
studies focusing specifically on climate change. In recent years, more and more media pay
attention to the thriving trend of climate change and cover more stories about it (Cox 2012).
The emergence of social media also changed the way how people communicate about
environment issues. Understanding this new format and apply it to the environmental
communication strategies is a new trend within organizations, especially NGOs (Seo et al.
2009, O’Neil 2011; Schafer 2012).

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The Internet, or digital space, or social media plays an important role in the case
of recent years’ environmental movements. Broadly speaking, many scholars have
already done research on social media and political issues like Arab Spring (Castells,
2011; Howard et al, 2011l; Shirky, 2011), protests during Occupy Movement (Theocharis
et al, 2013; Tremayne, 2013) and G20 Summit Pittsburgh (Earl et al, 2013). Then
environmental issues like climate conference 2011(Uldam, 2013) and climate march
(Bastos et al. 2015) gain academic attention. They found that social media plays a crucial
role in organizing events and communicating climate change messages. Scholars like
O’Neill and Boykoff (2011) begin to think about how actors and agents are increasingly
turning to these new channels to contribute to the framings of climate change. They find
that new media channels play multiple roles like “providing information, facilitating
engagement and widening participation.”
Currently, scholars are processing content of the social media database by doing
analysis on clusters, hashtags, mentions and Twitter circulation mechanisms (Howard et.
al.; 2011; Segerberg and

Bennett, 2011; Thorson et. al. 2013). These big data approaches
to the study of activism and advocacy remain isolated from studies of organizations and
their strategies in using these new media to mobilize action. Hestres’ (2014) interviews
with environmental advocacy organizations show that these groups are using digital
media strategically to raise awareness about environmental issues, and to build
connections between online and offline forms of action, what used to be collective actions
became segmented and personalized social media behaviors, but we learn little about how
these strategies are accomplished in practice (see also Sison, 2013). Segerberg and

Bennett

(2011) regard social media as organizing mechanisms and conclude the media can

17
reflect larger organizational schemes in a protest ecology. Lovejoy & Saxton (2012) put
the idea that climate groups can be categorized as “Information Sources,” “Community
Builders,” and “Promoters & Mobilizers.” As Bennett and Segerberg (2013) pointed out,
developments of the individualization in lifestyle issues like climate change, often require
organizations to be more flexible in their definitions of issues and communication
strategies. Like I’ve mentioned above about lifestyle movement, Bennett (2012) also
notice a changing pattern of participation in our era: the trend of personalized forms is
possibly transforming traditional political actions.
Many scholars view social media as a public sphere (Castells, 2008; Cox 2012). It
enables people to come to one place and talk about one certain issue. It is also a good way
to build an online community for people with same interest. This new public sphere
(compared with traditional media outlets) allows individuals to participate in the
discussion more easily, which opens paths for grassroots engagement. Through social
media channels, grassroots organization are making global linkages through virtual and
loose connections (O’Neil and Boykoff, 2011). Grassroots here means an individual can
contribute to the progress of the movement and thus becomes an organic part of the big
picture (Gao et al. 2011). In the interview I conducted with Rucha Naware, the
communication manager of Earth Hour global, she mentioned “grassroots” and
“open-source” many times to indicate these features of the movement. Scholarly, what
are these concepts mean? Does Earth Hour employ these concepts in the campaign?
Hybrid organization and climate change
Existing scholars have realized the digital innovation is a prerequisite for the
sprouting of new Internet-based organizations. Somewhat less attention has been paid to

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how non-profit advocacy organizations are responding to changes in the communication
environment. Research in this area suggests that traditional organizations have begun to
embrace grassroots-style digital action repertoires—borrowing from the innovations that
largely emerged from contentious politics movements—and that we are also witnessing
the rise of new, internet-mediated organizations like MoveOn, whose repertoires are
firmly situated in the mobilizing potential of digital media (Chadwick, 2007; Karpf,
2012). Chadwick described the processes through which legacy social action
organizations are beginning to borrow forms of action from social movements as a form
of “organizational hybridity.” The new Internet-based organizations do not depend on
paid memberships to run. They tend to maintain a smaller and geographically dispersed
network that works online and across multiple-issues (Karpf 2012, Hestres 2015).
In the environmental issue space, existing scholarship on this topic has largely
focused on contrasting the action repertoires and theories of change between legacy
environmental organizations (e.g., Sierra Club) and newer Internet-mediated
organizations like 350.org. For example, Hestres (2014; 2015) used interviews with
strategists at both legacy and internet-mediated environmental advocacy groups to
describe how the two differ in terms of their theories about how environmental change
should be advanced, and the impact of these theories of change on their digital strategies.
He found that the internet advocacy organizations focused narrowly on grassroots
mobilizations as their primary strategy of change. Traditional organizations were more
diverse: while some were spurred to change their strategies to embrace grassroots
mobilization, others remained focused on elite-oriented policy change. However,
Chadwick’s theorizing of organizational hybridity suggests it is important also to

19
consider that these two strategies for change might exist within a single advocacy
organization. Bimber et al. (2005) proposed that digital media make it possible for
organizations to be both hierarchical in their connections to members as well as allowing
a more entrepreneurial role for their supporters. The reduced cost for many forms of
action online makes it possible for organizations to embrace hybrid modes of engagement,
mash-ups between the more impersonal, top-down relationships with members and more
participatory, horizontal forms of member-to-member connections. Thus some traditional
organizations are exhibiting “some of the characteristics of fluid, flexible grassroots
social movements” (Bimber, 2005, p.376).
WWF is an environmental conservation organization with a long history of focus
on policy change. Their mode of engagement with their constituents has historically been
one-way communication with the goal of raising money to support the organization’s
legislative campaigns. Flanagin et al. (2005) proposed that advocacy organizations can be
mapped in what they call “collective action space” by considering whether and how an
organization enables communication among their members, and the extent to which the
organization structures the participation of members either in a strict hierarchy or enables
an entrepreneurial relationship in which participants actively contribute to the direction of
the organization (Figure 2). WWF is located firmly in the quadrant of impersonal and
institutional. The work of the organization traditionally happened not through public
participation of members but through interactions with political elites—work that was
funded by donations from the WWF membership. Members of WWF seldom connected
with each other horizontally. In the case of Earth Hour, as it is an organic but independent

20
part from WWF, how is this accomplished operationally, and what is the hybrid nature of
these two organizations?
From the example of COP21 (2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference),
we can have some hints on the relationship between Earth Hour and WWF, Rucha
Naware put it:
WWF, of course, is going to be part of the civil society at the COP 21. As Earth Hour,
what we are hoping to achieve is trying to be the connector, between the conference
rooms and the living rooms. So how we can connect the political powers to the
grassroots, we are going to talk about the COP, what do we need as a global
community to decide.

International Conversation
As the development of high technology, activism events are gradually going
global with the help of Internet. Back to 2003, Bennett discussed the concept of global
activism. He put the idea that digital media can facilitate social movements by exploring
the online network building in the Internet era. The web makes the campaign transcend
geographical barriers and shapes the global movement. He also thinks that internet-driven
global activism has loosely structured networks and weak identity ties. However, under
the circumstance of recent thriving social media, the networks, though seems loose
outside, could have inner connections based on the social attributes of the media.
Specifically speaking, a number of scholars have noticed that there is a need to
understand cross-cultural and multilingual environmental communication. Rayner and
Malone (1998) proposed that scholars should assess the climate change from an
international perspective, which political and cultural factors are very important. A lot of
work have been completed to compare the differences and similarities of the climate
change report like Brossard et al. (2004) and Dispensa and Brulle (2003). Climate Change

21
is an international topic which can trigger public discussion. As social media breaks the
barrier of international communication, the research of international communication has
forwarded to the direction of Advocacy 2.0, which relies on online outreach team and
technology. (Obar et al. 2012) As climate change is an international issue, campaigns and
events on climate change are always resonated within a wider spectrum. Generally
speaking, many online platforms are especially set up by activists to create international
networks (Lester & Hutchins, 2009). When it comes to the climate change, it becomes
more global unified (Peterson et. al. 2012).
Social media fosters transnational links between individuals and groups (Howard et
al. 2013) This concept can be applied to the network ties among international and local
environmental organizations, environmental advocates, media outlets, political factors and
individuals. Hestres (2015) explores how geographically dispersed “Internet-mediated
advocacy organizations” change policy conversations, which views the climate change
issue from the perspective of different regions. The case we studied – Earth Hour is region
oriented as well as international influenced. This transnational communication network is a
great example to study climate change movements as an international issue.
The Earth Hour movement is seen as the mass engagement platform of WWF on
climate change issues, which has international impact with the help of social media. The
case study focuses on building connections between the strategic discourse of Earth Hour
and the actual practices through which the campaign is conducted. This research focus on
the tensions between Earth Hour’s desire to facilitate local participation—to be an
“open-source campaign”—and the legacy hierarchical structures of WWF. The study is
guided by the following research questions:

22
RQ1: What, in practice, is an “open-source campaign,” and how does the discourse of
grassroots mobilization shape the digital strategies used by Earth Hour?
RQ2: How does the organizational infrastructure for Earth Hour global shape local
campaign participation in different countries?
RQ3: How does Earth Hour aggregate and amplify local participation to fulfill its goal of
creating a globally visible community of individual climate change actors?

4. Methods
To explore the Earth Hour case, I used interviews, content analysis of online
campaign materials, and Twitter data from the 2015 Earth Hour event. The research used
the social media monitoring software Radian6 to collect the full firehose of tweets related
to Earth Hour during the three days surrounding Earth Hour 2015 (March 27th – 29th),
searching for the hashtags #EarthHour and #YourPower. These two hashtags were
officially promoted by World Wildlife Fund and Earth Hour (#EarthHour is the hashtag
they use every year while #YourPower was the especially created for the 2015 event).
This paper also searched for the keywords “earth hour” to maximize the data we can
collect. Table 1 shows the number of tweets over time matching our search parameters.
As the file Radian 6 provides contains only raw tweets, I used a python script to clean the
dataset, then we had most mentioned username and most popular hashtags lists. Most
mentioned usernames are the handles that received highest attention in the conversation.
Those influencers shape the big picture of Earth Hour online community by connecting
and communicating with the online audience.

23
The focus of the interview data is an in-depth interview with the Earth Hour global
communication manager, Rucha Naware. The interview questions are about Earth Hour
social media tactics, organizational structure, global impact and mobilization strategy.
These interview data are supplemented by shorter email interviews with staffers from
WWF UK and WWF Canada, as well as The Society of Wilderness, the local
organization that runs Earth Hour in Taiwan. In addition, we also extracted publically
available data about Earth Hour and WWF social media platforms, including analyses of
local Earth Hour and WWF social media accounts, as well as statistics about Earth Hour
participation that are available on the WWF global website. The thesis also examine the
official annual report Earth Hour published in 2014 and 2015 about social media
performance.
As the paper wants to verify how the Earth Hour put their grassroots theory into the
real movement, I decided to use the mention network analysis to see how the accounts are
connected on the day of the event. It is also an approach to look at the community
building process of our case study. In our case, a mention network occurs when one
Twitter account mentions another, including retweets. The volume of mentions and
unique mentioned usernames will reveal the size of the community. I then processed the
mention data into the software NodeXL to perform network visualization based on the
Harel-KorenMultiscale algorithm. This algorithm is a fast way to map out how people are
connected in the collective action. NodeXL is a tool to do network visualization network
and analysis.

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5. Results
Theory of Change: Transformation to Crowdsourcing Grassroots Movement
My first research question is how does grassroots feature shapes the strategies of
Earth Hour. This question is best explored by researching on the theory of change it takes
in the movement. Some climate change organizations take protests as their main methods
to amplify their voice to be heard (Mercea, 2012). Hestres (2015) compares online
climate change advocacy groups with traditional/legacy environmental organizations: he
found that with the use of online tools and social media, new advocacy groups are mostly
grassroots oriented. He also finds that these thriving groups are utilizing a combination of
online-to-offline method to engage audiences with their campaigns.
The official website of Earth Hour (earthhour.org) is the window for the event to
reach out to the public. People who visited the Earth Hour website will see the
campaign’s connection to WWF immediately go into the website, the WWF logo is
placed on the left corner of the website’s banner while the Earth Hour logo on the other.
Earth Hour is described as “uniting people to protect the planet” and audience are invited
to “use your power to change climate change.” There are multiple ways users can
participate online, including an online petition, online games and ability to make a
donation, etc.
The relationship between Earth Hour and WWF, as described in the About Us page,
is “Earth Hour is a global environmental movement by WWF.” The structure of the
management is also mentioned. “Even though this is an open-source campaign, the Earth
Hour brand is legally trademarked worldwide and licensed for use by WWF delivering
the Earth Hour movement.” Earth Hour is seen as the mass engagement platform for

25
WWF. It expands the range of WWF member countries and can reach to territories that
are without WWF local offices. This feature shows that Earth Hour is trying to build an
easy-access event for a much wider demographic who concerned climate issues. When
asked about why Earth Hour describes itself as an open source movement, Naware
explained,
I think it simply means movement powered by people. It is not a traditional top-down
organizational communication around climate change. It is a movement that starts in
a living room. It is a movement that starts with young students who want to do
something. It is a movement that then comes out to the street to say they want to take
actions on climate change. There is never any imposition of what Earth Hour should
mean to you. Earth Hour for us is a movement of the people, so we don’t have the
organizational goals or objectives that WWF might have, for example, of policy
outcome… people can come together and celebrate their potentials to be actors of
change.

Naware highlights that Earth Hour encourages participants to create their own
activities in support of Earth Hour—in addition to encouraging individuals to turn of their
lights during the hour—and to use the Earth Hour web platform and social media to share
their actions with others with an eye to creating a global community of climate change
actors. The website offers a “starter kit” for visitors interested in taking part in Earth
Hour. The kit includes downloadable images as well as a series of detailed “how to”
guides for designing events of Earth Hour. Local Earth Hour websites also provide
regional kit for individuals and organizations, which makes a lot of sense to the local
audience. This “grassroots” feature makes the international movement – Earth Hour more
accessible to concerned people, making it more “grassroots.”
The “crowdsourcing” is the keyword in the interview. It explains the theory of
change of the Earth Hour movement. The overarching information of “change climate

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change” is delivered directly from WWF Global/Earth Hour to local offices. Naware
explained the messaging strategy specifically,
We [Earth Hour global] have the global messaging in place. After that, we go to local
levels, so what Earth Hour global team does is we share that general messaging.
What local teams will do is within this global messaging, they will tailor their local
messaging, their local call to actions.

Even though Earth Hour describes itself as a global platform that allows local
climate change messaging, local actions are strongly shaped by the messaging strategies
pre-set at the global level. This semi-open campaign is also a testimonial that traditional
organizations are experiencing huge transformation from elite-oriented to
grassroots-based. From this description by Naware, the organization has a great deal in
common with the Internet-mediated organizations studied by Karpf (2012) and others.
The staff of Earth Hour global is small (a team of 8), and the see their primary role as
supporting and amplifying the entrepreneurial actions of interested participants. However,
as seen in studies of other crowdsourced campaigns like this one, there is a balancing act
in practice between encouraging the entrepreneurial desires of participants and the
continued need to coordinate messaging and manage the bounds of the overall campaign
(Brabham, 2013).
The 2015 Earth Hour event was successful in mobilizing a high volume of Twitter
conversation. On the day of Earth Hour, the hashtag #EarthHour was a trending topic on
Twitter in 18 different countries. Trending is built in function of Twitter that tracks the
velocity of topics, and is an important indicator of attention for online campaigns (Cataldi
et al. 2010). Table 1 shows the number of tweets about Earth Hour for the three-day
period surrounding the Earth Hour event. The scale (by volume of posts) is at the same
level as the online peak of the Occupy Movement in 2011 (Conover, 2013). In addition,

27
Earth Hour not only mobilized a high volume of attention online, but that volume came
from a large number of participants. The tweets in our dataset came from 160,730 unique
accounts. Even though the top influencers still serve as “hubs” the Earth Hour discussion,
the low rate of tweets per person shows the characteristics of diverse, though shallow,
participation of the Earth Hour.
The importance of the continued mutual connection between Earth Hour—the large
grassroots mobilization—and WWF—the policy focused legacy organization becomes
clear as Rucha Naware describes the relationship between the two organizations.
Climate change is so complicated and intertwined in so many aspects. You need
policy change, and you need people to come together. You need to marry these two
because implementation, execution, even in the case of [countries like] Russia,
conception, inspiration comes from the people. Earth Hour being a movement of the
people, force that change, force that opportunity for WWF to use that power of the
crowd. With growing ambition, we had the understanding that climate change can
not operate only in the conference room, it needs to go to the living rooms… The
push-pull between leaders and people is so crucial on any issues and so much more
for climate change. [Even] WWF with all of its experience that it has in conservation
policy, [needs to] know how to get people into the dialogue, and Earth Hour provides
that platform to do so.

She is trying to build connections between the grassroots theory of change that Earth
Hour represents (the power of the living room; the power of the crowd) with the
elite-targeting, policy-focused theory of change that characterizes WWF (the power of
the conference room).
On the agenda Earth Hour proposed for long term development, the first stage is
to bring people together via a symbolic light off event. This event is created to inspire
people for a universal message: protect our planet. The second stage, which is called
“galvanize concerned people into taking actions more than the lights off event” also
resonates with year long campaign “Earth Hour City Challenges,” on that stage, Earth

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Hour becomes a brand that promotes and mobilized people about environmental priorities.
The last stage, as on the website and Naware said, is to create a mutual-connected
international community, where people are inspired to actively involved in building a
sustainable planet. From the agenda it sets, we see on every stage Earth Hour calls for the
grassroots power of people.
Sison (2013) argues that the event of Earth Hour not only creates space for people
who want to participate, but also creates the space for social change. Earth Hour frames
what people can do from daily life and encourages the concept that minor changes can
make a big difference. Policy changes that occurred in Russia, Brazil and other countries
suggest that online advocacy can open a way to social changes, when the engagement
reaches to a certain level. These changes, however, are largely attributed to the
elite-focused strategies of WWF, which can be explained by the official partnership
between WWF and governments. Naware describes the relationship between WWF and
social change by using the example of Russia as below:
Back in Russia, in 2012, the Russian parliament has a law that if 100,000 people come
together and say that they want action on a particular issue, the Parliament has to consider
that law. Now WWF is obviously working closely with the government, works on
conservation and policy, and they realize that sometimes bridge the gap you need the power
of the crowd. As a result, the bill was introduced to the parliament and the law was forced.
Climate change is so complicated and intertwined so many aspects.

So the answer to my first research question shows that in the era of Internet
technology, traditional organizations are taking steps and absorbing social media
strategies as a transformation to attract more audience. In the case of Earth Hour,
however, self-claimed “grassroots” can’t make it fully separate from the old stereotype of
WWF. The massive engagement of the movement is largely based on the engagement of
grassroots, while on the policy change level, the Earth Hour campaign has more

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elite-oriented implications. The semi-open feature of Earth Hour shaped the movement it
is, and will continuously shape the online-based communication strategies of Earth Hour.
Hybrid Organizational Structure: From Global to Local
The second research question asked about how the Earth Hour and WWF
organizations shape participation at the local and global level. Here, we are considering
the challenge for a hybrid organization like Earth Hour/WWF to manage a global
campaign while emphasizing the entrepreneurial role of local organizers. Naware and the
Earth Hour campaign materials emphasize the global nature of the grassroots
mobilization. But the small Earth Hour global organization is only a slice of the broader
infrastructure that supports the Earth Hour campaign in general. The local organizational
structures for Earth Hour vary by country. 172 countries and territories participated in
Earth Hour 2015. The local campaigns were run by 84 different local WWF offices and
88 local Earth Hour organizations.
Our analysis of these different countries reveal three kinds of local organizing
formats. When the country/territory has a WWF local office, the local Earth Hour
campaign was led by the climate team within that WWF chapter office. When there is no
WWF local office in a particular country, Earth Hour organizing is led by a local
community or organization. In some rare cases, like United Arab Emirates and Cambodia,
the event is a joint effort by multiple parties including WWF and local communities.
These organizational differences result in distinct approaches to communication by
country as well—they differently translate the global Earth Hour messages into their local
context. We selected four countries to zoom into the differences in campaign
organization and communication approach: Australia, Canada, the UK, South Africa.

30
Table 2 illustrates the social media platforms used locally for Earth Hour
communications. In most of the countries, the voice of Earth Hour comes from the WWF
official Twitter account. Other countries, such as Canada and Australia, have separate
Earth Hour accounts along with WWF accounts.
I analyzed the tweets from each of these countries’ Earth Hour or WWF local
accounts during the three-day period surrounding Earth Hour. Although in every country
retweeting is the major mechanism for these accounts to generate content—that is, they
are amplifying the content of other Twitter users (activists, celebrities, local WWF/Earth
Hour accounts, sponsors, etc.) more often than they are creating original content--the
overall approach to Earth Hour is distinct in each country (Table 3). It is important for
these accounts to make their followers realize that Earth Hour is happening, massively. In
Canada and Australia, Earth Hour’s independent Twitter handle is mainly responsible for
tweeting the content. Their local WWF offices play supporting roles, and the number of
tweets from local offices are significantly less than from the Earth Hour accounts in these
countries.
In three out of the four countries I analyzed, the official hashtag “#EarthHour” is the
most used hashtag, suggesting that the local countries intend their content to be seen by
the Twitter users who are paying attention to the global content stream organized by this
hashtag. The exception is South Africa. South Africa is focused on its own
#EarthHourSA hashtag. In addition to the universal #EarthHour tag, some local-featured
hashtags are also essential components of the content. In Australia, #AppetiteForChange
is a local effort reminding Australians the need to face global warming by addressing
rural communities and supply of food. In the UK, #PandaHugs is a hashtag created by

31
@wwf_uk as an automatic response to anyone who mentions their username on the day
of Earth Hour. These highly regional targeted hashtags are designed to resonate with
local audiences. To examine various communication strategies in these countries, a more
detailed content analysis is conducted and demonstrates the diversity of their approaches
to reach target audiences. This diversity poses proof that Earth Hour is an open-source
campaign that each country can develop its own roadmap based on the specific situation.
Below are the specific case studies:
Earth Hour in Australia: Amplifying individual actions
Earth Hour started in Australia in 2007. Its independent website does not link back
to the local WWF page. In Australia, the movement emphasizes building community,
reminding website visitors that 1 in every 3 Australians takes part in the hour by turning
off their lights. The independent account @EarthHour_AU kept on tweeting even after
the night of Earth Hour with a frequency of about two tweets per day from for the
seven-month period after Earth Hour 2015 (screenshot of @EarthHour_AU, Figure 3). In
addition to the use of the global hashtag #EarthHour, the local team also selected a local
theme for Australia: global warming impacts food and farming regions in Australia. A
large number of tweets from the Australia account are about this issue and use the
hashtag #AppetiteForChange.
There are four primary functions of the Earth Hour Twitter account in Australia: (1)
amplify individual success and actions (e.g. “RT @GelatoMessina: HOUR OF NO
POWER – We’ll be tipping out hats to earth hour by serving gelato in the dark tonight
between 8.30-9.30”); (2) report local process of Earth Hour event in Australia territory
(e.g. “RT @bdvz: Happy #EarthHour from Sydney! Talking about Earth Hour outcomes

32
around the world”); (3) promote local campaign and theme for the Earth Hour (e.g. “RT
@Hellfire72: Pizza is in the oven warming up, wine is poured, dinner is near, candles
ready #AppetiteForChange @EarthHour_AU”); (4) Connect with WWF International
and Earth Hour Global (e.g. “RT @earthhour: Best of Earth Hour 2015 album -see how
170+ countries & territories are celebrating #EarthHour”).
Earth Hour in Canada: Creating impact via influencers
Like Earth Hour in Australia, Earth Hour in Canada also has a separate Twitter
account and that is the account that mainly tweets during the period of Earth Hour
(screenshot of @EarthHourCanada, Figure 4). After the night of Earth Hour, the account
almost stopped updating. The content has many similarities to Australia, but the Canadian
account does more to emphasize the global perspective of the movement (e.g. “Good
morning #Canada! While you were sleeping, Samoa, Fiji, Australia, Japan & 9 other
countries already celebrated #EarthHour!”)
Though the Canadian account does make an effort to amplify these global
achievements, it seldom retweets or mentions other countries’ WWF or Earth Hour
accounts. Instead of actively sending tweets recording the process of Earth Hour in
Canada, retweeting is used as the main mechanism to track the progress. In Canada, the
Earth Hour account, instead of generating content itself, is mainly playing a supporting
booster role that amplifying more local success. There are two primary resources of
retweets: local influencers and local organizations/companies (e.g. “RT @jillianwalker:
Tonight 120 countries will participate in #EarthHour. In Vancouver, it kicks off in 10
mins. Light your candles! Turn off your lights!”; “RT @AirCanada: We’re taking part in
#EarthHour! For 60 min, we’ll turn off the lights wherever safe & practical. Join us!”).

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A staff member from WWF Canada told us that Earth Hour has been almost entirely
spun off in that country. “Although WWF was instrumental in getting Earth Hour off the
ground, it has grown so much that it has become its platform. So, other than still being
(proudly!) associated with Earth Hour, we don’t organize any local activities at all.”
What she said makes Canada’s case more unique because it may represent the future of
hybrid organization: when the online movement becomes big, it may detach from its
parent organizational structure.
Earth Hour in the UK: Building community
Different from Earth Hour in Canada and Australia, this movement in the UK didn’t
own a separate Twitter account. The voice is sent from @wwf_uk (screenshot of
@wwf_uk, Figure 5). In addition to basic tweets and retweets, the account set up an
automatic responding mechanism: when people mention their name “@wwf_uk,” it
would send a message like “Thanks for your support! #PandaHugs.” This message was
sent by @wwf_uk more than five hundred times on the day of Earth Hour. As a way of
engagement, this personalized message will encourage followers retweet and share it with
their follwers. #PandaHugs is a campaign started by WWF to generate buzz before Earth
Hour. Media is crucial when we look at the retweets data, top retweeted resources are
@BAS_news, @BBCNews, and @TheGuardian. They are mentioned many more times
even than another user @WWF and @earthhour.
In addition to social media engagement, WWF UK also calls for offline activities,
which makes it a great combination of online and offline campaign. According to WWF
UK, over 80% of people who involved in Earth Hour 2014 "are inspired to do more to
protect our planet." Social media is only one of the multiple ways audience can

34
participate. Besides that, people can choose to travel sustainably, donate, join team panda,
etc. For WWF UK, Earth Hour has been an integral part of its overall community
building strategy.
Earth Hour in South Africa: An independent Earth Hour
Earth Hour in South Africa is run by WWF South Africa. Their messages are sent
from @WWFSouthAfrica (screenshot of @WWFSouthAfrica, Figure 6). In the year of
2015, South Africa held lights off event in the inner-city of Johannesburg, which is also
as a memorial to Nelson Mandela, who concentrates on climate change issues a lot.
People in South Africa who wants to participate can tag Earth Hour social media account
@WWFSouthAfrica or via any kind of mobile phone to send text messages. The local
Earth Hour website focuses on how to educate people and make them realize the urgency
of the climate change issues. In addition to calling for on the ground activities like
switching off the lights, the movement in South Africa is more lifestyle-oriented
(Haenfler et al. 2012). It suggests people spread the message of changing climate change
and thinking green to change lifestyle. On the one hand, it promotes fighting against
climate change at the community level by changing personal lifestyles; on the other hand,
it calls for policy changes and high-level recognition of climate change. By promoting
concepts like “carpooling” and “green power,” the Earth Hour in South Africa is
successfully delivering the message of activism through the practice of changing your
own everyday choices. This hybrid feature makes it closer to its grassroots audience. It
becomes a platform for the public to pursue their “green” identities, and then to achieve
social and policy changes. Other countries are also taking similar steps. Take U.S. as an

35
example, it not only asks “every one of us can continue to engage in the movement,” but
also “tell President Obama to Take Strong Climate Action.”
The website of Earth Hour South Africa has a designated section of blog posts
where contributors share lifestyle tips on how to live a “green life.” The slogan of Earth
Hour South Africa is “There is no planet B.” All of the content on the website, as well as
on social media, are designed according to this central topic. When we look at the
mention network of South Africa social media account, we find that it hardly connects to
other accounts. The Earth Hour event is independently organized in South Africa. It is
under the big umbrella of the global campaign while its local relevance adds more
credibility to the regional success.
By researching on these different cases, we find that Earth Hour varies from country to
country. Each of them will choose a unique method to communicate with local audiences,
based on local priorities and strategies. Through amplifying individuals’ efforts,
communicating lifestyle tips, building a climate community and expand impact via
influencers, local events are maximizing their efforts to make it big on the night of Earth
Hour. Understanding these variants to the research because we can see that even though
the messaging of Earth Hour is global, when it comes to regional practices, it is still
highly localized and crafted by the local team.
Messaging Strategy: Global Voice, Local Relevance
The last research question asks how does Earth Hour use Twitter to aggregate and
amplify local participation to fulfill its goal of creating a globally visible community of
individual climate change actors. To answer this question, it is important to understand
what are the functions of the messaging (tweets) first. Lovejoy and Saxton (2012) talked

36
about the functions of tweet in a sample of the Twitter feeds from 100 of the largest
non-profit organizations. They argue that tweets mainly serve three functions:
information, community and action. According to these three different functions,
organizations then can be categorized as three roles: information sources,
community-builders and promoters. Twitter thus becomes the tool that reflects the
organization’s engagement and management strategy. In the case of Earth Hour,
informational content includes the introduction to the movement, highlights from local
events and other news coverage about the Earth Hour. Community building of Earth
Hour means via retweet and comment, Earth Hour is trying to build a community with
concerned public. Interactive conversations between the official account and follower is
also an indication of community function. The “key of action” function is that Earth Hour
encourages people to participate in Earth Hour events, or just stay at home and turn off
the unnecessary lights for an hour to show the dedication to climate change issues.
In the triangle designed by Lovejoy and Saxton (Figure. 7), which summarizes the
roles of 100 organizations according to the previous standard: a large portion of the
NGOs’ major functions are information providers. Only a few of them belongs to the
mobilizers and community builders. For Earth Hour, I coded a sample of tweets from two
international official handles just on the day of Earth Hour: @earthhour (screenshot of
@earthhour, Figure 8) and @WWF (screenshot of @WWF, Figure 9) by using and
enhancing the codebook Lovejoy and Saxton designed (2012). As we see from Table 4,
Earth Hour doesn’t have special concentration on a single function of information, action
or community. Instead, their function is rather balanced in this triangle, which makes it a

37
stable organization structure. Then content sent from Earth Hour serves the campaign as a
whole.
The goal of Earth Hour global is to collect all local efforts into one place and help
them become the organic part of this international event. Naware describes their goal of
building a global community:
We’d love to have this kind of community. Just getting people together and thinking
about changing minds or behaviors is a community of people, around that cause…
the step further than creating awareness is creating a community of people, who take
action or want to take action on climate change. What we want to do is to get people
together to talk about climate change.

We used a number of different analytical techniques to explore the extent to
which the local and global concerns about climate appear in Twitter conversations about
Earth Hour. The social media monitoring tool Radian6 is able to classify the location of
Twitter users for a small subset of all the tweets. Figure 10 illustrates the origin of the top
countries sending tweets on the day of Earth Hour, showing that the United States,
Canada, and the UK are ranked in the top three.
Table 5 presents the most frequently used hashtags in the dataset. The hashtag is
an effective way to bring people together and build community, like “#egypt” and “#libya”
successfully organize the conversation during Arab Spring (Howard et al. 2011). The
conversation was relatively centralized on these top 20 hashtags, which represent 71%,
65% and 60% of all the hashtags used respectively. Across the three-day period, the
official hashtag #EarthHour and #YourPower promoted by the WWF and Earth Hour
Global were the most widely used. There are also some variations of #EarthHour, like
#EarthHour and #EarthHour, which are also ranked top and add impact to the main
hashtag. We also examined the Top 20 hashtags to see to what extent local concerns

38
about climate change are highlighted versus the globally shared hashtags. Except for one
or two hashtag hijacking—that is, accounts that are not related to Earth Hour trying to
draw attention from the campaign and using the #earthhour hashtag—on each of the three
days, 95% of the most mentioned hashtags are associated with the global Earth Hour
(Table 6). The exceptions are #EarthHourUK, #TimeInLondon and #IniAksiku, each of
which highlight local concerns linked to climate change. The first two hashtags are
relevant to the UK, and #IniAksiku is “Earth Hour” in Indonesian. According to Naware:
“Indonesia is massive on Twitter, they have a huge Twitter user base, they also have a
huge Earth Hour supporter base. So the two marry on the night of Earth Hour and
trending.” From the perspective of international communication, as more global hashtags
are used, as well as global handles are more mentioned, Earth Hour 2015 has more global
implication than local.
Mentioning is a built-in function of Twitter, which is used to create mutual
connection between the sender and the receiver of the message. Users do not have to
follow each other to use the mention function. By cleaning the dataset extracted from
Radian6, a list of mentioned usernames was generated to help us understand which actors
were most important in talking about Earth Hour. The number of mentions an account
received can serve as a proxy for identifying influencers. Top mentioned usernames are
“hubs” in the discussion and help build relationship between different users. They could
either be the influencer of the event, or the organization that actively participate in the
campaign. The mention data (Table 7) is more sparse than the hashtag data, suggesting
that there are a wider variety of users involved in the conversation about Earth Hour. The
top 20 mentioned usernames account for 42%, 34% and 41% of all the mention dataset.

39
By contrast, in the Arab Spring, the top 10 percent usernames mentioned on the #Egypt
hashtag conversation were responsible for 73 percent of all mentions (Meraz &
Papacharissi, 2013) The centralization of usernames is an indicator of whether the
conversation is influencer-driven or not. In this case, the discussion about Earth Hour is a
more dispersed conversation instead of a centralized one like Arab Spring, which means a
large proportion of the content is generated from grassroots individuals. Local usernames
and organizations received slightly more mentions than global organizations, which
suggests, as we found in our analysis above, that local actors were central to the global
conversation about Earth Hour (Table 8).
We specifically looked into the content sent from two global handles, @earthhour
and @wwf, to examine how Earth Hour global works to connect the local concerns to the
global. The official handle of Earth Hour headquarters, @earthhour joined Twitter in
2008, immediately after the first Earth Hour event in Australia. It provides “tips” on how
to save energy, report the progress around the world, and encourage actions on climate
challenge. Especially during the day of Earth Hour, it reports the progress of “lights off”
events all over the world. However, when we look at the mention function of this account,
the infrequently used mechanism reveals that it only connects to local Earth Hour/WWF
accounts. Even though the content talks about what is going on across the world, it does
not mention either the local Twitter accounts from WWF or Earth Hour (e.g., “It's almost
#EarthHour in Indonesia. Lights out in 30 mins! RT if you're ready to
#ChangeClimateChange”; “Happy Australia! Come back in an hour and tell us how you
spent #EarthHour 2015”; “Lights out in 30 mins the UK! RT if you're celebrating
#EarthHour 2015”). The fact that global accounts seldom mention local usernames and

40
fail to respond to comments from those accounts decreases the credibility of slogan “we
are building a global community.” It also weakens the possibility that more traffic could
be driven to local level accounts from global level mentioning.
When we look at the most mentioned usernames and most popular tweets in the
campaign period of Earth Hour, we see that traditional media still play important roles in
the communication process. Traditional media accounts on social media platforms are
still regraded as reliable sources and can resonate with more people than the event
account itself. They are also crucial in the process of community building. We see that
@CNN, @Times, etc also rank top on the list, these traditional media’s Twitter accounts
drive a lot of traffic to the event. Earth Hour combines traditional media strategies and
social media outreach together, which makes it more impactful in an array of
environmental campaigns. Traditional media coverage becomes its in-depth
communication method, while online social media becomes the channel for real-time
communication. Naware describe the interrelationship as:
Twitter become your breaking news platform, I mean this is where people get news.
But you still have people when they want to in depth analysis and information who
will click on the link and go read it or pick up the newspaper. So the importance of
having this 360-degree communication strategies very important. Because a tweet
from NYT is great, but that tweet is going to disappear in this timeline within a few
seconds. You need to have a lasting kind of presence on that platform which comes
through traditional media outreach. It’s very important to keep both in mind as an
organization, we are very social and we use social media as a channel of
communication, information, awareness and engagement, for our followers. We use
traditional media to amplify that message, to give you access to people who are not
on social media, to give you access to in-depth reading on what is going on with EH
in Uganda forests, what is going on with policy change in Argentina or Russia.
Because in social media, there are only 140 characters, and that is the whole story
you can tell, so you need to make sure everyone has the full picture, and that’s why
they are both important.

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The research then considered the network connections between the local Earth
Hour/WWF accounts and Earth Hour global. When talking about the role of the local
team, Naware said: “A lot of the credit goes to the local teams because they run
on-ground events themselves. All of the local teams will give it local relevance. What
they do is to make climate change more understandable and accessible to people.” Figure
11 shows a visualization of the mention network in the tweets from Earth Hour global as
well as from the Earth Hour or WWF accounts in Australia, Canada, UK, and South
Africa. When the account mentions other’s username, there will be a line in the figure.
More lines and bigger size mean the account has a denser network than other accounts.
The network confirms that local WWFs are keystone players in the Earth Hour campaign
locally. However, the local Earth Hour/WWF campaigns work in isolation from one
another. There are few interconnections between the local offices, and there are few
connections between Earth Hour global and the local accounts. Earth Hour in South
Africa, in particular has no connections to the global conversation. Earth Hour in the UK
has the densest network because of the pre-set automatic mention function. If a country
has both WWF and Earth Hour accounts, they tend to mention each other. Otherwise,
there are few interconnections across the local accounts.
Naware explains the relationship between Earth Hour global and the local offices,
stating: “No one’s going to dictate how many posts, when, where, what. Local teams do
what they can to their market; then they share that with their communities.” From our
research on these cases, we see there do exist connections between local and international
(except for South Africa), but they very loose. We seldom see connections between one
local organization and another, which indicates that the so-called “global movement”

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remains “local-oriented.” Different countries have different strategies when
communicating the message of Earth Hour to the public, which is attributed to the loose
but organized structure within.

6. Discussion
As traditional advocacy organizations are entering the Internet era (Bimber et al.
2005), it is critical to understand how their digital initiatives fit with their legacy status.
World Wildlife Fund, which was founded a half century ago, describes itself as one of the
largest environmental organizations in the world. In 2007, the “switch off for an hour
(Earth Hour)” event quickly swept online all over the world. In less than ten years, it has
become WWF’s mass engagement platform and the “largest grassroots environmental
event in history.”
We see from our research that with the development of social media, “grassroots”
and “transnational” are becoming two inter-related features within one movement, they
are implemented at the same time. Around these two big themes, organizations are
developing local strategies, calling for policy changes and building communities. The
complexity of Earth Hour tells us it is hard to understand these “new initiatives” of
traditional organizations simply like other online advocacy groups. In our study, we
especially focus on the hybrid organizational structure, the attempt to make visible a
global community of people concerned about climate change and the interconnections
between the global and local digital strategies of the movement.
On the one hand, WWF is still a traditional organization that puts a majority of its
efforts into policy change, drawing on an elite-focused theory of change. On the other

43
hand, Earth Hour is seen as an innovative way for them to also mobilize a wide audience,
embracing a grassroots theory of change. The communication manager of Earth Global,
Rucha Naware, said it is a movement “powered by people, not traditional top-down
organizational communication around climate change, but a movement that starts in a
living room for some families.” But from our research, we see that the structures of Earth
Hour still maintain WWF’s traditional top-down hierarchy structure of national offices.
WWF and its local branches still play significant roles in organizing the movement, and
the Earth Hour global team is responsible for framing the overall movement and creating
the appearance of global attention through their use of the global social media accounts.
At the same time, the open-source description of the campaign is important to how
Earth Hour sees itself. Naware describes her role as an amplifier of the local:
[The internal team] speaks with the [local] teams to see what they did for the Earth
Hour, how we can help and how we can support, and as the campaign goes out, the
internal communication collects all of the stories and what is happening on the
ground. They then hand it over to Earth Hour global and my job is to get it out
through media and social media, including all of the other external channels. So like
I said, it is a massive communication and coordination effort.

In this way, the local development of the Earth Hour messaging has a chance to be
seen on the global stage. This is an opportunity for local concerns about climate change
to gain wider recognition. However, we find that the dominant form of engagement with
Earth Hour on social media is focused on association with the global movement.
Although the global Earth Hour and WWF accounts do write about particular local events,
they do not highlight specific local concerns about climate change as much as local did.
The global accounts amplify local success, but fail to make the local achievement visible
to an international level.

44
Figure 12 offers diagram to help us make sense of the change of organizations in the
Internet era. The first axis considers the movement scale. On the one end, it is purely
local campaigns; on the other end, it is a global movement that is organized by
transnational organizations. Some cases, like Earth Hour or the Occupy Movement, start
locally and then gain support in other countries (Rogers, 2012). Realizing the flow from
local to global or global to local is the key to understanding the horizontal axis. The
vertical axis is the organizational format (mobilization method). The traditional
organization still maintains their top-down model and uses their heritage influence
conducting movements; new, emerging environmental groups, which primarily rely on
online resources, tend to organize grassroots movements. A growing trend is what used to
be top-down organizations are now adopting grassroots models by applying social media
technology (Chadwick, 2007). In the structure of this social movement model, WWF
International is the top tier organization. It still plays a traditional role and oversees the
global Earth Hour movement. The local WWF or Earth Hour organization is where the
real grassroots movement begins. The role of Earth Hour global is to help broadcast what
happened at the grassroots, local level to the global audience. In turn, this global attention
serves to aid WWF in their elite-focused policy change efforts.
The information flow of the Earth Hour is unique, when compared with other
traditional environmental campaigns. On the one hand, it is an international campaign
with global impact. On the other end, from the information flow we can see that it stills
follows traditional top down communication mechanism. Earth Hour represents a rising
hybrid organizational structure. It originated from a traditional organization, and now
goes beyond typical online organization structure. The mobilization of the Earth Hour

45
also has “grassroots” implication. Earth Hour is about crowdsourcing. It allows and
encourages individuals and organizations to participate in the event in their own ways.
The grassroots concept the Earth Hour expects is people can generate the power for
mobilization. In reality, Earth Hour and WWF still control the power of voice and
organize the event from the back end. As Earth Hour becomes a major platform for WWF
to attract public attention and increase media exposure, there is an independent statistical
table on the WWF website to measure the social media data of Earth Hour (Figure 13).
In this thesis, I asked how the “grassroots” environmental mobilization of Earth
Hour shaped its digital strategies. The content it creates online and the communication
channel it chooses - social media, make it a typical large-scale grassroots campaign.
Earth Hour encourages individual participation and lifestyle changes, which is different
from traditional elite-oriented campaigns. These features allow it targets at a much wider
demographic and make it different from its parent organization-WWF. The Earth Hour is
grassroots. However, when we talk about the policy level changes, the spotlight turns to
WWF instead of Earth Hour. Earth Hour collects the power of people and WWF delivers
the power and messages to the government and pushing out changes by using its
long-time official partnership with the government. Unique and hybrid theory of change
make Earth Hour stands out from many other climate change movements.
Then I ask how does the organizational infrastructure for Earth Hour global shape
local campaign participation in different countries. From the perspective of
organizational structure, even though Earth Hour is an independent registered NGO, it
still follows the guidance from WWF global. By doing case studies of multiple countries’
WWF and Earth Hour accounts, it shows that the Earth Global only provides the

46
overarching message to local organizers: a large portion of the campaign are designed at
the local level. At the same time, a diversity of communication approaches indicates a
relatively loose connection between global and local organizers, from the perspective of
information exchange.
The final question asked how does Earth Hour aggregate and amplify local
participation to fulfill its goal of creating a globally visible community of individual
climate change actors. The messaging of the Earth Hour, which claimed to be
international, is still largely composed of local related information. The concept of
building a global community was good at the planning phase, but in execution progress,
we see the Earth Hour communities still constructed on the country level, instead of
different countries communicate with each other on social media. It still needs further
research to talk about whether a global community is established or not via Earth Hour,
but it is true that the Earth Hour has an international impact, with the help of strong social
media performance.
Through the research we conducted on the case of the Earth Hour, we understand
the transformation of a traditional environmental organization is happening, with the
development of social media. The grassroots feature of the movement is also facilitated
by the extensive use of Twitter. The hybridity of the WWF also shapes the messaging of
Earth Hour, making it more local related. In the future research, we hope to find how the
hybrid feature impacts policy changes. It is also worth time to do more interviews to
listen to local insights about the Earth Hour.

47
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WWF Australia Twitter account: https://twitter.com/WWF_Australia
WWF Canada Twitter account: https://twitter.com/WWFCanada
WWF Global website: http://wwf.panda.org
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52
Tables and Figures
Table 1. Volume of tweets by day.
March 27 March 28 March 29
Twitter 36,122 204,138 24,769

Table 2. Communication methods analysis for case studies.
WWF Twitter account Independent Twitter account Facebook
Australia √ √ √
Canada √ √ √
UK √ √
South Africa √
Taiwan √

Table 3. Twitter content analysis for case studies.

Tweet
s
Retweet
s
Percentag
e
Most used
Hashtag(s)
Most
mentioned
username
@earthhour 154 69 45% #EarthHour /
@wwf 98 35 36% #EarthHour
@earthhou
r
@EarthHourCanad
a
75 53 71% #EarthHour
@earthhou
r
@WWFCanada 45 27 60% #EarthHour /
@EarthHour_AU 94 69 73%
#AppetiteForChang
e
@earthhou
r
@wwfaustralia 30 18 60% #EarthHour /
@wwf_uk 595 35 6% #PandaHugs @WWF
@WWFSouthAfric
a
98 51 52%
#EarthHourSA
#EHChallenge
/

53

Table 4. Function of tweet on the day of Earth Hour.

Category Example
Information "1 movement. 1 cause. 1 planet. #EarthHour 2015 has
united millions across 172 countries and territories!
Thanks to all who took part! :)"
Community
Giving recognition
and thanks
"As #EarthHour 2015 comes to an end, THANK YOU for
being a part of the biggest celebration for the planet
EVER! 🌎⏳"
Acknowledgement of
current & local events

"With more than 1 MILLION celebrating across
Indonesia, we know every small action can make a big
diff. #IniAksiku http://t.co/oSCOs0uZy3"
Responses to reply
messages
"@QuantumG @Marimikel And so did millions of others
from more than 170 countries across the globe! ;)"
Action
Promoting an event ".@EarthHour is going on NOW! We've turned off our
iconic #Ghirardelli sign in #GhirardelliSquare for
#EarthHour. http://t.co/bJwM90dhtB"
Donation appeal "2015 marks the 9th yr of #EarthHour. Donate $10; power
the movement uniting the world for the planet.
#TweetMyPower http://t.co/b1DAIQJhrT"
Lobbying and
advocacy
"We are overwhelmed by your support to #EarthHour over
the years! Help us ensure more success with
#TweetMyPower http://t.co/b1DAIQrGAl"

54

Table 5. Top 20 hashtags in the sample.

3/27 3/28 3/29
#EarthHour
2020
4
#EarthHour
10766
9
#EarthHour
1239
6
#YourPower 2647 #YourPower 8811 #earthhour 687
#EarthHour2015 1218 #EarthHour2015 7809 #YourPower 624
#earthhour 1024 #earthhour 6430 #EarthHour2015 580
#ChangeClimateCh
ange
819
#ChangeClimateCh
ange
2408 #Earth 399
#IniAksiku 772 #AngryBirds 2157 #Hour 313
#Action2015 499 #yourpower 1902 #action2015 248
#UseYourPower 482 #Maldives 1892 #climate 242
#yourpower 460 #action2015 1604
#ChangeClimateCh
ange
215
#action2015 455 #liveEARTHhour 1596 #IniAksiku 214
#ClimateAction 413 #Business 1352 #Lights 148
#YesISave 365 #Games 1345 #liveEARTHhour 145
#EarthHourUK 301 #Verizon 1293 #ClimateChange 113
#timetoglo 284 #KCA 1205 #yourpower 113
#PicoftheWeek 273 #ClimateAction 1119 #HAH2015 107
#SaveThePlanet 270 #climatechange 1095 #climatechange 105
#Flipp4Forests 258 #IniAksiku 1069 #NatureIsSpeaking 104
#Earthhour 245 #EarthHourUK 1001 #TimeInLondon 104
#liveEARTHhour 234
#FreePresidentNash
eed
986 #KCA 101
#climatechange 228 #Earthhour 977 #environment 101

55

Table 6. Hashtags categorization: local vs. international.

Local/International
March 27*
4
2/16
March 28 3/13
March 29 2/16

*
1
Hashtag hijacking is using the popular hashtag and creating awareness for its own hashtag. There are 8
hashtag hijackings in the dataset (1,4, 2 on three days respectively): #PicoftheWeek, #Business, #Games,
#FreePresidentNasheed, #Maldives, #KCA(2) and #HAH2015.

56

Table 7. Top 20 mentioned usernames in the sample.

3/27 3/28 3/29
@earthhour 4579 @WWF 16763 @earthhour 1487
@WWF 3975 @earthhour 14590 @WWF 1029
@UN 824 @World_Wildlife 5062 @2014_almohandis 938
@World_Wildlife 703 @UN 2165 @mellberr 936
@wwf_uk 637 @AstroSamantha 1794 @Mark_Beech 936
@PrefecturGuayas 424 @PratiikRege 1778 @smitharyy 758
@KingSha9 401 @CalumWorthy 1748 @MetroUK 417
@YES_SaveEnergy 369 @mashable 1736 @hale_razor 408
@AstroSamantha 316 @wwf_uk 1678 @DotunOlusoga 373
@EHindonesia 298 @MetroUK 1472 @johnspatricc 358
@TimexUK 295 @ClimateReality 1447 @UN 335
@thewatchhut 285 @rossR5 1348 @mashable 277
@BAS_News 254 @LifeCheating 1162 @Independent 245
@getflipp 254 @Independent 1007 @ClimateReality 232
@LiveEarth 252 @johnspatricc 926 @iowahawkblog 230
@environmentca 247 @DotunOlusoga 835 @World_Wildlife 201
@UnileverWorld 239 @iowahawkblog 819 @EHindonesia 174
@WWFScotland 228 @hale_razor 805 @RicohIndia 163
@worldwildlife 221 @RT_com 745 @NBCNews 162
@guardianeco 212 @Globe_Pics 719 @arjunk26 159

57

Table 8. Mentioned usernames categorization: local vs. international.

Local/International
March 27 11/9
March 28 11/9
March 29 12/8

58
Figure 1. Earth Hour events map (1608 events, 1146 cities
5
)

5
Image#1: Category 1; Image#2: Category 2 [http://www.earthhour.org/tracker]

59
Figure 2. Groups in collective action space (Flanagin et al. 2005, p.39)

60
Figure 3. Screenshot of @EarthHour_AU

Figure 4. Screenshot of @EarthHourCanada

61
Figure 5. Screenshot of @wwf_uk

Figure 6. Screenshot of @WWFSouthAfrica

62
Figure 7. Ternary Plot: “Proportion of Organizations” tweets in each category
(Lovejoy&Saxton 2012, p.348)

Figure 8. Screenshot of @earthhour

63
Figure 9. Screenshot of @WWF

Figure 10. Tweets on the day of Earth Hour (by country).

64
Figure 11. A visualization of mentioned network of related Twitter accounts

Figure 12. Contemporary hybrid organization space

Grassroots
Global
Top-down
Local
WWF International
Local WWF/Organizations
Earth Hour International

65
Figure 13. Social media follower data (retrieved from WWF)

66
Appendix A. Interview with Rucha Naware
6
(Excerpt)

Hi Rucha. Thank you so much for taking your time to talk with me about the Earth Hour.
I want to introduce myself at the very beginning. This is Jasper from Beijing China, I
studied English for my undergraduate study and now I’m concentrating strategic public
relations graduate study. I am working on a research project exploring climate change,
and in particular the role of social media in campaigns seeking to raise awareness, and,
potentially, bring about policy change.

The first question is, as the communication manager of the EARTH HOUR, how do
you like it? Because you may have the job for only several months, or years, when
you first heard about it, what is your impression?
Actually I’m quiet new at the job. It has been six months. So EARTH HOUR 2015 is my
first EARTH HOUR. You mentioned in your questions as well, in terms of being a global
movement, there are so much to learn, so much to do because this year we cover 172
countries and territories. It is essentially a communication campaign because it talks to
the mass public. So it is very interesting, it is highly challenging sometimes. Because
unlike big companies or brands, we don't have a massive budget. It is very interesting that
it is definitely something a communication person enjoys doing. Actually thank you for

6
Rucha Naware is the communication manager of Earth Hour global at Singapore office. I conducted this
interview in June, 2015. This is an excerpt from the full one hour and a half interview. Following is a short
bio of Rucha, which is retrieved from the Earth Hour official website
(https://www.earthhour.org/rucha-naware):
Six years in the non-profit world have perhaps toned Rucha down a few notches, from idealist to
die-hard optimist, but there is no lowering her enthusiasm to help make the world a better place. Once
having trouble saying anything in less than 140 minutes (much less 140 characters), Rucha is now
putting her love for communication to good use to help get a maximum of media and social media
talking about Earth Hour!

67
the interview, because honestly it is very interesting to discuss with students see what
they feel, you can see the outside world and see how they perceive EARTH HOUR. So
I’m looking this as a conversation. Feel free to ask and comment.
I think you must be very busy during the day of EARTH HOUR, that is March 28
th
.
Could you please describe a normal day of your work or your daily schedule?
Essentially, I will walk you through how we look at the campaign. We have Jan to March,
almost April, that is what we called the campaign period, in terms of the mass external
communication going out, to get more engagement and mobilization. This is the period
we kind of getting the momentum we need, to make the night of Earth Hour memorable
for everyone. So these days are nothing normal about it, you are jumping from the
interview with the BBC, then to help the local team with their media purchase, press
conference, and the social media or going through all of these. On the week of the
EARTH HOUR, we work 24 time zones from the fist light goes out, finally to where sun
goes off on the another side of the world. So we work technically 24 hours, but by the
time, we also make a highlight video to make sure that people all over the world know
what was happened on the same day during EARTH HOUR. So as a communication
person, you end up working almost 24 hours non stop.
That is my first EARTH HOUR so there are many steps to go. You must be very surprised
that we have shifts, you can’t expect anyone to work that long. So we go to our office
Saturday afternoon Singapore time. Everyone is so excited, even our interns, who joins us
from Jan to June, even our interns do not take breaks, because it is so exciting to be a part
of something that is so global and so large-scale, everyone just has the energy to keep
them going.

68
You are such a small team but you make such a big impact around the world.
Teamwork and coordination are definitely more important when you in a small team. We
have interns and they are amazing. The interns are actually doing hands on work and we
would not function without the interns. It’s massive resource for us. They also represent
the EARTH HOUR audience, because they are from a younger age group. They help us
thinking out ideas. This is the team in Singapore, but as much as we coordinate the effort,
I think a lot of the credit have to go to the local WWF and Earth Hour teams in other
countries, because they run the on-ground events/initiatives themselves. So what the
global team does is give the global direction for the campaign, where do we want to go
and how do we want to communicate climate change; all of the local teams will give it
the local relevance: it could be language in some case, but it could also be, for example,
something which is a lot more profound, in terms of climate change is a scary issue, it is a
global issue, and what happens with climate activism is that often, it is not urgent in
terms of it is urgent on a global scale. But as a human being, I didn’t see the urgency. It
might seem very distant and remote, unless that you’re in Russia, and you know Arctic
Drilling is going to impact your environment, or you’re in this region of the world, you
know here is a big problem. For example, deforestation, or if you live in Brazil, you have
water crisis in the Amazon. So what we do with the earth hour is to make the climate
change locally relevant and that is where the local team comes in, what they can do is the
climate change is the overarching issue, to make it more understandable and accessible to
people, they gave that local relevance and they link to a local WWF project for example,
so people can take concrete actions, either lead up to the the EARTH HOUR during the

69
night of EARTH HOUR or beyond the EARTH HOUR. And that is why local teams are
important for us.
You just mentioned you had a good relationship with the WWF HQ and the local
teams. This year, 172 countries participate in, so there must be local teams around
all these countries, I want to know such kind of internal communication, how do you
communicate with these teams. For me it is like the WWF HQ is up the higher level,
local teams are at the lower level and you’re at the middle of the info flow.
Earth Hour global itself is an independent structure, so we are a charity registered in
Singapore. But yes, WWF is our parent organization. Here is an example, the chair of our
board, because we have our own board, is Mr. Sudhanshu Sarronwalahe was the
spokesperson for last year’s campaign as well, he is also the executive director for
marketing and communications for WWF international. So that is our upper level towards
WWF. Essentially EARTH HOUR is the massive engagement platform for WWF for
climate change. So what WWF does is use EARTH HOUR to communicate on climate
change with different country teams. So why we have the higher level kind of
communication that happens EARTH HOUR, the executive director of the EARTH HOUR,
the board as well as WWF international, because we all have teams and we work together,
I have a fantastic colleague XX, she is the internal communication manager, and her job
is to coordinate with all of the teams within 172 countries and territories, which are WWF.
The WWF are 82 countries, and the 88 countries are not WWF. During the Earth Hour,
she keeps very busy, she speaks with the teams and see what they did for the EARTH
HOUR, how we can help and how we can support, and as the campaign goes out, what the
internal communication does, (the external communication, which is me) ,all of the

70
stories and what is happening on the ground so for example, I know a group of volunteers
with Earth Hour are doing things in refugee camp in Iraq. Internal communication
sources all these stories, they handed it over to me and my job is to get it out through
media and social media, including all of the other eternal channels. So like I said, it is a
massive communication and coordination effort. But I think a lot of the credit goes to the
team, and also as I mentioned earlier, it is just a matter of cause. All WWF teams and
non-WWF teams, they are all believe in the cause, this kind of tireless ongoing
conversation, helps the campaign reach to level it has right now.
I’ve been concentrate on the EARTH HOUR from the beginning of the spring
semester, so it has been four to five months since then. I track the Twitter and your
website, so this year, you describe the EARTH HOUR as a grassroots movement, so
that is world’s largest environmental grassroots movement, could you define your
organization or just elaborate this definition?
I think it simply means movement powered by people. It is not traditional top-down
organizational communication around climate change. It is a movement that starts in a
living room for some families, it is a movement starts with young students who want to
do something, it is a movement then comes out to the street say they want take actions on
climate change. There is never any imposition of what EARTH HOUR should mean to you.
EARTH HOUR for us is a movement of the people, so why do we have organizational
goals or objectives of WWF might have, for example, of policy outcome. It is something
priority for us as an organization, but we’re not going to say to someone who is going to
celebrate earth hour with friends and families by going, maybe planting trees in their
community, you can’t do that, there is only one, two three actions you can take, our idea

71
is people can come together and celebrate their potentials to be actors of change, that is
what we mean by grassroots, it really means the power of people. Even the outcome we
achieve, even we change a policy or legislation change, it is because we have the power
of people, and we never underestimate that.
So that is because people care, so they can do something to support. Another
question for the EARTH HOUR as a grassroots movement, there are a lot of other
groups and organizations: some of them have a long history; EARTH HOUR is back
to 2007 in Australia. These orgs may have 20 events per year, while the EARTH
HOUR has this only one big campaign. Did you any similarities or differences
between these organizations?
The difference between these organizations and EARTH HOUR, essentially for me, there
is no distinctions because we are for the same cause. So they are different activities for
the same cause. Some orgs may run multiple campaigns in a calendar year. Earth Hour
runs one event, I’m going to see event which is the lights out, but then you have multiple
projects and campaigns going out through the year as well on local levels. So for eg in
Russia in 2015, the object is to collect 100,000 signatures on Arctic Drilling. So now that
campaigning led by WWF Russia, started before EARTH HOUR in February, is
continuing to September or the October this year. The impact of that goes to parliament.
So I would say every organization has days, campaigns or you can call landmark events,
that kind of mark the peak but the idea is the cause. I think the communication, the
messaging and the kind of ongoing narrative of every organization including EARTH
HOUR extends beyond that. So I would not say the distinction in terms of EARTH HOUR
is one campaign and other organizations have 20 campaigns, because what matters is the

72
ongoing narrative that ongoing media or platform for action that each organization offers
for its supporters. That is what EARTH HOUR and 350.org do. There are peaks, that it
normal, and after that you have year-on communication as well.
So the ultimate goal of these movements and campaigns is to raise people’s
awareness to climate change, to motivate them to do something and take actions.
The cause that matters most, every organization will take it in their own way, the
awareness and engagement are from the cause. It could be climate change, it could be
hunger, it could be poverty. But that is what every non-profit does including Earth Hour.
A quick question, have you ever try to reach these organizations, or other
environmental advocacy groups, to communicate with people and talk about your
campaign or you just run independently?
As EARTH HOUR is a part of the WWF, and WWF being one of the world’s largest
conservation organizations, they have robust dialogues with different actors on climate.
So what EARTH HOUR does is work very closely with the climate team at WWF, who
partners with all of these organizations, and then we reach out to them or they reach out
to us. If you look at, I know you observing us from social media, so recently a bunch of
organizations launch the people’s climate protest for COP21, so we are trying to build
awareness on that as well. Or we have EARTH HOUR blog where we have people to talk
about the impact of climate change on industries. So we do have dialogues, partnerships,
and conversations, which is largely led by WWF climate team because they contact with
these organizations on a daily basis. In many countries where WWF is not present,
EARTH HOUR is led by organizations or community groups. So in Taiwan, the Society of
Wild Life, they run earth hour. That’s the beauty of being a grassroots open source

73
campaign that anyone who believes in the cause can take it and make their own. And they
are very open to collaborating because what matters to us is the maximum of
mobilization. So we don’t want to have the ownership, we would not say that is the only
EARTH HOUR supporters, our idea is the global community for the climate change.
Let’s back to the social media question, to what extent do you think, or the role of
social media plays in the original conception of the EARTH HOUR?
If you think back to 2007 when the EARTH HOUR originated, there was barely any FB,
there was no Twitter. It went viral because it is innovative at that time, at that year. But
after that, in order to achieve the same impact, to grow as we are growing, in terms of
that you see every year, we see increase in countries, enthusiasm and numbers of actions
people take to EARTH HOUR to change climate change. I wouldn’t say it all attribute to
the social media, but social media plays a very important role in generating that first step
of awareness and engagement, and also interest communicating on a global issue like
climate change. Climate change affects every single person on the planet, most people
will be online, that is the most effective touch point today. If climate change is no borders,
technology doesn’t have any borders either. Social media is so important when helps
power the movement like EARTH HOUR. Especially when you have limited team
members, limited resources, it does become a very impactful and effective channel of
communication. In 2007, it might not be the very important role, but in 2015 and the
upcoming campaign of 2016, we know that digital is the space where people can come
together and we would like to do is use that space for people to take actions as well. In
2015, we had over 305,000 online actions taken for the climate change, which could be
adding your voice to a petition. It shows the potential media has, and we love to explore

74
that more to see how people who are online and on social media can actually become
“social” in terms of causes through this medium.
In China, many landmarks have event “turn off the lights for an hour”. While in
China, there is no Twitter nor Facebook. We have Weibo as a social media platform.
From 2007 the first EARTH HOUR to now, it has been eight years, what do you
think are the key elements to make the people have the consistent interest, and the
same level of enthusiasm in the EARTH HOUR campaign?
I would say there are are a couple of elements, the first is the cause itself. I think today
people are increasingly aware of the impact of the climate change, they are increasingly
aware of the role human play themselves causing the climate change. And people are also
increasing aware of their role as change makers. All of these together helps power
EARTH HOUR because what they have through EARTH HOUR is a platform where One,
they understand the climate change is an issue that affects everybody. Two, climate
change, which might seem as a big issue, if we all act together, we can make a change;
and Three, it is possible to act through movements like EARTH HOUR. I don’t think we
give people enough credit by saying that they are not interested or they don’t want to take
a action. Everyone wants to take an action, we see that in 2007, all Sydney turn off their
lights. So if you give people a movement, a medium, a platform to voice their concern
and to take action, they will do it. That keeps EARTH HOUR going. The cause is as
important as urgent, as monumental as it was in 2007. People are as enthusiastic,
motivated and engaged as they were in 2007, and communities, corporates and
governments, every single actor is coming together to talk about climate change which is
helping the movement even further. So I would just say three things: 1. Cause 2. People 3.

75
The amount of interest communication, awareness, engagement we have all on the board
that helps drive it.
Year by year, we have the Earth Hour event. Year by year, we accumulate impact
and the foundation. Every year, we have more countries participate in. So it’s
becoming a bigger and bigger activity.
In 2007, it was very simple: just turn off your lights and that was it. What’s encouraging
is that like you mention, people know that they can make a difference, that awareness is
helping. Otherwise it will be very easy to say that “I’m done this now, but it’s not making
any difference, what’s the point?” Earth Hour is an opportunity you see the change you
can make, and you want to be a part of it. So I think that is what helps drive the
movement every year gets more people involved. Because in 2007, if people had not the
impact they did, then the next year, there would not be 35 countries calling: I want to do
EARTH HOUR too.
So EARTH HOUR is a platform for people involve in the big conversation of climate
change. I know you have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Viral YouTube videos,
Tumblr, owned blogs, so what’s your concentration (amount of resources) on these
different social media platforms?
We obviously study, monitor and analyze what is working and what is not, so today we
are present on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, Tumblr as well as on LinkedIn,
which we think is expanding. What works best for us is Facebook and Twitter. So we will
focus on Facebook and Twitter. We craft messaging for these two platforms and tailor
information for other platforms accordingly. But the first priority is FB and Twitter.
Again, in China, we look at Weibo. That is the mark of two-way communication.

76
Communications is not only pushing out any message, analyze what works and what
doesn’t, how do you improve it, how do you tweet it… so we do that on a constant base
and what I would like to address is Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for our important
videos. They work altogether for our communication strategy. So you’re never going to
invest more in social media at the cost of traditional media. When I say invest, I mean
people and time, we don’t have enough budgets, so it is a matter of balancing. But I think
for any non-profit, especially for Earth Hour where communication is so important, you
have to look at it 360-degree strategy because you couldn’t only focus on one. Each
media, platform has its advantages and disadvantages, where analysis and monitoring
become so important. So you know where you can focus your more of energy and then
disperse the others accordingly.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract The Internet has accelerated the transformation of traditional non-profit organizations. Legacy groups are adapting the trend of open-source and grassroots to create their own “online based” movements. Claiming to be the “largest grassroots environmental event in history,” Earth Hour is World Wildlife Fund’s mass engagement platform for climate change. The thesis asks what is the organizational infrastructure of a hybrid organization like WWF/Earth Hour? How does the strategy of the Earth Hour campaign drive their digital media tactics? I explore these themes through a case study, drawing on interview data and analysis of Twitter content and network analysis of the information flow within. The research reveals that Earth Hour is successful at mobilizing people and making the movement international, while the operational infrastructure behind is still based on WWF’s traditional hierarchy national office mechanism.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Wang, Luping (author)

Core Title Creating a moment of time: Earth Hour, transnational grassroots movement and hybrid organization

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Strategic Public Relations

Publication Date 04/21/2016

Defense Date 04/18/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Climate,hybrid organization,international communication,OAI-PMH Harvest,social media,Twitter

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Thorson, Kjerstin (committee chair), Brabham, Daren (committee member), Leveque, Matthew (committee member)

Creator Email jasper199342@gmail.com,lupingwa@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-236949

Unique identifier UC11277161

Identifier etd-WangLuping-4327.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-236949 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-WangLuping-4327-0.pdf

Dmrecord 236949

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Wang, Luping

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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