The Earthshot Prize
The most prestigious global environment prize in history
The challenge
The Earthshot Prize is designed to incentivise change and to help repair our planet over the next ten years. The prize is awarded to five winners by The Royal Foundation each year and every winner will receive a grant of £1 million to continue their all-important work.
Our challenge was to create a standout website that would bring the campaign to life and communicate the different phases of the award process. The website would need to appeal to a broad audience and showcase the power of human ingenuity to create change and inspire action.
In the weeks preceding the award, there would be a six-part BBC documentary narrated by Prince William and Sir David Attenborough, investigating the various solutions that hold promise for both the environment and humanity. As a result, the website would need to handle a sporadic and significant increase in traffic. We predicted a huge spike during the televised award ceremony.
The approach
During our research and discovery phase, we quickly got to grips with the goals of the campaign and the different needs of the various audiences, including those of the internal digital team.
We worked alongside the branding agency to turn their guidelines into an interactive experience that would engage audiences and inspire action. The simple and intuitive user experience sits on a flexible and secure platform that easily accommodates the different phases of the campaign, from the nomination process right through to the awards.
Our robust hosting architecture is equipped to handle sudden spikes in traffic and is designed to load quickly even during the busiest moments of the campaign.
The results
The result is a scalable and modular website with visual impact that The Earthshot Prize can reuse and develop to suit their evolving needs.
The hosting setup, powered by 100% renewable energy, enabled us to upscale bandwidth during key moments in the campaign, such as the star-studded award ceremony on BBC One.
Inspired by our work on this pioneering environmental prize, we now consider sustainability throughout our design and build process, with a view to create better-performing websites with a lower carbon footprint.
You can read about the impact small editorial changes can make to reduce your website’s carbon emissions here.
Useable
2.14 minutes average session duration
Findable
Over 2 million pageviews since launch
Trackable
Data-driven approach to optimisation
