Winner - Sustain Magazine Business & Society Award for Communication
Posted March 13th, 2009 by
IFAW recently scooped Sustain Magazines Business & Society Award for Communication for the Adopt a Humpback Campaign that GREEN produced.
The overall aim of this campaign was to stop Japanese whalers from carrying out their threat to kill humpback whales in a sanctuary in Antarctica. By “adopting” named whales for all UK MPs, we hoped to engage and motivate them to do all they could to deter Japan from killing these 50 humpbacks – a vulnerable species decimated by whaling in the last century.
One of IFAW’s key international campaigns is to end commercial or so-called “scientific” whaling and protect whales. We hoped MPs would support IFAW’s work and continue lobbying against whaling at the annual International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting.
The overall campaign objective behind the Adopt a Humpback project was achieved, as a few weeks after the campaign was launched, Japan announced that it would not kill any humpback whales during the 2007/early 2008 whaling season in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean Sanctuary. While this may yet turn out to be only a temporary reprieve for these whales (at the time Japan pledged only that it would not take any humpbacks before the 2008 IWC meeting in June), there has been no clear indication since as to when Japan intends to resume the hunt for these whales.
In August 2008, IFAW welcomed the news that the status of humpback whales on the world’s Red List of endangered species has been moved from “vulnerable” to “least concern” after the population made a considerable recovery since the moratorium on commercial whaling came into effect in 1986.
Another aim of the campaign, to engage and motivate MPs to protect the humpbacks and to be active on the whaling issue generally, was also achieved. 154 MPs responded to the adoption pack, with 63 attending the photo call and a further 91 requesting press releases so they could highlight the issue with their local and regional media despite not being able to attend the photo call. Many MPs also used a follow-up press release revealing that the humpbacks were no longer being targeted. More than 100 newspaper stories appeared on the MP humpback adoption campaign, as well as a small amount of radio coverage. In addition, many MPs responded to our request to write to the Foreign Secretary and the Japanese Ambassador on the issue.
The next time we needed MPs to be really active on the whaling issue – in the run-up to this year’s IWC meeting – we sent another eye-catching mailing. This one was designed to build on the interest from the humpback adoption and encourage MPs to write to countries we feared may vote with the pro-whalers in favour of overturning the ban on commercial whaling.
To make this issue as interesting as possible, as well as being informative, we sent them another foldout pack with a teaser message. The outside read “one person” and as it was folded out continued with “influencing one minister”, “can swing one vote”, eventually showing a map of the world with pro-whaling nations, anti-whaling nations and others. It urged MPs to target five countries in particular, and to push for the creation of a new whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic.
Campaign recognition surveys of MPs have shown widespread recognition of IFAW’s Adopt a Humpback campaign and also indicated whaling was one of the issues they received most correspondence about from constituents. In previous years, MPs had told us whaling was not an issue which their constituents often raised with them.
In a meeting with Marine Minister Jonathan Shaw MP prior to this year’s IWC meeting, he said he had received representations from 250 MPs on the issue. To keep MPs interested and active on whaling we intend to keep sending them personalised updates on their whales as and when sightings occur.
