This year, our campaign reached 85.5m people – almost four times as many people as in 2021. This impact was only made possible by joining forces with hundreds of companies, creators, and celebrities around the world to spread the word about the urgency of taking immediate climate action. This impact report summarizes the contributions our community made during the week, celebrates their accomplishments, and takes a look at the future of TFCA!

In our second year of the campaign, we shifted our focus from a flash campaign to longer term impact: the action catalyzed by our week-long campaign will extend into the next year and beyond – plus, several more communications and localizations will follow before the end of 2022. And we’re off to a great start! During the first activation week alone – 18th-22th of April – a total of 373 companies from our network contributed to the campaign and created a huge impact, but there is more to come.

After the significantly positive impact of the TFCA 2021 campaign, this year we stepped up our efforts, with almost 500 companies applying to be part of the 2022 launch. Of those, 373 companies – with a combined customer base of hundreds of millions – met the campaign requirements, including: not investing or profiting from fossil fuels or extractive industries; having measured their corporate footprint, including Scope 3 (or committing to do it by the end of 2022); having a proven track record of reduction actions taken; having set and transparently communicated their long term carbon reduction goals; and having a minimum of 3 specific climate actions planned for the coming year. 

As we value transparency and tangibility, we’ve summarized all the existing climate protection efforts, recent campaign contributions, and future goals from every participating company on this overview page.

Additionally, we were supported by over 30 public figures, ranging from Instagram creators to famous actors like Brian Cox and soccer players such as Toni Kroos and Mario Götze. Tapping into their combined audience of 45 million people, they shared their personal stories about climate protection, as well as invited their fans and followers to take action via tfca.earth. 

Together with Berlin creative agency, I LIKE VISUALS we created a fantastic campaign video, in which we showcased the ease and speed with which anyone around the world could take climate action on our website, which was shared by many of our supporters.

This year we wanted to make it as easy as possible for companies to share our action modules with their customers. Therefore, we made an embeddable iFrame, for any participant to add into their website or product – this is the best way to have higher conversions of climate actions, without companies having to redirect their traffic somewhere else! If you’d like to display our actions on your website too, here’s the open code.

The 2022 TFCA campaign was run in partnership with ActNow, the UN initiative for individual climate action, as well as CountUsIn, the world’s largest individual climate action platform and aggregator. In our attempt to bring sustainable lifestyle changes within everyone’s reach, we upgraded the existing actions on our page with new content, offering a wide range of options across the areas of: political action, activism, action at work, sustainable energy and investments, digital habits, and sustainable food consumption. 

We offered companies a wide range of approaches and channels to use during the campaign week – with every single one of them being used, plus some went ahead and organized their own creative ways to support the TFCA mission during the week! Many, many posts, events, and initiatives were pushed, so here are some highlights from Earth Week alone:

• 78.8m visitors saw the campaign banner on companies’ websites and/or apps

• 2.8m people opened the dedicated newsletters

• 13.6k trees were planted 

• 15k people explored educational materials and webinars

• 2.1k people used/bought green products, replacing conventional alternatives

• 2.2k employees participated in internal climate-related activities

• 1.1k employees shared news about the campaign on their personal social media

Many of the companies participating approached the campaign with creativity, leveraging the superpowers of their products to reach their customers and stakeholders. It’s impossible to show it all, but here are just a few inspiring examples:

eBay Kleinanzeigen and mobile.de partnered up to launch a joint initiative – Gemeinsam fürs Klima – showcasing their efforts and integrating TFCA actions into their interfaces. To date, this is the single most powerful collaboration within the campaign, bringing more than 60% of the traffic to the campaign page this year. Plus, EbayK pulled 10*10 kg of plastic from the ocean and mobile.de donated €5,000 to a non-profit project preserving Tannenbusch Moor. 

Personio featured banners on their app login screen, main website, and sustainability and Personio Green sub-pages, plus promoted the Personio Green program… On top of that, this year they focused on internal employee engagement and created beautiful, impactful moments with their team members, involving more than 300 colleagues across 5 offices. Their activities included hand-making detergent, planting a rooftop garden, panel talks on recycling, litter clean-ups, clothes swap parties, and volunteering events.

Idealo had prominent banners on their homepage, promoted green products on their platform, and partnered together with eBay Kleinanzeigen to create a sustainable consumption guide which they shared on social media.

The Eduki team personally promoted the campaign and pushed the message strongly in German, French, and Spanish markets. Leveraging the power of their product  – educational materials for teachers – they created special editions focused on the climate which were downloaded 1.5k times within the campaign week alone. 

Apsiyon used all of their channels to promote the campaign: social media, website, and newsletter. In addition, more than 150 employees shared personal posts about the campaign. Going forward, they are opening up a dedicated Green Channel on their blog and app – and will plant 10k trees for carbon capture…

Blacklane shared sustainable travel tips with their Instagram community and reached out to their CEO’s LinkedIn contacts to raise awareness about the need for climate action from private companies. They engaged not only their employees, but also their wider network of chauffeur partners. In addition, they created an educational blog post on common green terminology in the fields of travel and mobility. 

Blinkist made sustainability content and shortcasts free for all their users, and also helped us to reach out to media outlets. 

TIER was promoting the campaign page on their website in a blog article, via in-app notifications, newsletters, social media and were running a CRM campaign in order to educate their riders and take climate action on the page. In addition, they were educating their community with a series of blog posts and promoting sustainable mobility solutions, as well as donating additional resources to a hydropower project in D.R. Kongo.

Blackroll, Fashion Cloud, Pack-it-eco, Q lab, Tomorrow.io, and dozens more integrated our action modules directly into their websites or apps. 

Living out the principle of Leaders for Climate Action community, many well-known founders and CEOs personally called for climate action on Earth Day.

What was the role of social media?

Many of us use social media daily, so we pushed it again as one of our most important channels: companies posted a wide variety of content, from our campaign video to climate quizzes, to educational climate protection tips. Together they reached about 1.7m people via Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok during the campaign launch week. Check out our hashtags: #5minsForThePlanet and #TimeforClimateAction ! 

This year, our team also added a slightly different approach. By creating short, informative videos – and utilizing TikTok and Instagram reels – we increased our chances of enjoying the virality these 2 channels can offer. Our videos were seen by over 153k people organically! 

Additionally, we were supported by celebrities such as Mario Götze, Toni Kroos, Brian Cox, Pheline Roggan, Arne Friedrich, Paul Keuter, Nicole Ansari, Sebastian Steudner, as well as creators such as Louisa Dellert, Tim Rasch, and many more. These public figures alone reached out to 2.1m people, sharing stories about their own sustainability journey and advising their followers to take climate action themselves!

Therefore, with the combined impact of our community of public figures and our own TFCA accounts, we reached a total of 3.9m people just via social media!

For this year, we worked hard to bring the campaign page onto a whole new level, improving functionality, design, and -– most importantly – content. Long story short, here’s what changed:

• Energy Switch: we improved the flow and added functionality to complete the transition without leaving our page

• Politics: in addition to offering the opportunity to contact local politicians, visitors can now also reach out to their representatives on an EU level, as well as use message templates to address the specific issues that worry them the most

• Finance: we extended the action from sustainable banking to sustainable investments, engaging a wider audience

• At work: last year it was only possible for visitors to share a few slide decks with their CEO, but this year they can learn about what they can personally do in their role, as well as set up meetings with their teams and kick-off suggested initiatives

• Support NGOs: we extended our catalog on suggested non-profits – visitors can now choose the areas of protection that most speak to them, as well as the type of support they want to offer: volunteering, donating, or subscribing

• Digital Habits: it turns out that it’s possible to plant trees while browsing – or even meditating – so we introduced this tool to highlight a few highly effective non-profit apps that visitors can install in just a few clicks

• Food: a brand new action we added this year: an engaging quiz educating visitors on the impacts of food waste and plant-rich diets, and also suggesting a few digital services that can be a great help in fighting the climate crisis with nutrition

Within just the first week of the campaign this year, we had more than 220,000 visitors. 3% of them took at least one first step from the suggested actions, with Food and Politics actions being the most used. 

Another brand new development is our sharing feature, which allows visitors to invite friends by generating a customised link – plus, we launched a social media challenge where people can nominate their colleagues or friends to switch energy provider, or take any other suggested action. 

These significant improvements would not have been possible without strong support of volunteers and ecosystem partners – WorkForClimate, abgeordnetenwatch, Climate Change Makers, Tech Zero, Playing for Planet, and many others. Together we created a shortlist of recommended providers for the campaign page. In doing so, we looked at a number of factors, ranging from credibility in climate action, sector-specific evaluations by third parties (e.g. charity assessments for NGOs and national consumer watchdog rankings for financial institutions), and alignment with recognized industry standards (e.g. B Corp certification for apps).

To sum up, following just one week of the campaign, we are already so impressed and heartened by all of the climate action taken via our channels. The numbers and highlights shared in this report are the best proof available that communities like ours can make a significant difference. 

For us, this campaign is not only about reaching individuals. It is a unique opportunity to bring conversations about more ambitious and outside-of-the-box climate action to companies. And the best cases are when they try out new features for the campaign period, but then keep them on as part of their product or website in the long run. So we see the main value of our campaign not in the numbers, but in catalyzing necessary change over time.

A big thank you goes out to all our team members, volunteers, editors, media, agencies, management, and countless others who have helped us to realize this large-scale project. Without your help, we could not have achieved this impact, and we are extremely grateful. We are proud to have organized TFCA 2022 and are already looking forward to next year’s campaign.