By Glen Frost, Editor, The PR Report and Founder, Lung Hour.

Earth Hour is a great example of how the open source campaign model can be used by communications practitioners to generate behavioural change (getting people to act). The Earth Hour brand is an open-source brand; the brand creators and owners have “let go” of their control of the brand. This is a huge leap of faith, but the upside is enormous; Earth Hour has influenced 1 billion people in just 4 years to hold their own events in cities around the world.

Andy Ridley, Executive Director, WWF and Co-Founder of Earth Hour, discussed his experience of co-creating and managing the public relations and marketing strategy, and annual activity for the award winning Earth Hour campaign, as well as the opportunities that open-source campaigns can offer communications practitioners. Andy’s key message is “be positive, fear doesn’t work” – an inspiring message for all professional communications practitioners.

Andy spoke at the official launch of Lung Hour on 1st September in Sydney (Lung Hour is an open source quit smoking campaign run by volunteer PR practitioners).

The 10 laws of great open source PR campaigns are:

1. Fear doesn’t work (apart from reaching the extremists). Simple, positive ideas are the best way to reach a mass market

2. You need friends and partners. Friends for brainstorming ideas, and partners to get traction, especially media and key influencers (in Andy’s case it was Fairfax and The City of Sydney)

3. You need to understand the economics of your industry/cause (logic), but a communications campaign should be created on a simple truth and a simple call to action that engages people’s emotions.

4. The campaign philosophy should be more “street party” than “street protest”

5. The lower the cost of involvement, the more people will engage

6. The campaign should empower people

7. An open source campaign means “the campaign” belongs to “the people”

8. Don’t worry, self policing works

9. Blogs and social media will drive opinion

10. The future is digital and mobile. Digital referring to the web and the global power of social media, and mobile for engagement activities like voting and giving (mobiles offer immediate and cheap interaction, via SMS voting for example, and use of the mobile carriers billing system, to take donations for example.