Low-carbon building campaign - Redhouse Lane Communications

Carbon Trust: Low-carbon building campaign

How the Carbon Trust is building awareness

Challenge

Buildings account for 40% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions.Improving their energy efficiency is a major opportunity and, it could beargued, urgent responsibility.

But the Carbon Trust had a problem: those who specify,build and occupy these premises were convinced that low-carbon adaptations arecostly, risky and a hassle to introduce.

Our response

Our campaign aimed to generate interest in low-carbonbuildings and demystify the technology involved.

We interviewed members of the target audience who hadsaved money by adopting low-carbon building principles, and used the interviewsto produce:

case studies for the Carbon Trust website
printed leave-behinds for Carbon Trust accountmanagers to use.

We also produced a series of films, using animation towalk viewers through the technology used in featured buildings. To promote theseries, we created a trailer composed of snippets of footage from each film andpresented by a respected eco-journalist.

Results

The campaign generated considerable interest in the LowCarbon Buildings Programme, which gave £131 million in grants to installmicrogeneration technology for around 20,000 projects between 2006 and 2010. Asecond phase, focusing on schools, churches and the not-for-profit sector, ledto the award of 2,700 grants.