The root of all good: How Dennis Publishing and The Drum planted a forest in a day
10,000 saplings, 215 people and just a few hours of daylight. This is how Dennis Publishing and The Drum planted a forest on Do It Day.
On a very foggy morning 215 volunteers from Dennis Publishing left the urban sprawl of London and headed off to rural Warwickshire, home of the Heart of England Forest (HoEF) to take on the ambitious challenge of planting 10,000 trees on The Drum’s Do It Day.
Since its inception by Dennis Publishing founder Felix Dennis, HoEF has been on a mission: to plant a 30,000-acre native broadleaf woodland in the heart of England that’s open to everyone to enjoy for generations to come. The charity is also on a mission to raise awareness of its goals and so at The Drum’s Plan It Day in September it tasked a room of marketers with coming up with an idea to help spread its message. That idea was #TreesforTrees, a simple campaign that encouraged children up and down the country to draw a picture or take a photo of a tree and post it on social media alongside the hashtag. For each image received, a tree would be planted in the HoEF.
“We knew what we wanted to do with the trees but it was how do we get the message out, so that’s what Do It Day was about for me: how to get more people to know what we are doing here, get the company behind it and also get the general public behind it,” says Dennis Publishing chief executive James Tye, fresh from planting an impressive 150 trees.
“The response to the campaign [which also included an ad in Cineworld cinemas across the UK] has been really good. The one thing Plan It Day brought up was that we should be trying to target children because they are going to be around to see this forest grow and develop so the marketers really concentrated on getting the message to children.”
From the initial idea presented by the winning team – which comprised Sadie Dedman, Bmore; Chris Gilfoy, Unique Digital; Victoria Wainwright, Good Agency; and Amy Knight, Eskimo Soup – Dennis Publishing made a small tweak to capitalise on the current trend of adults colouring in to relieve stress.
“The idea was originally just about kids drawing pictures and we broadened it out a bit, so while most of the pictures were from kids, there is also this trend ‘Colour Therapy’ where adults are colouring in,” explains Paul Lomax, chief digital officer and digital product development at Dennis.
“In fact, the adults seem to be enjoying drawing the pictures as much as the kids. We have a mixture of both. We also have photographs and some people have also let us know what a tree means to them. We’ve had one that was a decision logic tree and a few rude ones as well.”
Over the course of the day in wellington boots and knee-high mud, a band of volunteers, including broadcaster and chairman of the charity Jon Snow, carefully planted 10 hectares of trees. It may seem like a small drop in the ocean of HoEF’s ultimate goal, but it’s one that Tye believes can be built upon via a similar campaign in the future.
“I’d love to run another campaign. Each year you do it you should build more momentum and I’m really hoping it’s an annual event. The one thing that I really liked was on Plan It Day there were two or three ideas that I thought were ace that didn’t make it through to the final that we can also use. Maybe next time we’d try to plant 20,000 trees.”
While the saplings may have found new roots and the coaches, and volunteers have been deposited back in London, the challenge isn’t over yet. “We have to nurture those 10,000 trees we’ve planted today and help them grow,” adds Lomax.
“At the moment it is a field full of saplings and in 50 years we’ll see them grow. We haven’t really planned out exactly how we’ll take this forward but we do plan to get the team to talk about follow ups. We also need to choose the winner – so one winner will get to name the forest and we’ll do some activity about that.”
So can marketing change the world? With some good ideas, the power of social media and a little bit of man power, it has certainly changed the future of a corner of the Warwickshire countryside for generations yet to come.
This feature was first published in The Drum's special Do It Day issue on 13 November.