Cleaning Up the World, One Map at a Time

Clean Up the World is connecting local communities to a global purpose - the improvement of the environment. It's been great to see the enthusiasm with which our Clean Up the World groups have embraced the new website. Why not visit activities.cleanuptheworld.org and be inspired to take action in your community.

Ian Kiernan, Chairman and Founder, Clean Up the World.

 

 

 

 

Introduction

Clean Up the World is a global environmental campaign implemented in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme. Each year, it engages an estimated 35 million people from 120 countries around the globe who volunteer to partake in environmental activities to improve their local environment. Clean Up the World provides information and resources to each registered group to assist, carry out, and promote their activity and attract local volunteers and support. Groups conduct activities such as cleaning up a local park or river, planting trees, or conducting educational programmes.

With the new activity website, http://activities.cleanuptheworld.org, Clean Up the World has improved its capacity to profile and promote the activities of its participants to a global audience. The campaign is co-ordinated from Sydney, Australia from where we outreach to communities around the world in English, French, and Spanish.

To learn more about Clean Up the World, visit www.cleanuptheworld.org.

 

Our Goals

Clean Up the World is about inspiring and connecting local communities to a global purpose - the improvement of the environment. The Google Maps API enables us to visually profile the many and varied local activities that combine to create the global campaign. This technology really helps us to showcase the global outreach of Clean Up the World and the huge involvement of communities around the globe.

Google Maps allow participating groups to pinpoint, plan and profile their local activity including creating their own My Map, uploading photos using Picasa, and uploading videos using YouTube.

Our Google Maps Implementation

Google Maps API was the core technology used across the site. This enabled the creation of the global map and its filters on http://activities.cleanuptheworld.org, as well as the local maps on every group's page that pinpoints its location.

Google My Maps are used by groups to create local maps of their activity and can incorporate meeting points, areas covered, photos and videos.

Clean Up the World's founding organization, Clean Up Australia, recently used the My Map Editor for Android to upload photos to a Google My Map on the annual Clean Up Australia Day. Using a G1 phone, Ian Kiernan snapped photos with the phone's camera, and added them to the My Map on-the-fly, as he visited several cleanup locations in and around Sydney. The phone's GPS automatically placed the map points in the correct location.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To enable our campaign and participating groups to better promote the activities happening across the globe, we also created a widget that individuals and groups could embed on their websites.

Exposure, Recognition, and Impact

Clean Up the World groups have embraced the new website. They can now:

• See themselves as an active part of the global campaign.
• Profile their activities to the world.
• Share their projects within their own community of volunteers and supporters.

In addition to the benefits experienced by our participating groups, there are other benefits for the Clean Up the World organization:

• After the site went live, we saw a 42% spike in the number of groups joining the campaign.
• Visits to our website have increased.
• Our campaign is increasing its virtual outreach.
• We have improved the operational efficiency of the campaign.

Advice & Lessons Learned

As Clean Up the World outsources its web development, we required the services of a web agency to design the website and build the Google Maps API.

Key elements of our successful implementation were to:

• Ensure the web agency had a clear understanding of our campaign and the benefits which Google Maps could bring to it and its participants at both global and local levels.
• Plan for future expansion to additional languages, in addition to English, French and Spanish.
• Provide time and resources from our team for project scope and management, as well as application development and testing, to ensure delivery on time and within budget.
• Enable website promotion by participants and supporters through the campaign map widget.

Contact

Tricia Wilden
Campaign Manager
Clean Up the World
email: info@cleanuptheworld.org
web: www.cleanuptheworld.org