Collecting stories from around the globe with Earth Hour

When you’re running an operation that spans the globe, it becomes pretty clear that the earth is a big place. It’s not just distance that separates us. Languages and time zones, too, can make everything feel a little farther away.

It’s a reality that WWF’s Earth Hour, which is headquartered in Singapore, faces every year when more than 170 countries around the world come together for climate action and participate in its signature lights out event.

Every year, Earth Hour teams encourage people to switch off non-essential lights for one hour as a symbolic gesture marking their commitment to changing climate change. As homes and offices turn off the lights, they’re joined by some of the world’s most iconic landmarks standing in solidarity with the cause of climate action. It’s a moment that makes for an extraordinary visual impact and hundreds of captivating photos and videos.

And that’s where Dropbox Business has begun playing an ever-bigger part since Earth Hour started using it several years ago. “There’s a whole heap of incredible stories that come in on the night of Earth Hour,” says Earth Hour Global Executive Director Sid Das. “People across the world capture their events—including their landmarks—going dark and their environmental activities. And they’re excited about feeding those files back to us, to share the enthusiasm and energy of the crowd. It’s a remarkably easy process thanks to Dropbox.”

On the night of Earth Hour, their global team covers four shifts over a period of 24 hours. Using shared folders organized by continent- and country-specific subfolders, teams in each region upload photos and videos from local events. From there, the global team posts files to the “Earth Hour Live” website and social media, sharing the sights and sounds of events across the planet. It's a simple and painless workflow, one that wouldn't have been possible without Dropbox Business. As Das explains, “When exploring possible solutions, one thing was clear: we needed the platform to be intuitive, global and universal—like social media. So then we thought, What would actually work for us in all of our tools? That’s when we realized that Dropbox Business was something that could actually work for us across the world.”

With a solution that required little training for remote teams, the rest fell into place. Says Das, “We saw people from Australia to Libya—everybody just intuitively understood how to use Dropbox. When we started to see footage from all over the world, we realized our plan was actually working.” And for Earth Hour, that’s making it all the easier to bring stories from around the world to the whole world.