As a great way to discourage people from printing out documents unnecessarily, the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) launched a downloadable app that would let you save documents as a WWF file. This ‘.wwf’ file extension saves the document as an unprintable PDF. Thus, by sending a WWF file to another person, or someone at another organisation, you can spread the message. Once you’ve saved a document as a WWF, the icon of the document changes to reflect the format and a page is added to the end of your document, explaining the purpose to people who are encountering the campaign for the first time.
Impact:
This imaginative use of the digital medium is a great way to get people talking about your brand and your cause. At the same time, by encouraging people to spread this, you are allowing them to feel like they are doing their bit for the cause – this has already been proven by more than 50 000 downloads of this app. The WWF has really attacked this problem at the root – if you are unable to print something because of the very nature of the file – you will most certainly take notice, whereas other anti-print campaigns may have lost steam in the interim.
Video Case: