Global Cool
BIFA and Global Cool join forces to harness the power of the screen to promote greener living
Monday, December 6th, 2010 | Global Cool | 1 Comment
Global Cool is delighted to be working with the British Independent Film Awards to promote green living. Over the coming year we will be working together to develop an initiative that will deliver essential advice and information to film makers on how they can harness the powerful influence of their films to inspire their audience to take positive steps towards a greener lifestyle.
In 2009, the UK Film Council reported that UK cinema attendance had reached a seven-year high, with 173.5 million box office admissions. We want to leverage the potential of that reach and empower film makers with the knowledge and insight that can make a real difference in helping to create a more environmentally friendly society.
This doesn’t mean developing films that specifically focus on the climate and sustainability agenda, but a more subtle approach that introduces green behaviours seamlessly within the narrative of the picture; for example by showing people riding bikes or simply recycling at relevant points within the film. Reference points such as these help to normalise pro-environmental behaviour in a non-preachy way, making the action more socially acceptable to the viewing public.
US television shows such as 10 Things I Hate About You and Desperate Housewives are great examples of this type of approach. With the women of Wisteria Lane regularly using shopping bags that carry the recycling logo, and the lead character in 10 Things…, Kat Stratford, running her car on vegetable oil. We are keen to see how we can translate this approach to the UK film industry, to create a positive environmental impact that has the potential to go above and beyond solely reducing the carbon footprint of the production itself.
Ralph Fiennes and Global Cool CEO Caroline Fiennes (yes, they are related)
Jointly, Global Cool and BIFA want to furnish film makers with the necessary tools and insight to make these highly impactful decisions, and through the power of the screen, showcase the simple actions that individuals can take to live a greener lifestyle.
Look out for our activity over the coming year and if you are interested in being a part of this, please do get in touch. Together we can make a difference.
Global Cool wants people to travel by train
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 | Global Cool, Our Philosophy | 2 Comments
So much so, that we run two campaigns which promote it – Do It In Public, which is about everyday travel within the UK, and Traincations, which is about holidaying by train.
Through these campaigns, we’ve noticed that the way Global Cool promotes trains is quite different from how the rail industry normally does it. Train companies normally talk about two things: how fast the journey is and how cheap the tickets are – that is, how the journey won’t cost you much time, and won’t cost you much money. It’s not very inspiring – just about how the trip won’t disrupt your life. Nobody markets football matches as ‘only very short, so won’t cost you much time out of your busy life’.
And so, having not been encouraged to think that rail travel is fun, most people don’t. In a survey for Global Cool earlier this year, only 10 per cent of respondents said that they were excited about rail travel -that is, 90 per cent aren’t.
But Global Cool thinks that train journeys themselves are something to love – something to celebrate, rather than just endure.
People want to have fun. Two good illustrations of this are these. First, on Facebook, the main group of the massive French rail company SNCF has a paltry 4000 members, whereas the group wanting SNCF to use Homer Simpson’s voice for its announcements has 65 times that – 250,000 members. And second, we notice that the “auto”biography of the GoCompare meerkat – a probably quite-funny nonsense – is outselling this year’s other big autobiography from Tony Blair.
Train travel can provide that fun. Global Cool’s campaigns have focused on this, for example:
· Time to read: so we handed out a load of free books at railway stations and started a bookclub on Twitter (with the hashtag #BooksInPublic) where people talk about what they’re reading on trains
· Opportunity to meet new people: we taught people how to talk to strangers on trains and buses (which Brits generally don’t know!)
· Time to listen to music: so we got the public (and celebrities) to nominate songs from their favourite travel playlists
· The inspiration which comes from the journeys: many bands told us of songs or books or lyrics which have been inspired by journeys on trains and buses
From Murder on the Orient Express to The Railway Children to JK Rowling’s platform 9 1/2, trains are ripe with mystery and romanticism – strong and positive associations which we can use to get people onto trains. People DO have these positive stories: our website is awash with comments about people’s adventures and fun on train and bus trips – if we just ask people to focus on them.
The positive approach is effective: after just three months of Global Cool’s campaign this year, there was a 50% increase in people being excited about rail travel.
Rail marketing could focus a lot more on how the journey itself – the core product – can contribute to people’s lives, through giving fun and adventure, and less on how the journey is just an inconvenience to be minimised.
- Caroline Fiennes and Will Daunt
Diary of a Traincation: Overland from Marrakesh to London
Friday, November 12th, 2010 | Global Cool | No Comments
A hundred little adventures as Global Cool CEO Caroline Fiennes crossed an entire continent by rail and ferry – on the way dropping in a conference, about international rail travel!
Sunday, 8.55pm, Marrakesh
Made it. Just. Alhamdulillah, as they say here when something marvellous has happened.
I love great long trips: so many quirky experiences, and the unknown, and the unexpected. This rather epic trip starts, despite my being ready in my hotel 2½ hours before the train left, with the customary last-minute public-transport adrenaline rush – courtesy of the combined efforts of a lamentably slow waiter at dinner, the Moroccan companion who walked me after dinner to the station being more interested in discussing philosophy than punctuality, and a bike-crash which blocked off our route.
I hope this isn’t a portent for this whole trip, because it’s long. Overland from Marrakech in mid-Morocco to London, it will take longer than any I’ve ever done before. I leave tonight (Sunday) and arrive in London on Thursday lunchtime. A great adventure! – a route that hardly anybody does, but those who do, rave about, so I’m excited to see what it’s like. Actually I’m being unfair to rail speeds – the trip includes 48 hours in Madrid where I’m speaking at a conference – about international rail travel, so turning up by train seemed the least I could do. Global Cool talks a lot about traincations, so I’m glad to be back on the rails myself.
The trip has so many legs that the logistics are a feat – so I’m happy that wonderful Rail Europe has arranged it all for me. From Marrakech, get the overnight train to Tangiers; get across Tangiers (pretty big, and whose proximity to Europe has trained many tourist hasslers); ferry across the Strait to southern Spain; train to Madrid arriving Monday night; conference for two days; leave Madrid on Wednesday on the overnighter to Paris; quick petit dejeuner a la Parisienne; and Eurostar back to Crown Territory. Four days: four languages. Hmmm: I speak three decently and none of them is Arabic or Spanish. Never mind: smiles and ‘tea please’ are pretty widely understood.
~~~~~
Marrakech station is a sight to behold. It looks like it’s been hewn out of a single block of marble. The contrast with Djemaa el-Fna – Marrakech’s main ‘square’ where we’d had dinner –could hardly be greater. A thousand years of trade and story-telling here has earned Djemaa el-Fna UNESCO status, and every single day it’s crammed with snake-charmers, men serving tea from giant teapots strapped to their backs, a couple of hundred food vendors, the clatter of umpteen banjos / violins/ drums / dancers/ zithers, and bikes and scooters beeping and hooking as they weave their wave through the thousands of people who come to watch it all. Here, in the station, nothing: just silent empty shininess.
And despite a double-height hall the size of Soho Square, only six platforms. But on one of them –– a train with my name on one of its couchettes. Alhamdulillah.
~~~~~
I must have grown up. When I first starting travelling solo on overnight trains in rather unlikely places – nearly twenty years ago in southern India – I was so fresh-faced and dishevelled that people assumed I’d be in the upright-seat compartment. Now “madam” is shown straight to the couchettes. Well, that’s no bad thing either.
I’m loving the adventure of travel by rail. Adventures on trains are exciting: rather better than adventures on aeroplanes, where they’re just terrifying. And – given the scarfs, bags, shows, homeware and carpets served up by Marrakesh’s wonderful souks, I’m also loving that there’s no baggage restriction.
Some of the few delights of Marrakeshi markets which don’t seem to be in my bags
Of course the golden rule of travel is that, unless you fancy a trip to the embassy, hang on to your passport! And travelling solo on a train means it comes with me to the loo every time. But keep a tight grip on it because, yes, that is the outside world you can see down the loo. No wonder railway stations here aren’t so fragrant.
~~~~
So, feeling rather smug about having remembered those traveller essentials – sheet sleeping bag, (matching!) travel towel and earplugs – I lay out my bed.
___________
Monday
To my astonishment the guard woke me up at Tangiers. That is, I’d been asleep, and evidently quite well.
Good man, he produces some tea. And what a view! Pinkish light cracking over the mountains of northern Morocco. Farms; small-holdings; donkeys; empty steppe. If where I stayed in the mountains was Morocco’s answer to Chamonix, this is its North York Moors: big, wide, open valleys, speckled with a few dwellings. And that big big sky. Now turning gradually blue, hiding the astonishing array of stars which you can only see this far south: zillions of them with a big dense streak across the middle – Morocco lets you peer right into the Milky Way. This is the classic type of countryside you hurtle through – or over – but exploring it properly, and meeting its people is invariably fascinating.
It’s official: we’ve arrived in Tangiers
The ferry terminal is, as they are, totally unceremonial, but on the quayside, just after the bloke checks my ticket, it’s all rather significant. For where the concrete stops and the metal of the boat’s ramp starts, there stops Africa. Behind me, one block of land all the way from my cousin’s house on the beach in Cape Town: in front of me, one step – and I’m Out of Africa, onto a Spanish boat.
The Strait of Gibraltar. Almost certainly not called that by the countries either side of it. This natty catarmaran does it in 35minutes: escaping Moroccans who swim – of whom there are apparently lots – presumably take rather longer. A decent wind makes it jolly choppy, so the swim must be awful. But the trip is long enough for me to meet some lovely Americans, and hear their amazing story about discovering they have a family castle in Ireland and their adventures with the locals as they reclaimed it. That’s what I love about this kind of travel: if it were a film, the massive cast would include loads of cameo appearances by amazing people.
We arrive in Algeciras, which, but for the final ‘s’ is pronounced precisely like Al-Jazeera: I profoundly hope nobody expects me to appear on there.
Anyway, back in the EU. Back to the short passport queueJ I’m greeted by a set of hills impressively densely populated with wind-turbines (the windiness noticed by the Spanish evidently!) – apparently on a good day, Spain gets fully half its power from the wind – and a big billboard ad featuring Rafa Nadal. Vamos!
~~
At the Spanish port, another of those lovely encounters you only get on long-distance travel. A lady next to me, about my age, scarf covering her auburn hair suggests that she too has been solo in an Islamic country, and her big rucksack suggests she’s been on the road a while. She has: she’s from Vancouver, where, bizarrely, she works at the university in the same department as a great friend of mine – the friend I was with last time I travelled to Madrid, my destination today, rather appropriately. We’re both looking for the railway station, so walk there together, comparing the Arabic we’ve accumulated. Unexpectedly, I feel rather measly that I’m “only” going overland to London: she’s going from Morocco to Tunisia, which (oddly) involves going across to Spain, up to Barcelona, and then a boat back South. She deserves a medal for that dedication!
~~~~
There’s a while before the train to Madrid, so I camp out in a café: Café Opera to be specific, complete with big picture of Mozart on the wall – and playing lots of Kylie and Kings of Leon. Naturally. I order coffee in what I’m pretty sure is Italian – oh well. Picked up lunch for the train in the supermercado, using my precisely-zero knowledge of Spanish.
Natty street furniture in Algecerias
~~~
This train looks like it was built to blend in on a glacier! I’d bet it’s never seen any at all.
Policeman with truncheon saunters through the train. Followed by man distributing earphones. No Virgin-trains-radio-at-your-seat this! –turns out the Spanish get on-board TV in their trains!
~~~~
So after an hour, and with the glorious discovery that my seat is not only by the window and on the sunny side but also reclines(!), I’ve looked out of the window a lot and surmised two things:
First, the Spanish are really on the case about wind-turbines. There are zillions on the mountains in Southern Spain. And we go right through the mountains. Evidently the trains in Spain are not mainly on the plain.
And second, I see no tennis courts or football pitches anywhere. As the world (men’s) champion in both sports, Spain should be awash with both, no? Possibly this is related all the mountains.
Somebody walks through the carriage bearing food: there must be a restaurant car! – what a fine invention. I investigate, find the restaurant and look at a newspaper (this is beginning to sound like a Suzanne Vega song…) Even my zero-vocabulary Spanish can understand this caption to a front-page picture of Eva Longoria at an event: “Eva Longoria de Victoria Beckham”! And it gets me some tea. So I’ve now successfully scored tea in both the languages of this trip which I don’t speak. All shall be well.
In fact, it’s not true that I have no Spanish. I can say – with honesty but not grammatical precision – that I don’t speak Spanish.
~~~~
Crickey. Madrid station is like Kew Gardens. No joke – there’s a full-on tropical garden here, complete with turtles and 20meter-high trees. Very cool.
However, Madrid is also full of massive boulevards, high buildings, lights, adverts…. One week in Morocco and it’s as though I’m an alien in the West. Plus everybody has beautiful shoes – I still have the red dirt of the Atlas Mountains on mine! Still, at least my hotel is expecting me – and puts me in room 911! Ha ha – rather ominous. Actually it’s somewhat surprising that they still use that number.
Tuesday & Wednesday
So the purpose of all this was to come to this conference about high-speed rail travel. I’ll not talk a lot about that, except a few snippets that I learn. For one, the Russian railways employs a million people – more even than the Russian Army. As the CEO of an eight-person organisation, I’m impressed. For two, high-speed in Spain is reliably punctual that if the trip from Seville to Madrid has just a five minute delay, they give everybody a full refund. Crickey. And third, a clever chap from SNCF is working on a new high-speed line in…guess where?….Morocco. I hope it’s as good as the one I just went on.
There’s a bit of time for seeing things and people in Madrid. Lunchtime on the first day and I make a dash for some ‘sights’, bagging (through a rather random choice of direction) the Royal Palace. And who should be lurking outside but a fine British export.
A British invention, outside the Spanish monarchy’s palace
And for dinner in between I catch up with an old colleague who lives here now whom I’ve not seen for ages. He’s done well – amongst other things, he’s seen a company in which he invested years ago return 132 times his investment.
“Well I hope you were in for a lot”
“About ten grand”
“Cool. Er, wait. 132 times? Times 10k?”
“Yeah. £1.3 million.”
“Nice work! So looks like you’re paying for dinner then…”
~~~~~
Every time I mentioned to any of the Spaniards at the conference that I’m taking the overnight train to Paris, they go on about dinner on the train and how great it is. Apparently cheap, wonderful, full-service, proper cutlery, cooked fresh… Great eulogising: terrible expectation-management. But they also go on about how the track gauge is different in France and Spain. Last time I had a discussion about train gauges was years ago on my brother’s train-set. This is evidently one of the major problems in international rail travel, and for high-speed travel in particular. Some carriages have clever wheels which can operate on two systems, but generally engines don’t –and also some super-long-distance trains can get through three gauges. So “you will experience changing the locomotive at the border”: well actually since it’ll be the middle of the night, I’d rather hope that I don’t experience anything much.
~~~~~
They weren’t lying. Once I’ve navigated the Madrid metro and made it to the mainline station (foreign metro systems always remind me of the Krypton Factor: they’re like a 3D, no-instruction, time-pressured initiative test encoded in an unfamiliar-language. I always feel a lovely sense of achievement when emerging in the right place – like I’ve outwitted them!), found my couchette (berth number 42 –Douglas Adams, you rock), it turns out that I’m right next to the restaurant car! Which has sittings at 8pm and 10pm (how very Spanish). To the point about the food being fresh, I’m pretty sure I saw the chef in the kitchen starting with some raw carrots.
This train – which so full of white ridged plastic that it’s rather like being inside the Michelin Man – is called the TrenHotel (train hotel: genius – I have now worked out the Spanish for not only train (tren) but also station (estación)), and rightly so since they’ve thought of everything. Towels, toothbrushes, power sockets, earplugs, even coathangers – and complicated-looking beds which the staff assemble while we’re all off at dinner. Even women-only cabins. The perky little taps on the sink marked ‘presto’ – how cute! It’s all just like in TS Eliot’s lovely poem Skimbleshanks from Cats:
“Oh it’s very pleasant when you have found your little den
With your name written up on the door.
And the berth is very neat with a newly folded sheet
And there’s not a speck of dust on the floor.
There is every sort of light—you can make it dark or bright;
There’s a button that you turn to make a breeze.
There’s a funny little basin you’re supposed to wash your face in
And a crank to shut the window if you sneeze”
And like a hotel, they want to see your passport: but in a blaze of incomprehensible Spanish, the train manager makes off with it! “Mañana something-or-other”: presumably meaning that it’s because we cross a border in the middle of the night, and he’ll bring it back tomorrow. To allay my obvious alarm, he shows me a whole bag full of other people’s passports. Well, hasta mañana, little passport, I hope.
As I got on, I played ‘fantasy cabin companions’. My top pick is a German-speaker, travelling on their own, since I always love to chat in German, and preferably a Swiss-German or non-native speaker since they talk a bit more slowly. It’s a good game this: in Borneo once, on a two week mountain/jungle trip, that was my top pick and I got precisely that. And lo! When I get back from dinner, in my cabin is a girl travelling solo who turns out to be Austrian and lives in Vienna right near where I used to live. So a nice natter in our mutual weird Viennese German about what’s happening in Vienna (nothing much: that’s precisely its appeal!) This is her first ever overnight train, so has idea what to expect: I am the old hand and show her around – and stress how massively luxurious this train is.
~~~~~
Thursday
7.30am
Knock knock. Who’s there? Train manager with our passports. Phew.
8.31am – after its 13 ½ hour trip, this train arrives on the dot. Pretty impressive.
Evidently I took precisely five minutes from train landing to getting to the concourse
So, bonjour, la belle Paris! Ҫa va? Well, ҫa va very well for me, thank you – I just love Paris and am anyway happy to finally be in a country whose language I speak! We arrive into Gare du Austerlitz – just over the river from where I used to live, and since Monsieur SNCF thinks his friend owns the lovely old house where I used to live but neither of us could remember its precise address, I trot over there to have a look. Would take a Velib (the pay-as-you-go ‘Boris bikes’, which I think Paris invented), but a bit hard with my bags, and anyway, they’re evidently popular this morning.
It’s a public holiday here today. Funny – it’s was a public holiday in Madrid when I was there on Tuesday. If the Roman god Mars was the Bringer of War, perhaps I am the Bringer of Bank Holidays.
The unexplained grotto of Bastille Metro station
To get to the Eurostar terminal, I hop on the Metro at Bastille. It’s obviously being renovated or re-built because the platform’s carved straight out of bare rock – like some troglodyte dwelling in the Loire. Half expect some old guy to appear and tell me about the wine they store down there. Instead there are a few commuters (who work for foreign companies so don’t get the public holiday?) Funny: they’re going a few stops to the office; I’m crossing an entire continent to get to mine.
~~~~
In a final flourish of brilliance, the wonderful Rail Europe has produced for the final leg of this tour… a first class seat! Hoorah. And with it, lounge access – peace and quiet, and lots of free tea J (You can take the girl out of England, etc. etc.)
So courtesy of Rail Europe’s munificence and a random Metro ticket I found at home before setting off, I have managed to get right across France – in at the bottom & out at the top – without spending a single centime here. I’m sure Sarkozy would be just delighted.
~~~~~
“Beep beep beep” say everybody’s phones, indicating that we’re out of the tunnel and on home turf. Hurtling along on HS1 – High Speed 1 (which sounds a bit like AirForceOne but probably isn’t!) – the UK’s first high-speed railway, from the channel tunnel to St Pancras. And having met at the conference the guy responsible for building this line and the new station, I appreciate better just how impressive it is. A great introduction into Britain, with that massive wrought-iron vaulting. A touch of Brunel – appropriately, who built the first tunnel underwater.
Out, into the glory of London’s zone one. With the lovely euphoria of a surprisingly populous adventure – in which all the logistics worked like clockwork. What I could really do with finding now, is a guy serving tea, from a big teapot strapped to his back…
~~~~~
Caroline’s trip was arranged by Rail Europe.
For inspiration for your traincation, go to www.globalcool.org/traincation and to book go to www.eurostar.com or www.raileurope.co.uk
For tips on having conversations with strangers on trains, or buses, look at http://www.globalcool.org/lifestyle/the-art-of-conversation-tips-how-to-talk-on-public-transport
Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat goes global
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 | Global Cool | No Comments
We’re well in to our Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat campaign now, since it launched at Britain’s Next Top Model Live a couple of weeks ago, with loads more activity in the pipeline over the coming months – including our I Love My Jumper competition.
We’ve been getting loads of buzz across the blogosphere and we’re delighted that our message to wrap up warm in winter clothing and turn down your heating at home has made it all the way across the pond to Washington. Check out this great video…
Press coverage for Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 | Global Cool | No Comments
We launched our home energy campaign, Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat, at Britain’s Next Top Model Live on the weekend of October 22-24. The campaign will run throughout the winter and will encourage people to wrap up warm in their favourite winter jumpers at home so that they can turn down their heating and save energy.
At BNTML we hosted The Global Cool Lounge, where fashionistas could customise vintage jumpers with the help of our expert stylists and in the company of radio and TV presenter Gemma Cairney. Gemma also presented several Style Icon workshops for us over the weekend, helping us promote the idea of turning up the style and turning down the heat to our target audience. You can see some of our photos and videos here and all the entries to our I Love My Jumper competition here.
Here’s all the press coverage we’ve had so far,with much more to come…
- Global Cool in Fashion Matrix, The Times Fashion Supplement
- Global Cool in Gemma Cairney’s column, Company magazine
- Global Cool Turns Down the Heat at Britain’s Next Top Model, YSH London
- Style tips from Gemma Cairney, My Celebrity Fashion
- Pimp Your Jumper, That Charity Style
- Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat, Twentyteneightyfour
- Global Cool at Britain’s Next Top Model Live, Frost Magazine
- Britain’s Next Top Model Live, Kindred Sole
- Britain’s Next Top Model Live Style Icon Workshops, Stylespotter
- Green Sleeves, Rokit Vintage Fashion
- Britain’s Next Top Model Live, Fashion Strand
- Eco chic: Global Cool, Kindred Sole
- Global Cool at BNTM Live, Bunny Habbits
- Cool Down & Hot Up, Rokit Vintage
- Global Cool Turn Up The Style, World News
- Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat, Last Style of Defense
- Gemma Cairney’s ‘how to’ style guide, Collective Review
- Global Cool, Turn Up the Style, Turn Down The Heat! A Little Fashion Romance
- Recycling clothes, charity shops & repairs, Green Choices
- Exclusive guide for uber trendy city dwellers, Audrey Milkshakes
- Jumpers Remade, Frugal Cool
- Gemma Cairney talking about customising jumpers, Jo Whiley’s Radio 1 show
- Christmas jumpers, Amelia’s Fashion Land
- Fashion tips: How to customise that Christmas jumper, Shiny Style
- Britain’s Next Top Model Live, Fashion Strand
- Eco chic: Global Cool, Kindred Sole
- Global Cool at BNTM Live, Bunny Habbits
- Cool Down & Hot Up, Rokit Vintage
- Global Cool Turn Up The Style, World News
- Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat, Last Style of Defense
- Gemma Cairney’s ‘how to’ style guide, Collective Review
- Global Cool, Turn Up the Style, Turn Down The Heat! A Little Fashion Romance
- Recycling clothes, charity shops & repairs, Green Choices
- Exclusive guide for uber trendy city dwellers, Audrey Milkshakes
- Jumpers Remade, Frugal Cool
- Gemma Cairney talking about customising jumpers, Jo Whiley’s Radio 1 show
- Christmas jumpers, Amelia’s Fashion Land
- Fashion tips: How to customise that Christmas jumper, Shiny Style
- Pimp your jumper with Global Cool, Vintage Brighton
- Re-fashion your winter jumpers with Grace Woodward, Company Magazine
- Global Cool refashioning workshop, Plush Magazine
- Global Cool refashioning workshop, Leeds Guide
- Global Cool Remade workshops, Itchy Guides
- Grace Woodward interview, Stylist
- Win a hand customised jumper by Grace Woodward, Stylist
- Global Cool is turning up the style in Edinburgh, Godiva Boutique
- X Factor stylist Grace Woodward, Style Queen 101
- Grace Woodward refashions for Global Cool, Polkadot Rach
- Saving money the savvy way, So Feminine
- Purly queens, The List
- Help go green by restyling your woollies, The Scotsman
- Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat, Hebe Media
- Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat, Arash Mazinani
- Global Cool event encourages ‘rebooting’ a jumper to save money and reduce fuel usage, The List
- Global Cool: Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat, Ashleigh Chapman
- Global Cool wear a jumper, Once Not Wanted
- Gemma Cairney interview, Take Five
- Global Cool jumper workshop, Vintage Brighton
- Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat, Brighton Fashion Week
- Global, Global Cool, She’s Called Claire
- Global Cool in Plush magazine
- Global Cool in the Leeds guide
See more videos from The Global Cool Lounge at Britain’s Next Top Model here
Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat launches at Britain’s Next Top Model Live
Thursday, October 14th, 2010 | Global Cool | No Comments
This winter Global Cool is inspiring people to get stylish at home and use less energy, with the launch of its Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat campaign.
Following on from our 18 Degrees of Inspiration campaign last year, we will once again be encouraging people to wear cool knitwear around the home so that they can turn down their heating.
The campaign, which will be fronted by TV fashionista Gemma Cairney, will show people how to refashion their much-loved jumpers into this season’s latest trends as a way of encouraging them to turn their thermostat down. ‘Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat’ will be a nationwide campaign with fashion events taking place in cities across the UK. Globalcool.org will host a series of videos offering step-by-step guides on how you can recreate these looks at home.
Activity will launch at the inaugural Britain’s Next Top Model Live, taking place at London’s ExCel from 22nd – 24th October.
As the official charity partner of the event, Global Cool will host the ‘Global Cool Lounge’ where visitors to the show will have the opportunity to get expert advice from a team of stylists on how to refashion jumpers – customising existing knitwear to create unique, uber-stylish pieces. Gemma Cairney will also be hosting a series of Style Icon Workshops throughout the course of the weekend to give people a few essential hints and tips on what’s hot and what’s not in knitwear this winter.
Gemma says: “Global Cool have given me even more of an incentive to encourage, big, snuggly jumper wearing.. Perfect! I like my jumpers big, often primary coloured and with a motif that’ll make others smile, so I’m more than happy to put my gob behind a campaign that can eventually help this important thing called the Earth smile a bit too.”
Through this campaign Global Cool aims to tackle the 30% of an average Brit’s carbon footprint created by home heating. Typically, a UK household could save approximately £55 per year by turning down the thermostat by just one degree.
Naomi Segal, Campaign Director of Global Cool, says: “We want to make turning down the thermostat rewarding for people this winter by highlighting the personal benefits possible from reducing home energy use. We want people to see how simple it is to reduce their carbon footprint and live a stylish, green lifestyle. Activity like this is crucial to bringing about long term changes in behaviour which help create a lower-carbon society.”
To find out more about Global Cool visit the website here
You can read more about Global Cool’s campaigns here and our approach and objectives here
Press coverage of Global Cool’s Do It In Public campaign
Monday, August 9th, 2010 | Global Cool | 1 Comment
At Global Cool we recently launched our Do It In Public campaign. This year we’re building on 2009′s activity and showing people how taking a journey by bus or train is the perfect opportunity to enjoy some much needed ‘me time’.
We’ve started an online book club and handed out free Hodder & Staughton books at train stations, held a series of free events on the Art of Conversation on a restored Routemaster bus, and teamed up with transport companies to brighten people’s day with some famous station announcers! And we’ve even found time to visit various music festivals to interview bands backstage about how they like to enjoy their ‘me time’.
Below is a collection of the great press coverage Do It In Public has been receiving…
Onboard a bus where commuters chat? Crazy! Metro
Bus-t that taboo in the Mirror, Independent, People, Talk Talk, MSN, Run Riot and Gumtree.
Virgin Media, Mirror.co.uk and Evening Standard all carried the video report of our first Art of Conversation talk.
Our Art of Conversation spokesperson proved popular with radio stations and was interviewed on BBC Radio Fivelive, BBC Cambridgeshire, BBC York, Smooth Radio, Colourful Radio, County Sound Radio, Kingdom FM, Radio Wave, The Bay & Lakeland and U105.
And one of the coolest newsletters out there, Urban Junkies, recommended the Art Of Conversation.
The Guardian wrote about our Book Club, as did blogs This Is Local London, Savidge Reads and Once Upon A Book Case.
Our interviews backstage at Field Day festival were featured on Mixmag and Dontstayin.
Clash magazine’s website gave away VIP tickets to Field Day festival for us.
And lots of listings for our Art of Conversation lectures in Time Out, Free London Events, Meet Up, Free London Listings and Do Blog.
The Do It In Public campaign was also mentioned in The Independent as part of a piece about catching buses.
Do It In Public 2010 campaign
Thursday, July 15th, 2010 | Global Cool | No Comments
Global Cool‘s Do It In Public campaign for 2010 is now in full swing.
This summer we will once again be promoting the use of public transport rather than cars for longer journeys. Here are some of the highlights of the campaign:
- Books In Public – We have created an online book group to promote the joys of reading books on long bus and train journeys. To launch Books In Public we partnered with the publisher Hodder & Stoughton to hand out free copies of seven different books at train stations around the UK over the course of seven weeks. We’ve also offered our readers a 5% discount for recommending books for a long journey, in association with the Book Depository. You can find out more about Books In Public here, follow the hash tag on Twitter and see photos of one of the handouts, at London’s Liverpool Street, here.
- The Art of Conversation – Ever been too scared to strike up conversation with a stranger on a bus or train? We’ve got the perfect solution. We’ll be holding a series of lectures on a Routemaster bus that will travel around London, educating people on how to chat with random strangers.
- Celebrity voiceovers – we’ll be getting some of our celebrity friends to take to the mic at tube stations to add a touch of familiarity to the public service announcements and hopefully put a smile on people’s faces as they make their way around by public transport.
- Festival activity – once again we’ll be travelling to some of the UK’s biggest music festivals to talk to bands and artists about their experiences on public transport.
- Website content – in addition to all this the recently revamped Global Cool website will be producing all sorts of inspiration for using public transport. Read some of our articles here.
This is the second summer we’ve run the Do It In Public campaign. Last year we took a double decker bus loaded with games and activities to music festivals around the UK and interviewed several of the acts. You can view the videos we made on the Global Cool You Tube channel.
Find out more about Global Cool’s campaigns here
What do you think about our campaigns?
Global Cool Impact Assessment report released today
Thursday, July 8th, 2010 | Global Cool | No Comments
Global Cool is immensely proud to publish research that shows our campaigns are having an impact – and how serious we are about measuring and understanding our results.
We have now completed a full cycle of our four campaign areas – the Art of Swishing, where we worked with fashion to promote clothes recycling; promoting alternatives to driving (Do it in Public); using less energy at home (Turn up the Style, Turn down the Heat); and alternatives to flying (we promoted Traincations). Each campaign has succeeded in reaching and influencing our target audience – no mean feat given the innovative way in which Global Cool operates and the breadth of these topics.
Global Cool’s approach to promoting low-carbon behaviours fits what the Institute for Government calls “evidence-based innovation” – in other words, using techniques that have proven effective elsewhere (in our case, from commercial experience of selling to our target audience) and applying them in a new context.
Download Global Cool Campaigning Impact January 2009 – June 2010 here
Tris Lumley, Head of Strategy at New Philanthropy Capital, said: “I’m really impressed that Global Cool is so serious about measuring its results. This is really hard to do, especially for campaigning charities. In NPC’s experience, there is far too little focus across the sector on understanding results. And Global Cool’s results look great.”
Here are some of the findings that we’re excited about:
- Some of our campaigns aim to build awareness of low carbon behaviours such as “swishing” or taking train-based holidays to destinations beyond Paris and Brussels, and they’ve been successful. For example, awareness of swishing rose from 6.7% to 12% among 18-24 year olds.
- Other campaigns are more about influencing attitudes, such as towards taking journeys on trains and buses, or wearing warm clothes in winter, and we’ve succeeded here as well. After our “Wrap up for winter campaign” the proportion of people who said they were inspired to wear warmer clothes at home rose from 12% to 18%.
- We’re effectively finding our target market: 80% of people we talk to are ‘Outer Directed’ vs. less than half that in the general population. After four campaigns 30% of ODs have at least heard of Global Cool, up from 16% in January 2009.
- We’re building our reach through our campaigns and through our web traffic, social networking members, press coverage, etc. Already the cumulative reach of our campaigns is over 238 million.
- We get great feedback from focus groups (“The blog is readable and the photos show that it’s fun and active rather than just preaching, it’s an organisation out there doing something”) and social network sites (“Global Cool features really interesting & entertaining articles that just HAPPEN to promote an eco friendly lifestyle.”). A person our chief executive met at a party right after the launch of our home heating campaign said “Oh you made those videos? I loved them! I thought I’ll try that. So I put on a jumper and turned down my heating. It had never occurred to me to do that before!”
Measuring the results of any kind of campaign is not easy. People’s behaviour is influenced by many external factors beyond our control (volcanos, airline strikes, etc.), so even when we see changes in attitudes and/or behaviour, it can be hard (and sometimes impossible) to pin down what caused them. Global Cool therefore measures interim stages of attitude as well as interaction with our audience – what we call reach and engagement – in addition to action. We also look at many types of data – including surveys of the general public before and after each campaign, surveys of our subscribers, focus groups, and third party research.
Find out more about Global Cool’s objectives, approach, target audience and target actions here
Global Cool’s new website
Monday, July 5th, 2010 | Global Cool | 2 Comments
We launched a redesigned website for the Global Cool campaign couple of weeks ago.
The old website had been in existence for around 18 months and played a crucial role in establishing Global Cool and the work we do, particularly through our campaigns.
But Global Cool is a rapidly evolving organisation. We are constantly reassessing how we can best use the tools at our disposal to reduce carbon emissions.
In recent months we have been trying to get better at continuing to talk with our audience (or our friends as we prefer to call them) about our key messages – public transport, flight-free holidays, home energy use and recycling – once an initial campaign period is over.
To do this, we have turned the Global Cool website into an online magazine, moving away from the more traditional campaigning/charity website set-up. A magazine site not only allows us to carry several strands of content in addition to the main campaign, it also better reflects the needs and interests of our users.
All of Global Cool’s work is built on the notion that ‘Now People’, the segment of society we target, are not interested in climate change, and that the only way to get them to change their behaviour is to market climate-friendly behaviours to them in the same way as the commercial world does. Therefore it makes sense for us to carry our message via a medium that Now People recognise: a fun magazine site that talks about fashion, music, travel, sport, gadgets and lifestyle, rather than a charity website that talks about climate change, global warming and carbon.
The changes we have made to the website also reflect feedback from our audience via our surveys and focus groups. We hope that the new site will inspire more people to be greener by providing a richer experience for people who reach us whether through search engines or via our social media, PR and experiential activity.
You can visit the new Global Cool site here and we welcome any feedback in the comments below.
Innovative Green Lifestyle Content
Global Cool Foundation runs the Global Cool campaign, our innovative online green lifestyle magazine. The site regularly attracts over 30,000 unique users per month - visit GlobalCool.org, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or watch our You Tube videos.
Our Blog: Making Green Mainstream
Don’t Just Take Our Word For It…
"A fantastic organisation working to help people find ways to be greener without sacrificing the things they enjoy." - Boris Johnson, Mayor of London
"Global Cool does a great job" - Ed Miliband MP, Leader of the Labour Party and former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
"I really want to do well, but I honestly don't know how to do well unless somebody tells me.... and that's where Global Cool has a future" - Stephen Fry, British Actor
Read more...
Follow Us