Thursday 14 October marked the debut of the Sustainability Award at the 2021 Årets Rambuk and Geelmuyden Kiese Copenhagen took the honour for its campaign called ‘From Sustainable Development Goals to Our Goals‘. Developed in collaboration with Statistics Denmark, Deloitte and the 2030 panel, this campaign provides a Danish frame of reference for the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals and increased awareness of the issues.

The campaign focused on raising awareness of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and communicating them in a way that feels relevant to the individual. The Sustainable Development Goals can come across as abstract, distant and irrelevant, explains Hanne Schmidt – Creative Director at GK Copenhagen – so we designed the campaign to put them at the forefront of a Danish context and show how, even in a country like Denmark where we consider ourselves leaders in terms of sustainability, we still have a long way to go.

“At Geelmuyden Kiese, we describe ourselves as a societal communications agency. We want to contribute to an open society and generate more knowledge, so helping to make a real difference in this way has been a dream project for us,” says Hanne Schmidt. It has also been a major project that involved almost our entire office, so there are a lot of us to share in the pride of having our efforts rewarded with the Sustainability Award.

In addition to a comprehensive newspaper and outdoor campaign, private individuals, researchers, politicians, companies and organisations were invited to get involved and debate the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. And more than 6,000 concrete comments and suggestions about how to reach the Sustainable Development Goals were delivered at workshops around the country and through social media. The entire initiative culminated in a report that became an important tool for the Minister of Finance who, in continuation of the campaign, decided that all ministries need to prepare an action plan to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in Denmark.

This task was issued by Statistics Denmark and the 2030 panel and was completed in collaboration with Deloitte, Sweco, Danish Energy Management, Kraka, RUC and AAU.

Årets Rambuk is a Danish award that recognises communication agencies, advertising agencies, media agencies and advertisers who set a high standard for their methods of using media in their marketing strategies. The ‘Sustainability Award’ was awarded for the first time ever in 2021.