UBC Graduate Research

Project blue sky : a case study Carter, Erin; Lundy, Alison; Lu, Zhiyong; Pugh, Steven

Abstract

The objective of Project Blue Sky was to mobilize Olympic and Paralympic athletes to take a leadership role and to use the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games to shine a spotlight on climate change. To achieve this goal, spokespeople were identified, partnerships were formed, social media was activated, blog seeding was planned, and different media outlets were approached. The website attracted environmentally, socially, and health conscious individuals because of its innovative and original concept. A website needs to be flexible and go through many iterations before it’s complete. Unfortunately, many of the changes that were applied to the Project Blue Sky website were not done early enough in order to make a substantial difference towards its 1 billion kilometre goal. This report will discuss the methods that Project Blue Sky used to attract members to the website and will also discuss what the barriers to engagement were. In addition, this report will discuss how the website started, who was involved in the project and what the Project Blue Sky team learned throughout the project. The team at Project Blue Sky hopes this report will serve as a tool for future community engagement projects. According to a report from the David Suzuki Foundation, “(public engagement) is the category where VANOC (has) had the least success”i. As such, this report aims to understand how engagement, or lack there of, contributed to the limited success of this project and will offer recommendations for future projects. The recommendations found throughout this report are summarized in Appendix 1.

Item Media

Item Citations and Data

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada