Wipro Earth Hour Challenge

The brief

For Wipro EcoEnergy’s Earth Hour 2015, we turned a simple employee challenge into something everyone could see building in real time.

Wipro would switch off non-essential electricity across its locations worldwide for Earth Hour, 8:30 to 9:30pm on Saturday, 28 March 2015. The question was how to make employees part of it, rather than an audience to it.

The idea: every employee action would add to a shared, visible outcome.

The numbers

From Wipro EcoEnergy’s own thank-you communication after the event:

Quiz participants: 2,683
Minutes given back to the planet: 1,858
kWh saved: 5,323.30
Cities outside India took part: 6
Social reach across LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook: 1,73,821
Twitter engagement, against an industry average of about 1%: 1.96%

Source: Wipro EcoEnergy's Earth Hour Challenge thank-you mailer

A live challenge

In the week leading up to Earth Hour, employees took the challenge every day: a question on energy and sustainability, with yesterday’s answer revealed the next morning.

Every correct answer added one minute to the time Wipro’s lights would stay off. Instead of individual scores, those contributions appeared as a growing cloud of +1s flowing into a collective counter, so everyone could watch the total rise as colleagues across Wipro took part.

01Employee
02Answer
03+1 minute
04Collective total
05Lights off

Real-world impact

The counter wasn’t just a visualisation. It set how long Wipro’s offices would observe the shutdown beyond the hour itself.

Correct answers added 1,858 minutes of darkness across Wipro’s locations.

Offices in India and in Shanghai, Johannesburg, Reading, Mississauga, Chicago and Edmonton took part.

Before and after photos of Wipro offices, corridors and signage with lights on and then switched off for Earth Hour — Lights off at Wipro locations, and the total saved

Mailer banner: the total savings achieved in kWh as a result of observing Earth Hour and the additional minutes contributed is 5323.30 — Lights off at Wipro locations, and the total saved

From the CEO's desk

The results went to the top. Wipro’s CEO featured the challenge in his “Let’s Talk” column, “When the lights go out: towards a brighter future”, describing how employees extended the shutdown:

“In addition to this hour, we decided to add a minute every time someone correctly answered a question about Energy Saving and the Environment on an online portal.”

The official thank-you mailer that followed was titled “The Earth Hour Challenge, and how Wipro successfully stood up to it!”

The thank-you mailer: The Earth Hour Challenge, and how Wipro successfully stood up to it, with 2683 quiz participants and the cities outside India — The official mailer, and coverage in Deccan Herald

Deccan Herald clippings: An hour of voluntary darkness so that there aren't dark days; Wipro to Turn Off Lights; Colourful Earth Hour campaign to highlight climate change — The official mailer, and coverage in Deccan Herald

The idea

The most interesting part of the project wasn’t the quiz. It was making collective participation visible.

Instead of telling employees their actions mattered, the platform showed them exactly how those actions accumulated into something much larger, and then turned that total into real minutes of lights off.

At a glance