Elevating ITF’s Instagram presence

Understanding the Challenge

As the world’s oldest international tree-planting charity, the International Tree Foundation (ITF) has a bold mission – inspiring communities to plant, protect, and promote trees for the benefit of people and the planet. With a lean communications team, their social content needed structure, clarity, and stronger audience resonance. Furthermore, the growing emotional toll of climate messaging presented a unique challenge: how to inspire action without overwhelming the audience.

Designing a Thoughtful Response

In a voluntary partnership, famille dedicated 16 hours per month to rethink ITF’s social strategy, starting with Instagram. Using insight-led discovery, benchmarking, and co-creation via Miro, we developed flexible content pillars and visual treatments rooted in ITF’s brand. Our approach prioritized accessibility and “brainprint” impact, balancing urgent messaging with uplifting stories to reduce climate fatigue and anxiety. This was grounded in insights, such as The Lancet’s global youth survey, where 59% of 16–25-year-olds reported extreme worry about climate change, with nearly half stating that it negatively affects their daily lives.

Our approach prioritised accessibility and “brainprint” impact balancing urgent messaging with uplifting stories to reduce climate fatigue and anxiety.

Making Measurable Change

• Instagram interactions up 499.7%, with a 70.7% rise in organic reach
• A single Facebook post using the new approach reached 490,747 people organically, with 10,488 interactions, 3,571 shares, and 785 saves
• ITF’s internal team now plans content more confidently, applying the method across platforms
• Our collaborative approach with ITF was awarded Gold in the Digital Impact Awards 2024 for most effective use of Social Media with a small budget.

We have never seen organic engagement like this ever! We adapted the approach we took with Instagram to our Facebook channel. Thanks to famille for giving us the guidelines to structure our content, and support through our social media planning sessions, as we continue to shape content. International Tree Foundation

You may like to learn more about Instagram grid content planning and the benefits for your brand and team in our article: From seedlings to brand stories: Elevating International Tree Foundation’s Instagram.