Norad: Making the Global Goals Personal

Even though most of Norwegians are aware that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) exist, many lack any knowledge on each of the goals and how to achieve them. Only half of all Norwegians could name any of the SDGs at the beginning of 2020.

Since 2016, Norad, The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, in partnership with H+K, has aimed to increase the Norwegians’ awareness of the SDGs. In 2020 they challenged us to go one step further: to create a campaign that would increase Norwegians’ education on the goals.

We created a politically neutral personality test, based on the SDGs, that would show which of the Global goals is most important to the participant. To kickstart our outreach, we engaged Norway’s largest collaborative SDG communication effort between NGOs, businesses and the public sector.

Over 110,000 Norwegians completed the test and received their personal sustainability goal – more than 2% of the entire Norwegian population. 70% of those who saw the campaign can now name one or more of the SDGs and the dedicated site is now used by teachers across the entire country to educate young people about the 17 SDGs.