Clean your boots to protect our native taonga

The challenge

Kauri trees across New Zealand are being threatened by Kauri dieback, a non-curable disease which spreads from tree to tree in soil. Work has been done by multiple groups including the Keep Kauri Standing Program, Northland Regional Council and DOC.

All fronting the same challenge: How do you help stop kauri die-back, with limited funding? A new approach was needed, to increase awareness of the disease, tell people how it spreads and encouraging everyone to help reduce the devastation being caused. The ultimate goal is to help prevent the spread of Kauri die-back to save our Kauri trees.

The solution

bigfish saw the opportunity to create a community partnership between the Keep Kauri Standing Programme, DOC, Northland Regional Council, and bring in Mitre 10 Whangarei alongside the Northland Rugby Union. With the Kauri tree being a significant taonga for Northland and rugby as popular as ever, the possibility of reaching a new audience through the Northland Rugby Union whose team’s crest being the mighty Kauri tree – adorning their jerseys for 100 years worked well.

Led with a simple message to ‘Clean your Boots’ the Keep Kauri Standing campaign leveraged the popularity of the Northland Mitre 10 Cup team to promote stopping the spread through behavioural change. Encouraging everyone to stop and clean their boots at the cleaning stations around our most popular parks and walking tracks. The first of the videos shows the Northland Mitre 10 Cup squad visit to Tane Mahuta and includes interviews with NRU players and Te Roroa Iwi who are the guardians of the Waipoua Forest. The second video includes Northland Rugby legend Sid Going as well as players Rene Ranger, Tom Robinson and Renata Roberts-Te Nana.

Alongside the video campaign, with the help of the Northland Rugby squad, we handed out over 3000 bootbags and cleaning kits to all junior rugby players across the region. These boot bags were stuffed with free tickets to Northland games and other goodies from our campaign partners.