The Night We ReNatured
The Brief
Raise £60 million for a word the public doesn’t understand
South Downs National Park Authority had set a £60 million fundraising target over ten years; enough to bring 13,000 hectares back under nature’s care. But ‘renaturing’ wasn’t a word most people knew. Without public understanding, there would be no donations. No government credibility. No lottery backing.
The Solution
Turn a new word into a story people wanted to fund
The Night We ReNatured: a 70-second animated film following a young girl on a nocturnal adventure through a reimagined South Downs. Dreamlike, abstract, but built entirely from the Park’s own flora, fauna and colour palette. Paired with a full digital and social strategy designed to turn awareness into donations and momentum into funding.
Background
The UN wants a third of nature restored. Most people don't know nature needs restoring
The South Downs National Park covers over a thousand square miles of southern England. Only 25 per cent of it was managed for nature. The goal is to reach 33 per cent by 2030 — in line with the UN’s global target for ecosystem restoration.
Getting there means raising £60 million and adding 13,000 hectares of new habitat — three times the size of Portsmouth. Public donations are only part of the picture. Government backing and lottery funding depend on visible momentum and credibility. Neither would arrive without it.
But ‘renaturing’ isn’t in the public vocabulary. It isn’t rewilding, which lets nature take over entirely. It's more deliberate — restoring hedgerows, planting trees, bringing back ponds and grasslands. Getting that distinction across was the campaign’s first job.
Our Approach
Conservation campaigns show what’s lost. We showed what could be
We started by asking who had the most to lose from biodiversity collapse, and who had the most to gain from getting it right. The answer was the same: children. A young girl became the narrator — her voice calling the audience into a landscape that belonged to her and to everyone who’d come after.
The animation departed sharply from convention. No aerial drones over real landscapes. No mournful piano under wildlife footage. Instead: a nocturnal dreamscape, abstract but built entirely from the Park’s own textures, colour palette, plants and species. Mysterious, poignant, magical — and impossible to mistake for anything else.
The film was the focal point, but not the whole job. We built the full campaign architecture around it — digital assets, social teasers, avatars, banners, stills, and the landing page that would convert viewers into donors.
The Night We ReNatured — 70-Second Campaign Film
Key Project Assets
The Night We ReNatured — 70-Second Animation
A dreamlike film following a young girl on a nocturnal journey through a reimagined South Downs, narrated in her own voice and anchored in the Park’s natural textures, species and colour palette.
Integrated Digital & Social Strategy
A full campaign architecture designed to convert awareness into donations — built to hit both engagement and fundraising targets across the Park’s owned, earned and paid channels.
Campaign Asset Suite
Avatars, banners, stills and promotional teasers carrying the film’s visual identity across every platform — a single, instantly recognisable look that carried from cinema screens to social feeds.
ReNature Landing Page
A purpose-built campaign destination translating the film’s emotional pull into clear calls to action — the conversion engine behind the Park’s donation, awareness and partnership goals.
Impact
The campaign turned a word nobody knew into a funding engine. The film travelled further than anyone expected, the press amplified it across borders, and SDNPA secured the credibility that government and lottery funders require before they commit.
Gallery
Project Insights
From a word nobody knew to a decade of funding
Ambition at this scale needs belief, not awareness. Conservation fundraising usually defaults to grief — documentary realism, sombre voices, footage of what’s being lost. It earns sympathy, but it doesn’t earn scale. We built something people could back instead: a dreamlike world narrated by a child, where the future is still possible.
Two million views in a week. A decade of fundraising credibility. Government backing. Lottery funding. The campaign proves that the most powerful way to grow an ambition is to help people picture what it looks like when it succeeds.
The team at Tilt fully understood the creative challenge of communicating nature recovery in a protected landscape. The striking visual identity and moving storytelling will continue to support the campaign over the coming decade.
Luke Walter, Digital and Social Media Officer — South Downs National Park Authority
Postscript
We didn’t just make the film. We bought the land
Working on this campaign, we came across Iford Estate — a three-generation family farm just outside Lewes now dedicating around 800 hectares to nature recovery. Chalk grassland, floodplain, woodland, scrub. Over 1,300 species already recorded on site.
When the time came to offset our own footprint, generic carbon credits on the other side of the world suddenly didn’t feel right. We now buy biodiversity credits from Iford. Local nature, funded by the story we helped tell. That felt like the point.
