World Cleanup Day / Global volunteer movement / 2018-2021

A global cleanup runs on invitations, not announcements.

I built World Cleanup Day's 2018 website, live-day map and invitation generator, and maintained the site through 2021.

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countries

180+

Each country organised participation locally. The central product supported one shared day without becoming a global register.

invite seasons

2018→2021

The same generator carried a new date and new artwork every year.

In brief

Evidence JSON ↗

Built: 2018 campaign site, live map and invitation generator; maintenance through 2021.
Credit: Mobile app by partners; graphic design by Silvar Laasik. Registration stayed with each country.
Context: 17.8 million participants in 157 countries describes the movement, not website traffic.

The work

Local teams, one global day.

Each country handled its own registration. The central website explained the event and helped volunteers invite others.

The invitation

Make it personal. Share it.

01Find the event
One shared date, local organisation.
02Make an invitation
Photo, message and campaign artwork.
03Send it
Regional messaging apps, download or copy link.

Invitation generator

A photo and one sentence.

Volunteers made personal invitations using the campaign artwork.

Phones

Keep uploads manageable.

I capped image sizes, accepted common formats and exported one shareable image.

Distribution

Use local messaging apps.

Sharing options varied by region; download and copy-link worked as fallbacks.

Infrastructure

Prepare for one busy day.

The WordPress site and interactive tools ran separately, with staging and rollback.

15 September 2018

For one day the homepage stopped being a page.

The invite generator did its work in the weeks before the cleanup. On the day itself the site switched into live mode: a UTC clock, whichever country's broadcast was on air, a wall of posts arriving from the movement's own channels, and a map of the wave crossing the planet. Volunteers who had already finished their own cleanup could watch the rest of the world take its turn.

The homepage across the day, captured hour by hour: live video from the country currently cleaning, a social wall pulling posts from Facebook, Twitter, VK, and Tumblr, and the day's press releases underneath. Nobody re-published the page — it re-published itself as the wave moved.

The World Cleanup Day map on the day of the cleanup, with countries coloured to show which are about to clean, currently cleaning, and finished. — The green wave: every country coloured by where it stood in its own 10am-to-3pm window. Pink is next, yellow is cleaning now, green is finished. The state came from the schedule and the timezone, so the map never waited on somebody in Tallinn to update it.

Volunteers working on laptops behind a window in Tallinn during World Cleanup Day 2018, with World Cleanup Day stickers on the glass and wall. — The other half of the live site: volunteers in Tallinn on their own laptops, running twenty-four hours of coverage. That crew size is the real constraint behind every decision above — anything that needed constant manual attention would not have survived the day.

After the day

Annual updates, 2018–2021.

Central swaps for the date, artwork, and campaign copy
The same generator reused from 2018 to 2021
The interactive generator isolated from the editorial website

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