Switzerland Mountain Cleaners
First an April Fool’s joke, later reality.
When a bird drops its droppings over the beautiful Swiss mountains, the alarm goes off: at the Mountain Cleaners, a voluntary emergency organisation that cleans up the mountain.
The Mountain Cleaners introduced themselves in a self-made video and were looking for volunteer Mountain Cleaners. Over 30,000 people signed up for the job — even though the video and the search for volunteer Mountain Cleaners appeared on 1 April.
With the story of the Mountain Cleaners, Switzerland Tourism managed to make a name for itself in every national medium without exception.
The campaign also caused a sensation internationally: in Italy alone, a dozen radio and television stations reported on the initiative on 1 April, reaching 19 million people there alone.
In Germany, France and even Russia, the industrious Mountain Cleaners were also featured in the daily news. In the USA, Time magazine even wrote about it.
The huge response led the people in charge of Engelberg (the place where the Mountain Cleaners were filmed) to offer proper mountain cleaning courses.
Hundreds of people booked them.
This story of the real Mountain Cleaners then made the rounds in the media again.
And in the end, the Mountain Cleaners campaign even became a Globi book, one of Switzerland’s favorite childrens book