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Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. We are that idea.

Written by Kieran Battles. 22 September 2009

A short story about what you did.

On September 16th BeThatChange went live. And, on that sunny Wednesday morning from a flat in Bristol we launched the world’s first Twitterstorm campaign - #pm2un – to get Gordon Brown to the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen.

At 9am #pm2un meant nothing. By 9pm the same day, it returned 51,000 Google search results. A few tweets became a few hundred tweets. Then, mid-morning, Guardian ECO, the UK Youth Climate Coalition and Stop Climate Chaos added their voice to the call. A few hundred tweets became a several thousand tweets.

At lunchtime Stephen Fry joined the Twitterstorm, and in doing so brought the issue to the attention of his 760,000 or so followers. Then came Greenpeace, Oxfam, 1010, People & Planet until, 6 hours into the life of our new movement, at 3pm, we received a direct message from Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for the Environment and Climate Change asking what our priorities were.

We told him.

On Ed Miliband’s pledge page, just one day after the launch of our #pm2un ‘the Prime Minister attending Copenhagen to help deliver a deal’ had received 93% of the votes.

In one day the BeThatChange Twitter following went from zero to more than one thousand. And it’s still growing. In just one day you built our movement, made it stronger and increased our ability to end poverty and secure a future for our planet.

Then, late on the evening of Sunday 20th September, just 5 days after our campaign started, the Prime Minister announced he will attend the summit in Copenhagen and urged other leaders to do the same.

Of course, we were not alone in this success. But we were part of it. Our Twitterstorm took the work that had gone before and created a tipping point.

What we did made a difference and may well change the course of history. Of course, it’s just the start. But what a start.