Network Rail. Tidying up digital clutter to save time, energy and carbon
Role: Art Director. Agency: Storycatchers
Context
SharePoint at Network Rail had become overloaded with thousands of outdated files, orphaned sites and forgotten folders that slowed people down every day. Searching for information was frustrating, productivity suffered and the environmental impact of storing vast amounts of unnecessary data had become significant.
The task was to create an internal behaviour-change campaign that helped colleagues take responsibility for digital clutter, understand the true cost of data, and adopt healthier habits that would support a more efficient and sustainable way of working.
Starting with a simple truth
Digital data feels weightless. It lives “in the cloud”, so it’s easy to forget (or not even realise) it takes up space, energy and carbon in the real world. Our team wanted to make that impact tangible – something people could see rather than only be told about.
We developed a visual metaphor that turned an abstract issue into something immediate: a clear blue sky, disrupted by a thick, pixelated “data cloud”, representing the carbon created by unnecessary files.
As colleagues helped tidy SharePoint, the cloud would visually shrink, revealing more of the sky. A simple, intuitive way to show collective impact.
A clear, memorable rallying cry
We centred the campaign around one direct line: Clean up our cloud. Short, friendly and instructive, it framed the behaviour we needed and connected the digital and environmental goals. Underneath that sat a broader proposition – let’s save our vital energy – acknowledging both organisational efficiency and environmental responsibility.
Above – assets from the Awareness phaseBehavioural science at the core
Using the EAST framework (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely) the campaign was structured as a three-stage behaviour-change journey:
Awareness (why SharePoint clutter matters for performance, carbon and people’s time)
Action (practical weekly clean-up tasks and simple guides)
Sustain (celebrating progress and embedding digital minimalism)
In a live rollout, these phases would have been shaped by real colleague interviews during discovery, just as we did on Network Rail’s Safe Service programme.
Above – assets from the Action phaseHow the campaign worked
Across posters, screensavers, Viva Engage posts, MyConnect articles and briefing packs, the shrinking cloud became a unifying visual language. Each dot in the cloud represented a piece of data; each reduction visibly showed the difference teams were making.
Social proof, champions, weekly checklists and at-a-glance digital screens helped reinforce the behaviour shift. Progress would be measured through SharePoint analytics, giving colleagues real-time feedback: storage saved, clutter reduced and carbon avoided.
Above – assets from the Sustain phaseBringing the issue to life
The campaign reframed digital housekeeping from a technical chore into a meaningful collective action. By grounding the message in something everyday and relatable – a sky slowly clearing – colleagues could see that decluttering wasn’t about rules or admin, but about supporting a greener, smoother and more responsive railway.
Why this mattered
A cleaner SharePoint means:
faster decision-making
less frustration for colleagues
reduced energy use and carbon emissions
more time for work that actually matters
And underneath it all is a shift in culture – towards owning the impact of our digital choices, together.