Monthly Archives: September 2007

“Greenpeace’s survival has been dependent on this capacity to inform but never bore the public.”

Greenpeace Photographic Retrospective

One of the frustrations of being a Greenpeace insider is standing in the slipstream of some amazing stories. Doesn’t sound frustrating, does it? Well it is.

I’m at YAM (yet another meeting) at the de Bron conference center with some old Greenpeace hands. In the last two hours, I’ve heard some outrageous stuff, some of which can’t really be told, and some which just hasn’t. The ones that can’t be told I understand: one campaigner had a string of vignettes about his approach to making people “A Greenpeace Campaigner for an hour” — the harbourmaster he forewarned of a Greenpeace illegal timber blockade and who was willing to ignore his phone for an hour, the corporate insider who actually asked us to make a critical comment in a press release about a policy we both wanted changed, so he could pressure his colleages — the specifics of these kinds of stories can mean people’s jobs (I’ve altered the two examples). But the ones that just don’t get told because we don’t gather them and value them and put them out there break my heart. As a communicator, I want these things to be out there in the world, I want people to know about them.

But Greenpeace is a child of the television era, a student of the pre–digested and regurgitated soundbite to camera. Campaigners who can tell a story that grips everyone’s attention in the galley of a ship or around a beer-soaked table turn into CNN Sock Puppets when we put a microphone in their face. And too many, behind a keyboard, think that Greenpeace’s voice is supposed to sound like the New York Times.

The contrast for me is most striking when I look at how we talk to each other in internal communications, vs. how we talk to our audience. Our internal culture is very informal — we talk to one another the way friends talk to each other. Which these days, pal, is the way you and me talk in this here Blog–o-Sphere.

The way Flickr talks to you when it says “Flickr is having a massage” instead of “Our servers are down for maintenance. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience.”

The way two people involved in a social network like Facebook or MySpace talk. It’s the difference between mediated communications in which someone talks for an organization (which is what you want at a press conference, a meeting with a corporate target, a contract negotiation) and two people who talk to each other as equal members of a social movement. Which is what you want here.

I’ve seen fist-pumping victory messages to colleagues that left all of us with that Woo–Hoo glow of victory turn into the most turgid communications imaginable as “Greenpeace today welcomed the decision of Mr. Burns to shut down the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, noting that this represents the culmination of several decades of advocacy work and the primacy of environmental principles over short term profit.” Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Wake me up when someone reanimates your corpse, please. BURNS FOLDS, NUKE SLAYED

: You’re JUMPING FOR JOY. Say it!

A couple weeks ago we had an internal communiqué that began “Here’s some kick-ass good news from Indonesia” about a Fatwa being declared against a planned nuclear power plant by the Islamic Religious Council of Java. The message arrived at YAM, was read aloud to cheers and back slapping and uproarious approval. Within minutes, I’d posted that sentence to the Greenpeace weblog.

And within hours, I had several people on my ass about inappropriate language or cultural insensitivity. Whoops. I talked the way we talk when we’re trying to inspire one another. I talked the way we talk when we talk to colleagues. I talked the way we talked when we talk to people we know and trust. And we can’t talk to our supporters that way, can we?

It’s a BLOG people. It’s personal. It’s the place where we take off the pancake makeup, put our feet up in the dressing room, have a cuppa tea and TALK TO people instead of talking AT them. And if we think that they’re not in this with us, shoulder to shoulder, I don’t know where we think they are.

As with 99% of these things in my experience, the internal demand for puritanism and formulaic communications is out of touch with what we hear back from supporters. Public concern about my use of language: 0. Number of comments at the blog expressing dismay at my cultural insensitivity: 0. Number of internal messages asking me to wash my mouth out with soap: 4.

Fortunately, our management team at Greenpeace International gets this. We won’t be joining the ranks of the 10% of companies that have fired people for blogs deemed inappropriate anytime soon. But for those of us who blog and take voice issues seriously, it’s going to take lots of work and tomato-ducking to turn the big ship to a new course.

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Whew. I just came back from eight days of meetings (not a misprint) as part of Greenpeace’s three-year planning process. It was four meetings (Oceans, Climate, Forests, and Genetic Engineering), but those of us involved in cross cutting work like communications and actions needed to be present at all.

Here’s what I put in my meeting survival kit:

1. A Large Mug: conference centers in the Netherlands encourage coffee and tea economy by offering tiny thimble-sized cups. I say nuts to that. Give me my industrial-quantities cup, the one made by supporter Grateful Child as gifts for all of us in supporter services and on the web team.

2. Painkillers: I’m a fan of the big pink pill, ibuprofen. Works great against the hangover from late night ad hoc intersessionals at the bar as well as the inevitable acronym-induced brain pressure that arises from listening to real experts talk in their technical shorthand.

3. Running shoes: Time was I was a religious runner, every morning, at these events as a hedge against indoor–itis. I’ve got a bad knee now (see painkillers, above) but this is still my favorite head-clearer.

4. Chris Rose’s How to Win Campaigns. This is the book I use the way Renaissance Artists used black mirrors, gazing deep to restore their color appreciation. Always relevant, always a good reminder of things to keep in mind at the strategic, communications, and tactical level. No environmental or human rights campaigner should be without this.

5. Tiger balm and Chocolate. OK, I fudged the last one into two, but these are my favorite weapons in the arsenal against the late-afternoon dip. The 2pm slot is deadly, I try to avoid it when I present, and when I´m in the audience I need the chocolate zing, and a tiny bit of tiger balm rubbed into the temples and on the forehead between the eyes does some sort of chakra–awakening that keeps me from blowing Zs out into the plenary.

But I guess the most important thing that I need to remind myself to bring to these occasions is the big picture. It’s so damn easy to get lost in the details of any one campaign, the political strategies to win particular treaty language or the tactical work to raise awareness in the most general ways, that I have to make a physical effort to step back and ask the big questions.

Is this the best thing we can do with our limited resources to slow global warming within 40 years? Is this going to reach people’s hearts and minds and get them involved in that struggle? And is this something that only Greenpeace can do in defense of the global commons?

Might as well never unpack those questions, and just give them a permanent spot in the meeting backpack.

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