Monthly Archives: March 2008

by Brian Fitzgerald | March 27, 2008

Empowering (Digital) Heroism

There are a few big forces having to do with online work moving around within the castle walls at Greenpeace at the moment. The Greenpeace Planet Content Management System, which I’ve been part of shaping through two iterations and now serves all but a few of our offices worldwide, is due for a replacement. We’re moving toward a globally agreed single fundraising database/CRM system. And we concluded last year a major assessment of our identity which gave us some lighthouses for our organisational communications and development strategies.

One of the strongest trends over the past few years that our identity work crystallised was the concept of Greenpeace as “Empowering hero” — being the hero that inspires others to act, rather than the hero everyone sits back passively and watches save the day on their own. This has been a central development thread in our public engagement work on the web and one I’m convinced we can take farther.

Yesterday, in thinking about the process we’re about to embark on in choosing a content management system, ensuring it talks to our fundraiser database, re-imagining how our websites and blogs interact and behave and look and feel, and doing all the cat herding and shuttle diplomacy that these efforts entail in a global, distributed-decision-making institution like Greenpeace, I decided to think about first principles, and came up with the following rough cut of ten principles that I think need to guide our thinking.

Digital Direction and Empowering Heroism
Ten implications of Greenpeace’s Identity on our relationship to our supporters and the digital properties they interact with.

1. Our digital properties should be designed to inform, inspire, and activate – though not in that order. Greenpeace leads with action.

2. A supporter is anyone who supports Greenpeace: with money, time, words, or actions. The first measure of success of our digital properties is the degree to which they help us win campaigns. Without supporters, we win nothing. The primary ongoing mission of our digital properties is to recruit and activate supporters.

3. When an individual chooses to support a global organisation like Greenpeace, they support the entire organisation – not just a national sector or a single campaign. Our digital properties need to make clear they contribute to more than one sector, they can participate in more than one way. By supporting any part of the organisation’s work, they support the entire organisation.

4. A supporter is not an object – it is a relationship. The second measure of the success of our digital properties is the degree to which they provide supporters with easy ways to find the right relationship with the organisation: every transaction should offer the option of a national or local context, an option to receive information in the supporter’s own language, an option to receive precisely the right level and frequency of information. Every transaction should provide options to move to a higher level of involvement — from casual reader to information subscriber, from information subscriber to online activist, from online activist to monetary donor, from monetary donor to time donor, from time donor to evangelist – or any of a dozen other paths to more involvement that we might provide.

5. The relationship to our supporters is not owned by Greenpeace, or any part of Greenpeace. The supporter owns it. Our digital properties should allow the supporter to easily determine
· the information they want Greenpeace to give them
· the information they want Greenpeace to have
· the information they want other supporters to see.

6. Every supporter should be recognised as a supporter in any exchange with the organisation – via web, phone, email to supporter services – no matter what office they are signed up with. All our digital properties need to be able to exchange information with a single universal supporter identification system.

7. If our supporters choose to offer up information about their identity, our digital properties should welcome them by name, know what they like and dislike, remember what they have done, and always provide them with options to do more.

8. Everything we publish should be created in a way that maximizes its chances of being republished. If a supporter has a blog, our digital properties should know that, and offer immediate opportunities to replicate content. If a supporter passes information along to friends or shares information from their address book, our digital properties should offer the option to store that list of contact information for the supporter to use again.

9. Our digital properties should encourage community and supporter network interactions – not simple us-to-them or them-to-us pathed interactions. Our digital properties should encourage user-generated content alongside our institutionally-generated content.

10. We encourage action to save the planet – not only the actions that we design and endorse, but in a wider sense of encouraging people to take actions in their daily lives, to take personal responsibility for protecting our planet for future generations. Our digital properties should not simply be about inspiring people to take action with Greenpeace – they should provide paths and tools and stories which inspire action, full stop.

Selah. Work in progress. Comments welcome.

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Filed under Activism, Webdesign

by Brian Fitzgerald | March 24, 2008

5 years too many

5 years too many,
originally uploaded by spring_peeper.

Stumbled upon this on Flickr.

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Filed under Uncategorized

by Brian Fitzgerald | March 17, 2008

Engaged Buddhism

I was raised Catholic, until the day, at 14, I told my dad I wouldn’t be going to church any more because I felt like a hypocrite. His response was interesting: “You’re too young to know what a hypocrite is,” which to this day I don’t know if he meant literally or with a wider meaning.

I cherry-picked what I liked about Catholicism, from the Sermon on the Mount to the stained-glass-colored mysteries of the high mass in Latin to the Bible as a layered literary work by a wide set of authors — some of whom were genuine poets, others carny barkers.

Today, I’m grateful for some of the values that I got out of the church, but believe it’s truly bizarre and cruel to raise a child with the mythologies of heaven and hell. It was especially warped to deliver that mythology by the latter’s earthly minions: nuns brandishing rulers with which to slap your wrists. I remember struggling so hard with the concept of purgatory, and all those unbaptized children of other religions failing to get through the cloud-shrouded gates, no matter how true to the code of Christianity they lived, simply because they had failed to get the memo about the application process. I mean really.

Continue reading →

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Filed under Activism, Personal

by Brian Fitzgerald | March 14, 2008

5-star stubborn and slightly feral

That was an overheard assessment of one of my colleagues at the local Greenpeace watering hole last night, and I thought it was just a first-class piece of verbal dexterity. Not to mention true. It would make a fine description of the organization as a whole.

And while we’re speaking of words, I’ve managed to land myself in the middle of two books that lend themselves to non-serial reading, a bad habit in which I luxuriate sometimes. One is Ogilvey on Advertising, which Mister Lloyd recommended, and which seems to be an endless font of fine writing, great stories, and surprising insights. But the master adman violated one of his own rules in one chapter, misdirecting his customer away from his product and toward the competition, when he sketched a biography of Leo Burnett. I loved this piece of advice, and would give it to anyone working on communicating a Greenpeace campaign:

“Steep yourself in your subject, work like hell, and love, honor and obey your hunches.”

The other book I’m snippet sniping is Innocent when you Dream, a collection of interviews with Tom Waits.

At one point he explains a line from “Real Gone” as having been bagged from something Bob Dylan said in an interview: “I want to believe in the mercy of the world again.” Roll that one around on your tongue a bit.

Missing SXSW

“So Meta”… Creative Commons image by Yatta.

If I could have been anywhere in the world this week, it would have been in Austin, Texas, for SXSW 2008. I made a really hard decision to cut this trip from my carbon budget — I couldn’t link it to other plans to be in the US, unlike last year we didn’t have a website up for an award or a tech-specific campaign agenda to push out to that audience, and I couldn’t make the likely benefit curve run up the y-axis past the known cost.

Tough part is, I don’t quite know how to measure the benefits of attending an event like Southby. This week, documentary filmmaker Thomas Wallner is here in Amsterdam pursuing plans to make a film about Greenpeace’s first venture into Africa. Thomas was a contact I made following a SXSW panel discussion of Alternate Reality Games when he asked “Are you the Greenpeace guy who asked that question?”

I had asked about games that mattered, games that brought a real activist agenda to entertainment-sized audiences. One of the games the panel referenced as then under development, World Without Oil, won the SXSW web award this year. Oh, and look at that — it won in the ACTIVISM category, which didn’t exist in 2007. (Our Green my Apple site was nominated in the “Not for Profit” category and got smoked by an anti-teen-smoking site.)

Now, there was a possible benefit of attending last year: I wrote to the awards panel suggesting they should add an activism category!

Well, my bitter heart could go on and on and on about the good that I’d like to think measurably came of all the carbon I spent to get to Texas from Amsterdam, but the real God’s honest truth here is that even had I not been on planetary business and there for the cause, it just did me good to be surrounded by hyper-intelligent, hyper-creative individuals and feel the buzz of optimism about the future. I learned a lot. I made some great contacts. I like to think I made some people think about Greenpeace differently. But how do you measure what those things are worth — in dollars or carbon, for that matter?

In a world in which we now have to balance the harm we do by travelling by air with the benefits arising, it sure would be great to have some agreed yardstick for “benefit.” Dick Cheney wouldn’t think twice about his airtravel being justified, because he reckons he’s saving the world from unamerican evils.

But in the perfect little world I’m constructing in my head, Cheney would be grounded and the skies would be occupied by Eco freaks and Green engineers going anywhere they damn pleased — in fabulous carbon-neutral airships — in the name of fixing the mess that Exxon and the House of Bush (also grounded) made of the planet. And in that world right now, I’m at the closing party at SXSW with a red bull and vodka, talking to somebody from Google about how to craft carbon-consuming search algorithms and hearing the pitch for the Greenpeace Illuminati Alternate Reality TV show and online game.

Maybe next year…

Fish Jingles

I’m working on a project for our Stolen Fish campaign to try and put our demands into an advertising jingle. We’re creating a redlist of fish that consumers shouldn’t buy and retailers shouldn’t sell, and way up near the top are yellowfin and bigeye tuna.

Over the weekend, my first attempt morphed out of a bathtub song that I’ve been singing to my kids for ages. I don’t quite know where the tune comes from — I’m fairly certain I didn’t pull it out of the blue, — it has a Gilbert and Sullivan feel to it. The lyrics, I realised as I started to work with it for the jingle, are a limerick format:

We never stand up in the bath
If we do it incurs daddy’s wrath
We rub a dub dub
And we rinse and we scrub
But we never stand up in the bath.…

You can hear it croaked here. I had two versions of the fish lyric:

We never sell redlisted fish
Only pirates would serve up a dish
Made of tuna that’s thin
Like bigeye, yellowfin
No we never sell redlisted fish.

But “thin” doesn’t quite carry the message that these species are on the brink of collapse. So mark two was this:

We never sell redlisted fish
only pirates would serve up a dish
Made of yellowfin tuna,
Or bigeye cause sooner
Not later they’ll cease to exist.

Work in progress here. I layered some echo effects and transposed versions to try and suggest the choral effect I’m looking for.

I don’t think this is it. Unless you see the lyric, the “sooner not later” inversion is hard to hear, and as jingles go this may be too closed. The tune is a real hook for me anyway, I’ve been carrying it around since my nine year old was an infant.

Anyway, that’s one thing that’s on my drawing board at the minute. Anyone who has any fish limerick brainstorms, happy to hear them!!!

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Filed under Environmental Issues