Category Archives: Webdesign

Planet 3

Planet III — launched May 2010

It sounds like Sci Fi. But it’s the latest incarnation of the “Greenpeace Planet” website and Content Management System, which we launched today. It involved more than a year of effort, lots of sweat and blood and not a few tears,  by a great many people led by Andrew Davies.   The  system selection process alone evaluated 42 long-list and 12 short-list candidate systems with a global User Reference Group, that amazingly came to a unanimous decision about the technology.  The new site has been designed from the bottom up to integrate social networking and draw big focus on our online campaign efforts.  It’s also, thanks to the Design Eye of Elaine Hill, a drop-dead gorgeous piece of eye candy.

It moves us ever closer to a dream that a bunch of Webbies had back at the turn of the century (ayep, that long ago) when, over beers, we considered what it would be like if instead of having dozens of different Greenpeace national websites and designs and systems around the world, we could work together to come up with a single common but flexible design, run by a common content management system that would allow us to share content and assets around the world, clone stories within language groups, and aggregate the global people power of our online actions across the globe.

At the time we had those discussion, our Greenpeace International page was composed by hand,  and its big cutting

Greenpeace website 2002

edge feature was a background image that changed randomly when you hit the home page.  Sometimes you’d get moss, sometimes beach, sometimes tree.  It was way cool in its day, in the same way the HTML command was cool in its day.

Most of the content we were posting then was press releases, slapped into HTML and FTPed over to our web server, which was in the attic of our office, by a two-man web team, Martin Baker and Gillo Cutupri. Martin did the words. Gillo did the pictures. By 2002  we had a sign-up form, where you could add your email to a mailing list, which we’d set up at the encouragement of Kevin Jardine, who prophesied that email lists were going to be important, and one of the website’s main purposes should be to get people networking with us through email so we could involve them in “online campaigns.”  This was crazy talk.

April 2003

We launched a site in 1999 that was built on Zope.  It’s big design feature was a spinning globe, and it had menus with “rounded corners.” These were achieved with tiny rounded corner gif images carefully placed with a relatively new technology called CSS.   But it also boasted an online forum, which would grow into a community of activists that did some amazing, pioneering online campaign work over the years.  One of the veterans of that community, Lisa Vickers,  found her way from forum member to volunteer to a Greenpeace ship and works today at the Greenpeace International headquarters as a digital campaigner.  I knew her for years only as “Lizardfish” from the forum.

Planet 1, our first real global content management system, was built in OpenACSand ran on the most robust technology of its day: an AOL server. Yes, AOL, as in America OnLine, the first Server Farmers.  We needed to build our own content management system because none existed in those days that would work in every character set, every language, every layout we needed to serve an organisation that had offices in Russia, Japan, Thailand, Israel and the Arabic world and was moving into China.  Bruno Mattarollo, an Argentine techie and activist, came on board as technical lead.  At some point we realised we needed project manager, and recruited Danielle Hickey, who had run Greenpeace Australia’s web presence, to leave Sydney and join the mad crew in Amsterdam. (She would eventually head back to Sydney with Bruno in tow. I tried to get them to name their first child Planet One. Fortunately, they resisted).   The build of Planet One was insane.  I remember pizza-fuelled nights in the office that lasted until most of the bars in Amsterdam were closed (and bars in Amsterdam stay open verrrrrry late) and a small army of webbies and volunteers helping move thousands of pages that had been hand built into a database. We celebrated the launch with super soaker squirt guns in pedal boats on the Amsterdam canals.

Planet One served us until 2005, when it was time to move to a new system, developed by Lars Pind and

Planet II: April 2005 — May 2010

project managed by Stephen Donnelly over the course of two years. It marked a new era as we moved steadily from a handful of pioneering offices to bring 22 or our national websites on board, saving millions of eurodollars by not pursuing multiple national design and backend tracks.

Planet Two was designed to inform, inspire, and engage. It carried on and refined the tradition of the Greenpeace website as news magazine, with a backend that was designed to widen the number of people who could publish content to our website — from HR Managers posting jobs to press officers posting press releases to publication managers publishing reports — we brought a wealth of content forward.

But when it came time design Planet Three, we were all about “Inspire, Engage, and Mobilize.” We wanted actions that our supporters could take big and proud. We wanted ways our supporters could replicate content through social media to be everywhere. We wanted the site to provide positive feedback for actions taken, donations made, letters sent, petitions signed. We wanted a sign-in system that would allow the site to recognise our supporters and personalize their experience. We wanted a site that featured our award-winning photography in big bold formats. We wanted a site that was less about us, and more about our amazing network of supporters and what they can do. And that’s what Andrew and his team delivered.

I used a couple-three internal buzz words the other day in an email exchange, and was asked to define a “Pre-order Petition,” a “Buzz Visualizer” and “Brand Judo.” These are examples of a few tools that Greenpeace has used successfully in the past, and I thought I’d share:
Pre-order petitions

A pre-order petition is a way of demonstrating a market for a product that may not exist yet. It’s a convenient way to counter industry flacks who say “we don’t produce environmentally sound products, because there is no market for them.” Or “nobody will pay more a green product.”

Greenpeace Germany did this with GreenFreeze by asking supporters if they would commit to being the first purchasers of a new refrigeration technology that didn’t use climate-killing chemicals.

In the spring of 1992 Greenpeace brought together scientists who had extensively researched the use of propane and butane as refrigerants, with an East German company DKK Scharfenstein. The company had been producing refrigerators for 50 years and was the leading household appliance manufacturer in the former East Germany. After reunification, however, it faced severe economic problems and was due to be closed down.

When DKK Scharfenstein announced their intention to mass produce “GreenFreeze”, Greenpeace Germany successfully campaigned to gather tens of thousands of pre-orders for the yet-to-be-produced new refrigerator from environmentally conscious consumers. This overwhelming support from the public secured the capital investment needed for the new ‘GreenFreeze’ product, and at the same time, salvaged the company and saved the jobs of its workers.

Buzz visualizers

A “buzz visualizer” is a means to reflect back to your audience that others are already taking the action you are asking them to take. It can be a page or widget which simply demonstrates that others are talking about and taking action around a particular issue: a feedback loop. Good canvassers know that you never, ever, present a blank petition to anyone. People who think they are the only ones or first one taking action resist. People who see their neighbors’ names on a petition or get a sense of lots of people acting together are more likely to join in.

A buzz visualizer can be as simple as a technorati graph like this one, which charts mentions of “Light Bulbs” and “Global Warming” occurring together in blogs for the last 180 days:

Or it could look like the Green my Apple iBuzz page, which shows latest Flickr photo submissions, latest blog mentions, and latest socially bookmarked mentions of the campaign:

http://www.greenmyapple.org/buzz

It can also be as simple as a “donation thermometer” which charts how close to a financial goal a fundraising drive has gotten.

Brand Strength Judo

When trying to wrestle with a strong brand, “Brand Strength Judo” is a means of channeling a brand’s own strength against it, so that all the advertising money that they have put into creating a consumer identity or a brand icon gets subverted BY the campaign, making that identity or icon work for us and our objectives.

An example would be using Apple users’ love of their Apple products (something that Apple has cultivated and made powerful) as the force demanding environmental change at Apple. We don’t attack the brand, we use its own strength by saying “We love our Macs, we just wish they came in Green.”

Another example would be using Iceland’s reputation as a Nature destination for tourists (an identity they put big advertising into) against it by reaching out to precisely those tourists with the message that Iceland is killing whales.

Or subverting Coke’s Polar Bears from brand symbols to climate change victims in our spoof messaging.

technorati tags:Greenpeace, Activism, e-activism, online_campaigning

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