The 5 W’s of Greenpeace International’s Web Communications
We’ve been working with the Greenpeace International (GPI) web strategist and Story and Communications department* on a strategic initiative to Communicate with Intention.
“We will be able to communicate with intention once we’ve used data and journey mapping to clarify what our intentions actually are. The final piece of this bit of work is to help guide stakeholders in developing a project plan for content development. We also want to empower Greenpeace Communication staff to be creative!”
After loads of research over the past months, and the production of individual resources, processes and guides, we’re now pulling everything together into the 5 W’s (which is actually 5 Ws and an H) of the Greenpeace International website.
Why: A Strategy to Educate & Engage
It might seem simple, but being laser focused on what your web presence is trying to do is a result of careful thought and planning. You’ll need to interview multiple stakeholders including users or volunteers, staff in various departments, people who know the history of your organisation and experts in your industry. You will want to think carefully about your organisational mission and how that mission becomes actionable.
Talking to people will help you determine what the end goal of your communications need to be in order to build community and capacity for your organisation. A communication strategy needs to include all of these voices if it’s going to work!
The focus of the Greenpeace International website is to educate and engage so that people are empowered to take action on behalf of our planet. It should tell the global story of the organisation, provide and help website visitors find resources they need to facilitate change in their own lives and communities.
These terms are cyclical in nature meaning that the content should do both. Sometimes GPI is educating first and engaging second, other times it is engaging first and educating second. It all depends on the goals of the campaign and the specific piece of content.
After running some workshops and speaking with folks from the Story and Comms team, we put together this “Educate and Engage” deck to help campaigners, programme designers and everyone else understand exactly what these terms mean in the context of Greenpeace International.
Who: A Unique Audience
You’ve probably heard the phrase “Everyone is not a target audience”. Well, it’s true. You want to craft your communication to resonate with people it will resonate with. If people don’t care about your message, they won’t take action on behalf of it.
Greenpeace International is a multi-faceted organisation with millions of people it its diverse and widespread audience. After careful research and thinking around who exactly Greenpeace International should optimise for, we’ve pulled together some best practices for communicating with the desired audience.
This audience is young, urban, women from the Global South, with English as the common language. Our best practices slide deck references the research as to why this is the desired audience, and you can read more about audience in our post on the Audience Ikigai.
How: A Bold, Positive & Factual Tone
Personality of a brand comes through the words we use. A tone is essentially an extension of a brand personality. Some organisations are more funny or serious in their communications. Others are sarcastic or respectful. There are diplomatic tones, enthusiastic tones, matter-of-fact, outraged, sassy… We can create endless nuanced lists about the way communications are understood. For many organisations, there are cultural differences to be considered both amongst the audience as well as the staff. Hey, communicating is hard!
A great way to figure out the tone for your web presence is to ask stakeholders and community members what tones resonate the most for them. Using a Likert scale to separate binaries (e.g. more funny or more serious) can help you hit the right mix.
The website tone should be bold, but seeped in positivity and factuality — a tone that aligns with advice from the GPI Story Team. Greenpeace International is an authority on environmental issues and the global community is full of bold stories. The soul of Greenpeace is its volunteers and activists, so serving as a voice that can empower them and highlight their stories is a north star to guide the website tone. The nuance of tone will be looked at in tandem across all the GPI communication channels. Our Promising Practices work gives some insight into how audience and tone tie together.
What: A Key Info Template for Content
Content is complicated. There are a variety of pieces and parts that need to come together to tell an effective story. With the web, there are pieces and parts flying around on social media sites, websites, and other platforms. There are images, text, audio, video and animated gifs. Having a collection of bits that align with each other will help you tell stories across different platforms.
Again, Greenpeace International is a complex global community. We need stories to reach the GPI audience wherever they are. We need components for all the various communication channels, including the website. We worked with the communications professionals on “must haves” for each project or campaign. Then we made a template to help people collaboratively collect each piece. The Key Info Template helps create consistency. It makes it easier to onboard new collaborators to an in-progress project.
Where: Resources & Accountability to share
Finally, there is the question of how everything comes together. How can people collaborate on strategic content with the right tone for your target audience? This piece is about putting a process in place that allows people to do just that — Collaborate. It doesn’t matter what tool or method you use, as long as you have one that helps keep everyone aligned.
The Web Strategist is responsible for the GPI site and will guide the web editors who are responsible for content. In order to coordinate and provide transparency into the various communication projects going on at any one time, we created an Asana template. A project team can copy the template and shape it for their project needs. They can add people to tasks, comment, add deadlines and check things off.
Asana is a project management tool that GPI recently adopted, and we used the opportunity to pull together All The Things. The template has all the important how-tos and guides, and links out to the strategy and best practices work. It provides a one-stop-shop for teams to coordinate on new communication work. The Story and Comms team will be piloting and testing our new Asana template with new projects and campaigns in the coming months.
When: What’s next?
We have now wrapped up Phases 0, 1 and 2 of our Website Implementation project. However, there’s more to do! Over the next weeks, we’ll be working out a proposal for what “Phase 3: Change Management” might look like. The resources we’ve included above are great, but not if staff can’t use them!
We know we want to design a workshop series and run further staff development initiatives on this work. We want to continue building an encouraging culture of open and help people use the processes they’ve helped us design. We want to ensure organisational understanding of the how and why of the communications and engagement strategies, and we want to run some technical workshops like SEO Training or How to A/B Test.
The Website Strategy Implementation team is looking forward to hearing more feedback and testing, testing, testing our methods and processes. Do you have feedback? Get in touch or leave a comment!
*Special thanks to Kelli Tolen, Mehdi Leman, Diego Gonzaga, the Managing Editors and the rest of the Story and Comms staff who have provided their ideas, feedback and input into this work!