This week, the global Actions community within Greenpeace is coming together to share best practices and lessons learned from recent campaigns. These are the people who coordinate the bold, iconic (and often high risk) actions that set Greenpeace campaigns apart and inspire others to take action.
Thijs Notenboom, the Head of Actions at Greenpeace International, coordinates this global community of actions campaigners and is playing an important role in helping the global organisation think about how to bridge digital mobilisation with offline action to achieve greater impact.
In the clip below, Thijs talks about three ways to innovate on the classic real world “actions” model:
- remote participation: an online activity can now have an immediate and direct impact on real-world actions (e.g closing of a gate or pipe via steps or clicks)
- mobilising more people: rapid communication tools linking supporters or individuals to actions can mobilise people in record time– to get people in the streets or invite them to join a Greenpeace campaign action (eg. Greenpeace Germany mobilised many people to make a 200,000-person human chain between two power plants)
- crowd-powered research: we can work with our global online supporters community to help build intel that powers campaign actions (e.g. does anyone know anyone who could tell us where the oil rig is heading?)
Thijs also sends an important message to digital campaigners and digital mobilisation pros: to achieve truly innovative and breakthrough mobilisation efforts, we need to understand what actions coordinators and campaigners really mean when planning or executing Direct Actions, Direct Communications, Photo Opportunities, and Protests.
The differences between these four tactics are significant, and they play uniquely different roles in winning campaigns. Just as campaigners need to understand how new digital tools and strategies work (like social media) to be effective in designing campaign strategy, digital campaigners need to appreciate the nuances between these types of actions to make valuable contributions to campaign planning.
I struggle with the idea of remote participation – especially when it comes to closing a pipe. If Greenpeace wants to shut something down, then get on and do it, stop turning it into a daft game, where I have to click to persuade you to do it – you’ve already broken in to the place, get on with it.
Where I think the interesting intersections of online mobilisation offline mobilisations / NVDA is adding diversity and numbers. Not necessarily directly to the Greenpeace NVDA, but to a diversity of related activities. If Greenpeace shuts down one coal fired power station, then let’s mobilise people to picket dozens of others – in a non arrestable way, and 100′s of people to visit other coal fired station to meet with the manager, and 1000′s of people to phone the managers, and 10′s of thousands of people to write personal letters (not just generic emails) to managers all over the country and of course many more people to listen, watch and spread the word of all of these actions – sidestepping the world of corporate media.
Richard, I think the idea of asking many people to do a small thing online for us to do a bigger thing offline is changing the concept of “Greenpeace doing something and other people follow” towards “People do something and Greenpeace is with them, boosting their effort, helps coordinate and focus”. Without public interest, no campaign.
Its risky, because well, if nobody does the symbolic support act, we’d actually have to cancel the action to remain credible. But if it does work, it gives lots more credibility to us representing the people.
[...] literally shut a polluting discharge pipe underwater, as Greenpeace Actions Head Thijs Notenboom envisions here – engaging more people in the change-making process (and ideally future asks). In addition [...]