Greenpeace’s Supporter Journeys Infrastructure

For international charities as large and diverse as Greenpeace, ensuring that all communications are supporter-centric can be a challenge. I spoke to Mustafa Ozkulahci, Supporter Journeys Manager at Greenpeace International about how they ensure that supporter engagement is baked into all teams’ processes.

Mustafa, or Musti, helps to develop and roll-out strategies across all 26 Greenpeace offices worldwide. As you may have guessed from his job title, his focus is on supporter journeys. What makes supporter journeys a priority? When it comes to planning an appeal, campaign, or set of communications, they believe it’s important to get the ‘four Rs’ right:

• Right ask
• Right time
• Right channel
• Right message

Without a journey framework it can be very difficult to know what the four Rs are, or to think about how a supporter will engage with a campaign over time. That’s where Musti’s team come in.

They run supporter journey workshops across the world and teach the methodology which they have identified for planning supporter journeys to maximise engagement.

What is the Greenpeace methodology you ask? Well the shorthand version is…

1. Capture data. Make sure that you know what data you need to consider, where it is stored, and what new data you may need to collect.
2. Analyse data. What are all of the shared KPIs which stretch across directorates? How can you track all of the engagements that a supporter might take? This is not just donations or signatures, but could be a wide range of things.
3. Make strategic decisions. Think about what the objectives are and which types of engagements need to be prioritised. Does the data support these decisions?
4. Engagement scoring. Find a way to track supporter engagement throughout so that you have a way to report on your KPIs. Create a dashboard or somewhere that you can track this on a running basis so that you don’t need to run analysis multiple times.
5. Segment. Make sure you know who you are targeting by profiling your demographic. This will help you identify the right timing, channels, and messages for each demographic.
6. Map your journeys. Use all of the above to map out the ideal journey for your supporters to take. Define your testing programmes so that you can test and learn.

Usually Musti and his team will run three day workshops to really delve into the data and make sure that journeys are evidence based and truly supporter-centric. They also inject a certain element of impartiality to ensure that objectives and KPIs reflect the behaviour of the supporter, not just internal systems and processes. As a result, Greenpeace are able to achieve a consistency in strategy and approach, despite operating in different languages, with differing levels of resource, in variable political landscapes.

This has had a positive impact on the effectiveness of campaigns.

In Italy they are seeing an increase in sign-ups, in Indonesia they have seen an increase in email opens. Almost all regions are seeing the benefit of treating supporters as individuals and allowing them to engage in a range of ways, rather than pigeon holing them as “just” donors or campaigners etc.

So, does your charity have a consistent approach to planning supporter-centric journeys? If not, what’s stopping you?

If you are working on something exciting that is improving supporter engagement, let me know! You can email me at SXSEblog@gmail.com.