Greenpeace harnesses people power

"The global organisation saw that despite decades of successful campaigns, we werent always winning at the scale of the planetary challenges we're facing," reveals Benjamin Simon a campaigner with the international Mobilisation Lab at Greenpeace. "We needed to change our approach to harness people power more effectively."

To help facilitate this shift, Greenpeace began exploring new ways to monitor the conversations sparked by its campaigns: a task that falls to Radian 6, part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

As Juliette Hauville, a Greenpeace Digital Mobilisation Specialist, explains: "With Radian6, we can not only track conversations, we can see when they peak too. We can then analyse what were the key success factors and reproduce this in other campaigns. If a conversation about a certain campaign is not growing, this acts as an alert for us to find out why."

A snapshot of a big conversation

In September 2013, the arrest of 30 activists in Russia led to a massive peak in conversations about oil exploration in the Arctic as well as Greenpeace's campaigning tactics.

"We were dealing with a large volume of information both from traditional and social media, and needed to be able to share this without overloading people," comments Hauville. "With Radian6, we were able to provide Greenpeaces decision-makers with a snapshot of the conversation in different countries."

Over the course of seven months, Greenpeace used Radian6 on a daily basis to monitor conversations about 'hooligans' and 'heroes' in relation to the Arctic 30.

"By tracking the two sides of the conversation, we were able to see which had the largest share of voice and the sources behind the negative comments," explains Hauville. "This intelligence helped us develop ideas to influence the conversation."

The Arctic 30 were released from jail at the end of November 2013.Greenpeace has also used Radian6 to research online discussions around its high-profile Oceans campaign in 2013 and to respond to air pollution caused by deforestation in Indonesia.

Faster response, greater engagement

With over 25 million supporters around the world, Greenpeace needs to be able to listen to conversations on a global scale. "We selected Radian6 due to its extensive coverage of both languages and social sources," adds Hauville. "We were also impressed with its usability."

A monthly report on media analysis can be shared with the rest of the organisation using information captured by Radian6.

As Greenpeace continues to expand its digital mobilisation efforts, Radian6 will enable it to shift from reactive to proactive social media listening in the future.

"We want to move towards more 'big listening' a tactic pioneered by a group called Upwell (www.upwell.us) - where we look at broader environmental topics and co-ordinate a response with a network of allies," comments Simon.