Jane Keys, Greenpeace International, Amsterdam
Greenpeace is a multi-national organisation with offices in 24 countries. Greenpeace aims to draw attention to environmental abuse via direct non-violent action, science, research and political lobbying. Greenpeace has used the WWW as a communication tool since September 1994.
Since 1987 environmental NGOs have had a telecommunications network called GreenNet, part of the Association for Progressive Communications as a forum for exchanging knowledge between themselves (Note 1).
Greenpeace has relied on telecommunication for internal communication almost since its inception. In addition, Greenpeace depends upon the rapid transmission of information and images across the world. As an organisation founded 25 years ago along with the Quaker principles of "bearing witness" we have always had a heavy reliance on the media. Wherever there is an "environmental catastrophe" or one in the making, or an action against a nuclear power plant, a Brent Spar, a whaler or a nuclear test our campaigners and our cameras record the event. For example, when French commandos stormed the Rainbow Warrior in the South Pacific last year - shortly before the first nuclear test, the image was digitized, compressed and bounced to a waiting satellite all before the commandos could break down the door to the Warrior's bridge where the communication systems was kept. Within a few hours the pictures were being transmitted by the major TV stations round the world.
The new communications revolution is said to be shifting the power to the people. The power shift seriously threatens the dominance of traditional mass media forms, specifically radio, television, magazines and newspapers. The driving force for this change is interactive communication. Interactive communication inspires engaged participants rather than passive listeners or viewers. The Internet's World Wide Web is the main forum for this new multi-media interactive communication .
Greenpeace with its heavy reliance on traditional mass media as a channel for its campaign messages, has had to take note of the communications revolution of which the Internet is part.
The Internet WWW site did not originate from the campaigns or media departments, but from various computer staff based in several of the national offices as well as at International in Amsterdam. These people developed the site in their own time due to a fascination with the technology. They taught themselves how to write a web page and put whatever information they could find onto the site. Despite this chaotic manner of working the site was hailed a success by many. Our people were accomplishing technical feats - such as the ability to display photographs and videos, hear audio and the ability to send messages from the web site - when these Internet features were still in their infancy in the big wide Internet world.
It comprised a central page with links to press releases, reports and even an interactive quiz. The quiz gave back an immediate reply of how well a person had done and included links back to other pages to explain the correct answer. The site also encouraged people to fax President Clinton and allowed people to do this by just clicking on the send button. The site was also effective because it catered for a variety of needs - press releases for Journalists, quizzes and fact sheets for the casual visitor, in-depth reports for people who wanted to know more and finally the ability for the person to take some sort of positive action themselves. The next site to be planned and designed was for the ozone campaign - also due to John Mate's efforts. Both sites also linked the pages to other NGOs working on the issue.
These two sites marked the turning point in the Greenpeace WWW site. Other campaigners around the world started to think about the possibilities for their campaign.
We also used the site at this time to collect signatures from around the world from people opposed to testing. Forty thousand signature were collected via the Internet. However, to put this into perspective the total number of signature was 7 million. A similar facility is now being offered for people to protect against the nuclear testing being carried out by China. In fact one of the pages that can be faxed is in Chinese script.
Another Internet action was during the Brent Spar campaign. At this time we put a link on our page to Shell's Internet site, actually a US division of Shell as the International HQ didn't have an Internet page at that time. We asked people to visit Shell's site and send a message to Shell's Management asking them to not dump at sea. The Brent Spar page was also interesting as it showed the strong link with traditional media. The number of people logging into the Brent Spar page was directly related to when the story was covered in newspapers and on TV.
Greenpeace UK has a site for their national Solar Campaign. The site offers a selection of positive actions which people can make, ranging from writing to their MP to contacting a supplier to get a quote for installing solar panels in their home. Once again the Greenpeace policy of linking our sites to other organisations is adhered to.
So the Internet can be a useful tool for enabling people to take their own positive actions and to express their views to the people who make decisions. This is especially important in the UK where our research indicates that people want to take action themselves rather than just leaving it up to the big NGOs such as Greenpeace. This trend has also been perceived in other countries in Europe as well as in the USA - witness the growth in organisations such as Earth First.
The Internet gives us the ability to provide the whole story. Many months of research and preparation often result in one or a few days of traditional media coverage which give a very simple view of the whole debate. Using the Internet we are able to explain how we arrived at our one line soundbite. One example which you can see at the moment is the effects of organochlorines on fertility. The Internet site allows anyone to "drill down" (as the jargon goes) - that is to read the overview and then look at the full reports and debates which support the argument. This page makes use of some other Internet facilities such as listservers. The page offers the opportunity for people to subscribe to a list to receive regular updates. The site will also offer a live broadcast.
The Internet is also a good forum for campaigns which are not considered "newsworthy" by the traditional media. Some examples of this come from our Solutions Campaigning. Greenfreeze, a fridge which operates using hydrocarbon technology is a good example as is our work with Financial Institutions with respect to global warming.
The Internet's multi-media features is also an opportunity to portray information in new and exciting ways. For example, Friend's of the Earth, UK's site offers a graphical presentation of the UK Chemical Release Inventory. They have used a map of the UK as the opening page and the public can click on an area, or enter their postcode and find out which industries are polluting them. I see this as a great use of the internet's abilities - FOE couldn't have done this in printed form - it would have been too complex to read through. This form of presentation also makes the information personal - which we all know is a great motivator for change.
We have offices in 24 countries. Some of the offices now have their own sites to communicate with supporters in their country - our English speaking offices with their own sites are: USA, UK, Australia and Greenpeace International. More importantly, our non-English speaking countries can present information in their own language. This is especially important for environmental information - nearly all of which is in English. Greenpeace national offices with pages in their own language are currently: Norway, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland and The Netherlands.
Traditional paper based media is stagnant and expensive to update. The Internet allows us to show the story as it develops. One example is when the Pacific Pintail started its nuclear voyage around the world in February 1995, closely followed by the Greenpeace ship MV Solo. Greenpeace organised direct actions and demonstrations around the world to publicize the passage of the ship. In tandem a site on the Internet showed graphically plotted two variables - the physical location of the ship and the political aspect - we lobbied national Governments to object in writing to the passage of the ship and showed on the WWW site which countries had lodged a formal objection.
Other ideas we have had - are making use of video to record environmental destruction in real time. For example, we are piloting a secret camera set up in a forest which is being clear-cut. People can watch the forest being destroyed - both immediately and in intervals - looking at the site the next day or week they can see how quickly the forests are being destroyed.
Another NGOs, Hunger Aid, used to have an interesting feature on their page. While you're reading their page a message flashes up and informs you how many people have died of malnutrition while you've been reading their page. Another example of making information meaningful to the individual.
Listservers are obviously a great tool for targeted communication. However, we haven't made as much use of listservers as we could. We do have a listserver for press releases - our target group is journalists though the list is open to anyone. I expect to see much more use made of listservers in the future - probably for communicating with supporters.
Fundraising - we always need money! We rely solely on the public for our funds, we take no money from Governments or Industry. We initially considered the Internet to be a good medium for collecting money - but it doesn't seem to be anymore. However, GP USA merchandise has just launched their merchandising operation on the Internet. The site is a pilot for the whole organisation, time will tell how successful the venture is.
Rather a depressing conclusion for an International Environmental campaigning organisation. Many media articles suggest that this situation is changing , that more Europeans are now using the net and that gender balance is being restored. However, its difficult not to be skeptical (see Note 2).
The question of who visits the site is compounded by the question of why people visit the WWW site. Preliminary - what do people do on the Internet - will they actually take action - do anything to affect the environment
Research in the USA suggests that most people use the WWW as a form of entertainment, in a similar manner to playing computer games. Last July I surveyed all the research I could find on "what people did on the Internet" - unfortunately most classification of activities were called "browsing" - which didn't really answer my question. GVU's Fourth Survey concluded that Europeans spend less time than Americans computing for fun.
Its difficult to draw conclusions from these surveys as to whether we at Greenpeace are reaching the people we want to reach. My only conclusion about who uses the WWW and why is that we don't know enough, that it probably varies from site to site, and that we do need to know more.
It is suspected that visitors to our sites have diverse needs. These may vary due to language, culture, education and of course the reason for their visit. Our expertise is with communicating through the traditional media forms - such as radio, TV and newspapers. Although we have some communication with our supporters, this has never been our forte. Internet communication requires a totally different approach. One major difference is knowing your audience. We have a good idea of the type of people who read different papers in different countries and who watches which TV news and documentary programs. We are used to targeting our information to take account of the language, culture, political situation and knowledge level of our audience. We are also used to writing information to appeal to journalists - rather than the public.
When considering who is accessing the world wide web there is also an assumption that the people you are targeting are in possession of a windows capable computer, a fast modem and full Internet access. Its easy to get carried away with wonderful graphics and moving images but how many people can actually access them? Also most people pay per time on-line, it costs them money to load your images. If your site takes too long to load - it won't be visited.
We have no idea of who visits our Internet site - so it is difficult to target our information to be both appealing and accessible to them.
Designing pages and creating copy for the Internet is time consuming. Its not enough just to put up a copy of a printed page. In addition, different skills are needed - graphic designers are needed as well as "word designers" - e.g. our press officers.
The Internet is interactively dynamic. That is people expect to interact with the pages. We have never resolved the problem of who will reply to all the messages coming from the Internet. Our structure is such that each national office responds to supporters from its own country - this is mainly due to differences in languages. It is often unclear as to which country a message received via the Internet has originate from.
The Internet also increases the amount of correspondence - this requires people to deal with it. We don't have the money to fund this so often messages go unanswered - which is very bad for people's perception of Greenpeace. I believe our worst mistake in this area was webchat - an electronic room for people to discuss Greenpeace. As no-one from Greenpeace had the time to visit the electronic room to chat the page has become a forum for environmental backlash.
Another human resources related problem is keeping the information up to date. The Internet allows for the story to be constantly updated. But in the middle of an active campaign the Campaigners' priority is to organise actions and speak to journalists. Its difficult to find time to update the Internet site. Its important to keep changing the information available in order to keep people coming back to our site. If the estimate of 10 million hosts is correct - that's a lot of competition!
Campaigners might make updating the Internet site a higher priority in their work if they knew who they were reaching on the Internet.
How do you measure success on the Internet? What we believe is success means people who have visited our site have taken some sort of positive action. This could mean they sent a fax to their MEP or sent a donation to Greenpeace or used the information we provide in some other positive way.
We have not come up with any measures of success. For this reason Greenpeace's Internet site is constantly under threat of being cut. We have limited resources and we have to know that all the money being spent is being spent in the most effective way.
The priorities:
Greenpeace campaigns for environmental change, with the rise in anti-environmentalism we need every tool was can get in order to maintain our effectiveness - maybe activism on the Internet - or Interactivism is the answer...
Strangelove, M (1994) The Internet as a catalyst for a paradigm shift. Computer Mediated Communications Magazine. Vol.1, No. 8, December 1, p7
2. For comprehensive up to date information on the Internet's size and the demographics of its users - see: http://www.limitless.co.uk/net.html This page is an index with links to most of the available material.