Greenpeace Skillshare

Posted by irishg on August 7th, 2005 at 08:53am

Just got confirmation that I’ll be participating in a Greenpeace regional fundraising skillshare in Brazil next week (Aug 14-19). I’ll be leading a couple of discussions on new trends in online fundraising and online engagement, and as well, I hope to convene an overview/discussion of new online engagment tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging, flickr, de.licio.us, etc. that may already be famliar to some people reading this blog, but which are just starting to emerge into the everyday practices of mainstream nonprofits.

I’m expecting there will be some interesting stuff to report back. Greenpeace’s recent No Whaling Virtual March (http://whales.greenpeace.org) was developed by Marcelo Inniara, the online engagement guru from Greenpeace Argentina. More than 60,000 people uploaded photos of themselves holding Stop Whaling signs and messages to be projected onto a billboard in Seoul, South Korea where the International Whaling Commission was debating a return to commericalized whaling. It’s a great example of the “show the network” school of online mobilizing, and I love just browsing through the photos that have been submitted. It really communicates the sense that 60,000+ signups is more than just a number — it’s a vast crowd of real, individual people.

Another interesting thing about the No Whale campaign is that a large percentage of the signups to the campaign — with uploaded photos and all — have come from non-western/developed countries. In fact, signups from some of the larger southern countries such as India (4300), Brazil (4500) easily surpassed more traditional online activist countries such as the United States (1400), Italy (1100), and France (2200). As well, a handful of signups came from very non-traditional activist countries such as China (93), Indonesia (65), and even Albania (4) and Iraq (2). Greenpeace is actively ‘globalizing’ and has opened offices in India, Thailand, Turkey and Lebanon in the past few years, so these signup point-of-origin numbers could be an indicator of success.

I look forward to hearing what this means for Greenpeace’s regional and global fundraising.

Under Learning from the South+ fundraising