Public campaigns
In over 10 years at Greenpeace, I have worked on many high-profile and successful public campaigns, both in the UK and globally. These have showcased my creative, development and management skills — skills that can give your project impact and achieve change.
© David Mirzeoff / Greenpeace
HSBC
As part of Greenpeace's Indonesia forests work, I led development on a major project targeting HSBC. The problem? HSBC was bankrolling palm oil companies known to be destroying rainforests. After conducting research and devising the strategy, I co-ordinated a project team to deliver the public campaign elements, including artwork and printed assets, media work, volunteer activities, report production, digital communications and tools, fundraising, and non-violent direct action.
Result? A complete success. HSBC upgraded its palm oil policy to exclude problematic companies, and other major banks began looking at their own links to the palm oil industry.
Nestlé & KitKat
Another Indonesia forests campaign, this time about Nestlé's use of dirty palm oil. As the digital campaigner, I built the supporter engagement strategy around a high-impact but easy-to-complete 'email the CEO' action. Working with fundraising colleagues, I built a supporter journey which delivered campaign impact and potential new donors. Over the following weeks, additional tactics were promoted to supporters to increase their involvement and pressure on Nestlé.
The online campaign drew significant media attention, including from Mashable, Fast Company, the Guardian and the Financial Times.
And it worked. Nestlé eventually agreed to identify and exclude problematic palm oil companies from its supply chains.
© Kristian Buus / Greenpeace
Princes tinned tuna
The tinned tuna being sold by Princes was being produced at a terrible cost: other marine life was being caught and killed in tuna nets. I produced the digital strand of Greenpeace UK's campaign, devising the supporter journey to capitalise on a major TV series Hugh's Fish Fight – airing at the same time.
The really exciting bits included: producing an introductory animation; emailing supporters to ask them to phone Princes, staggering the email send to keep calls coming throughout the day; and live-tweeting during Hugh's Fish Fight to recruit new supporters by promoting Greenpeace's fish consumer guide.
© Kristian Buus / Greenpeace
Mattel & Barbie
Another problem for Indonesian forests is the pulp and paper industry, which supplied packaging for (amongst others) toy giant Mattel. I worked with Greenpeace UK's volunteer co-ordination team to develop a treasure hunt: 'Chainsaw Barbies' were hidden around the UK by volunteers, and clues to their location posted on a Google map.
Once found, a unique code on each one could be used to register online as part of the Barbie Investigation Bureau, a group of ultra-keen supporters who were approached with additional, more demanding campaign tactics. As well as devising the logistics, I worked with developers Torchbox to create the map and registration system in the Drupal website.
And the campaign was a big success: Mattel agreed to play nice and committed to protecting forests with an upgraded policy.
Unilever & Dove
Palm oil again! Unilever is one of the biggest palm oil consumers in the world, and Dove was used to highlight the threats to orangutans and Indonesia's forests. I devised a photo petition and worked with the Greenpeace UK volunteer co-ordination team to create a way for volunteer groups to use it as part of their street campaigning. Members of the public were asked to pose and the photos were added to a nationwide map to show the breadth of support.
This was a time before smartphones and apps, so photos were manually upload by volunteers and added to Flickr group with location information. The photostream was sucked into a Google map on the Greenpeace website, and online supporters were invited to send a random image to Unilever's CEO to make sure he saw them.