A Group Born at Greenpeace Spreads Ideas About Grass-Roots Advocacy

For decades, Greenpeace, the environmental-advocacy nonprofit born in 1971 from a ragtag committee of activists, relied on organizing methods that dated from the Age of Aquarius.

Trouble was, the rest of the world was living in the age of Zuckerberg.

It took a crisis to bring the organization’s approach to advocacy up to date. In 2009, despite a massive organizing effort led by Greenpeace and other major conservation groups, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen failed to produce a treaty. In the aftermath of the conference, Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace’s international executive director, framed this “colossal failure” as a turning point for his organization. To stay relevant, the group had to develop new ways to organize and advocate for its causes.

Enter the Mobilisation Lab, MobLab for short. The unit was created by Greenpeace in 2011. It’s leader, Michael Silberman, helped pioneer digital organizing, notably in his work to spur online activism for then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign.

The effort has been so successful that MobLab spun off last year into its own entity, with a mission to help other nonprofits modernize their advocacy efforts. It has worked with Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and Save the Children, among other charities, along with the international agency Unicef.

The MobLab story holds important lessons for other advocacy organizations that want to pump up their people power — and reach supporters and potential activists more effectively and inexpensively.

Among those lessons: Just dive in and start innovating. Some people at your organization may already be using tools needed to create more open campaigns.

“There’s an assumption, because we’re a nonprofit or social-change organization, that we have to wait for new tactics or technology to be thoroughly tested by other sectors,” Silberman says. “But we don’t have time to waste.”

Mobilizing the Middle

When Silberman joined Greenpeace in 2011, he found an organization willing to embrace risk; after all, its members would willingly put their very bodies on the line during protests. But Greenpeace had grown large and compartmentalized over the years — it now works in 55 countries. The resulting bureaucracy “could be inhibiting to the best ways of working, to getting the best out of your staff,” Silberman says.

As he and his two staff members found their way, they listened to other employees. They found that Greenpeace was heavily invested in engaging two parts of its audience: a small top tier that could be called on for important roles, such as participating in nonviolent protests or meeting with local volunteer groups, and a vast bottom tier filled with people who followed the organization on social media, signed petitions, or gave small, one-time donations.

“There was very little in the middle,” Silberman says. “There was very little people could do unless you designed a campaign differently, with more roles for more people.”

In response, MobLab helped Greenpeace create new kinds of events, such as Paddle in Seattle. The May 2015 action, organized by local activists with Greenpeace’s endorsement, saw more than 200 kayaks surround a Shell-owned oil rig moored in Seattle’s port, to protest the company’s plans to drill in the Alaskan Arctic. Five months later, Shell announced it was abandoning those plans.

Instead of “the classic Greenpeace action, where you have half a dozen people involved in, say, a banner drop, you had hundreds of everyday people getting in kayaks, making the action even more visible and powerful,” Silberman says.

Getting Nimble

MobLab’s Campaign Accelerator program, a five-day workshop aimed at helping organizations design and launch advocacy activities, has helped jump-start efforts at several organizations around the world. Twelve groups have run a Campaign Accelerator planning process, and an additional 30 have sent a total of 179 people to be trained in MobLab methods. A tool kit for the program is also available on the organization’s website.

In the era of the 24/7 news cycle and viral content, “the idea of a multiweek, multimonth, drawn-out planning process is increasingly deficient,” Silberman says. “Those long processes were not generating good results.”

The MobLab program shows how to reach out to potential activists to help them create campaigns rather than centralizing control within the organization. “It gets the campaign team out of their office, out of their own heads and their own biases, into the streets, so they can challenge their assumptions by talking to real people who better represent the audiences they want to engage in the campaign,” Silberman says.

Sometimes talking to people before shaping the campaign can result in startling revelations. MobLab recently worked with Amnesty International on an advocacy project to support refugees. An Amnesty staff member interviewed people on the street to help hone the message, discovering in the process that “many people didn’t know the difference between a refugee and an immigrant,” Silberman says.

The things campaigners learn while doing a campaign can result in changes. MobLab’s website recounts the story of the 2016 City of Dreams campaign in Brazil, in which the environmental group Purpose Climate Lab and its partners aimed to get residents of three Brazilian cities to discuss and learn about climate change and vote for candidates who aim to fight it.

City of Dreams started out organizing events and providing information through a website, but the campaign soon migrated to Facebook, a switch that proved successful at getting people’s attention and getting them to attend events. A case study on the campaign noted a survey that found that 55 percent of Brazilians consider Facebook to be the internet.

Capturing ‘Collective Wisdom’

Organizations that have sought MobLab’s help thus far report that it has jump-started advocacy work.

For instance, Unicef has been working with MobLab for about a year and a half, part of a new effort to attract volunteers, says David Ponet, who leads the country-support team at Unicef’s new global volunteer office in New York.

MobLab helped Unicef brainstorm ideas, zero in on a target audience, create rough sketches of what new campaigns would look like, seek feedback from people on the street, and make tweaks based on that feedback.

“There’s a collective wisdom and expertise in the room, and the task is to tease it out,” Ponet says.

MobLab has worked with Unicef in Nicaragua, where the agency hopes to organize a campaign to prevent violence against children. The partnership will continue, Ponet says, focusing on the specific priorities of each country or region where Unicef is active. (For example, in the Philippines, getting Unicef volunteers involved in emergency-response campaigns is top of mind.)

The expectation is that MobLab’s ideas might eventually have a fundraising impact, Ponet says. “Some of our colleagues are interested in it for that reason. When you give people things to do, they are more likely to give, and they’re more likely to be repeat givers.”