Greenpeace

We held our interactive strategy livestream this past Sunday, and wow did it start with a bang!

"We're going after the coal industry, and over the next few months we will be fine tuning our strategy & plan," proclaimed the broadcasts’ host and producer Beka Economopoulos.  

It certainly was a powerful event throughout, including high level strategy discussions with senior members of Greenpeace USA such as Online Director Kevin Grandia, Research Director Kert Davies, and Climate Campaigner Gabe Wisniewski. Marshall Ganz of Harvard’s Leading Change Institute, fresh off being lionized by the New Organizing Institute, further provided a historical vantage point for how this social movement can follow the lessons of those that came before, emphasizing the importance of how the "targeting of coal makes visible the environmental degradation that is happening now."

This sentiment was also evident in the video we launched during the livestream, which vividly depicted harrowing personal stories of lives damaged by coal: 

All in all, quite the inspiring event! On a personal level, I was especially encouraged by the fantastic work of our @GreenpeaceUSA Twitter Champs, who dutifully spread the word far and wide, representing just how much potential we have to amplify this powerful message by working together.

Our MVP’s for this livestream included @joan_gala for RTing just about everything we tweeted on the livestream, @jahnessa for likewise tweeting up a storm and for taking part in our interactive chat, as well as to @megan_bray for passionately advocating her followers to attend.

@seachele420, @treehugginvamp, and @sandra777 were our MVP runner-ups, and @texasvegetarian, @kaskadia, @direaction, @whodat35, @lifeofvegan, @sarahelabance, and @gnudarwin were a big help collectively as well!

As I said, quite the inspiring and encouraging affair throughout, and we couldn’t appreciate the help from our dear Twitter Champs any more!

Thanks so much for all that you do, and we hope you enjoyed the livestream! If you missed it, stay tuned as we’ll be updating this post with the full video, and we wish you and all of our supporters the happiest of holidays.

--Harry Waisbren, Greenpeace USA Online Organizer

Get ready Greenpeace supporters, staff, Twitter Champs, and friends! On December 19, from 7-8 pm EST, we will be holding a special interactive livestream to broadcast our new climate campaign, and we want YOU to be there!

In fact, not only are you all are more than invited to attend, but we need YOUR help to put the finishing touches on the campaign! Come discuss our upcoming campaign for this Spring, using the #quitcoal tag on Twitter (Twitter Champs, start your engines!!!), while senior Greenpeace climate strategists reflect on the past few years and map out the post-election political moment and cultural atmosphere.

Greenpeace has a plan. And for the first time ever, we’d like to bring you to the table to help us shape it!

So, on December 19 tune in at http://greenpeace.org/usa/live, and with your help we’ll have much more in store.

We launched our Greenpeace Twitter Champs project last week, and are quite psyched about this effort to work more closely with our top Twitter supporters!

But how do we decide which supporters are true Twitter Champs? Well, we’re figuring that out for ourselves as a matter of fact. This is all a building process, but below you’ll find some of the ideas inspiring our strategy as we get this going:

Retweeting our Tweets

Our Twitter Champs help us get our message out to their own audiences who trust them, and RTing is central to being a top supporter on Twitter. @Joan_Gala has been especially sensational in this regard!

If you are a Twitter Champ we will be asking you to RT some of our tweets, and if you want to be a Twitter Champ RTing us consistently is the most direct way to become one.

Adding to our Tweets

It’s impossible to include every hashtag or account name we might want to include per tweet, but our supporters can add them in to their versions to help direct our message to an even more more expansive audience.

We also want to hear what you think about our tweets, if only because it brings more exposure for the issue the tweet is supporting. Our recent twitter interactions with @megan_bray and @JAHnessa have been particularly fantastic in this vain!

Motivation to be a Champ

Being a top supporter for us is no spectator sport, so we want to make sure all of our Twitter Champs are excited to help us make a difference.

We put a lot of weight on this since we want people who will really get into it. This is especially because being a Twitter Champ isn’t only about helping us----we want it to be a reward for those who help us as well!

Our Twitter Champs will only get out of this what they put into it though, so it is helping us help you. @retrohousewife5 and @TexasVegetarian have both shown a lot of early motivation to be champs, for instance.

Now remember that this is all a building process, so keep telling us what you think by commenting on this blog or by shooting us a message on twitter!

Photo via amitbhawani

Attention, attention: Are you a Greenpeace supporter? Are you on Twitter? Are you a champion?

Greenpeace USA is bringing together our top supporters on Twitter, aka our “Twitter Champs!”

We’re starting by making a Twitter list, which we will be using as a shout out to our most motivated Greenpeace tweeters and a tool to organize some very cool projects. It will also help us engage and interact with all of you that much more! 

Our Twitter Champs are already people who are helping us out on Twitter, but we want to harness the collective energy better by bringing you into one place. We’re hoping that when we work together we can really make a difference.

Likewise, Twitter Champs is very much about showing appreciation to all of you who are helping us out so much already. We want to make sure you get credit for being Twitter leaders for Greenpeace, which is why we’ll be using Twitter Champs to sing your praises!

So, are you a Greenpeace Twitter Champ, or do you have what it takes to be one? Let us know, and we’ll be in touch soon as we get this project rolling.

---Harry

P.S. Special thanks to Alan Rosenblatt of the Center for American Progress Action Fund for suggesting this idea at Care2’s Cutting Edge Integrated Social Media Strategies webinar.

Update: so what makes a Twitter Champ, anyways? So far we're focusing on: retweeting our tweets, adding to our tweets, and motivation to be a champ.

If you’re heading to the movie theatre this weekend you might just be going to see Denzel Washington’s new block buster action-packed movie, Unstoppable. When a train carrying toxic chemicals gets loose on the tracks, it puts thousands of lives at risk as it hurtles through communities with chemicals that could spread a poison gas cloud for miles. And of course, it’s Denzel’s job to stop it.

This sort of scenario is just what we here at Greenpeace are also trying to stop with our chemical security campaign. In fact, our friend Andrew Salomone has produced his own sweded trailer, meaning his own limited budget remake, on the subject. Check out the trailer for the movie we’d like to see, “It’s Stoppable:”

Unstoppable wouldn’t have a plot if companies like Dow did the right thing and switched to safer alternatives.

So tell congress when it comes to a chemical disaster, It’s Stoppable. Take action to prevent a toxic nightmare in your community.

For more information, check out this post from Greenpeace Toxics Campaigner, John Deans.