Greenpeace International
Save the Arctic
Time is running out for the North Pole. We worked with Greenpeace to restyle their high-priority “Save The Arctic” campaign website, one of the biggest campaigns the NGO has run against oil drilling and industrial fishing in the region since 2012. The campaign demands the area to be declared a natural sanctuary.
Greenpeace asked us to restyle their “Save the Arctic” website. Their aim was to increase conversion rates, build a responsive website optimized for different devices, make it as easy as possible to sign and create petitions, improve the interface with Facebook Connect, and respond to Greenpeace’s multilingual and multinational identity by ensuring easy modification and implementation of new plug-ins and features.
Website
In this project we did an overall restyling of the front end of the “Save The Arctic” website and refactored the back end by building a CMS. We started our work by researching and evaluating dozens of websites in order to gauge their effectiveness, call-to-actions, user engagement and usability.
Despite the fact that a single-page website was required, the design was complicated in and of itself. Greenpeace is an organization with independent offices in many countries. Each of these offices had different requests for the website as far as content, policy and data management went. To solve this conflict, we built a flexible CMS from scratch and endowed each individual national office with the faculty to change layouts and contents and manage the email addresses collected. We built the CMS using MODx, which offers simplicity while being flexible and efficient.
We also developed the possibility of inserting and changing images and videos on the default theme in the main area. The campaign’s goals may vary over time, so we wanted to create a flexible and reusable layout.
Responsivity
We designed the website along with the responsive approach, and we optimized the website for different devices as well as intended use. While designing the graphics and layout we were goal-oriented but at the same time attentive to the need to make it catchy, modern, fresh and urgent. We came up with the idea of a melting-polar-bear illustration composed of ice blocks; the illustration represents the Arctic environment and urges visitors to stop the melting by signing the petition.
Petition
We improved the petition form by implementing a full-screen view and fewer form fields to catch the user’s attention and minimize the process friction. We also designed an effective user flow to lead users to share on their social accounts through a ‘thank you’ page and a ‘thank you’ email that invites friends and includes a donation option.
In this video you can see the animation of the polar bear melting that was on the homepage of Save the Arctic.
Hacking Save the Arctic
During Christmas 2014, we realized a “hacking Save the Arctic” campaign run by… reindeers.
In the fight against oil drilling, not only the polar bear – which is the iconic animal of the campaign – is in danger, but also reindeers and other species who are living in the same environment .
That’s why an “armed group” called Reindeer United take possession of the Save the arctic campaign, on social networks, during Christmas shouting “Polar bears suck!” and hacking all images of polar animals with reindeer’s antlers and nose.
We also realized a replica landing page where reindeers could explain why they had taken possession of the campaign and why saving the arctic is so important, not only for the polar bears.
Results
Around 50 National Greenpeace offices are using the platform that we designed. In the first two weeks, Save The Arctic generated 80,300 total signups and 20,623 new leads.
We, both us and Greenpeace, achieved our goal of increasing the petition conversion rates. Save The Arctic conversion rate increased by 189% after the launch of the platform.
We will continue to work with Greenpeace to improve and develop the platform, along with addressing the campaign’s future needs.