Greenpeace UK

The challenge

Greenpeace. The name alone evokes a world-renowned organisation that fearlessly stands up for environmental issues in the face of multiple challenges. However, their old site was visually dated, struggled to show off their unique, powerful imagery and videos, and wasn’t connected to their other, more dynamic channels. 

There were clear gaps in user tracking capabilities, meaning that the team lacked crucial information on site performance and user interaction with key elements. Following investment in extensive email campaigning and social media, the website was the final piece of the puzzle to help Greenpeace reach their full digital potential.

The brief

The climate crisis is the biggest existential threat facing humankind. While the scale of the problem cannot be overstated, Greenpeace is aware that individual supporters engage with the issue in a range of different ways: from the occasional meat-free Monday to a willingness to participate in non-violent direct action. Therefore, the new site needed to meet audiences’ very diverse needs, while driving action and inspiring hope with energising content. 

Greenpeace’s team needed the flexibility to create a range of layouts to match this content, whether that’s short, punchy campaign pages, or more editorial style long-form thought pieces. Seamless integration with their direct marketing platform was vital, with well-mapped user journeys throughout the site.

The process

We kicked off the project by deeply investigating Greenpeace’s audiences and marketing strategy, turning this research into user personas and user journeys. Then through UX workshops, we created a pared-back site structure and homepage content, validated with online surveys and involving multiple internal stakeholder groups.

As you’d expect in such a high-profile organisation, there were many strong voices and competing priorities, but we were able to facilitate some healthy discussion and, importantly, arrive at a consensus. Our User Experience research then formed a basis for our design thinking, as did our team’s background in content, editorial work and behavioural science.

The solution

Our Head of Creative often uses the quote “If I’d had more time, I’d have written a shorter letter” (attributed to Blaise Pascal), as it nicely sums up how it can be more difficult to make a design look simple. This was certainly the case with Greenpeace. They had multiple strong campaign identities and an overall brand closely associated with the symbolic and powerful colour green, but their messaging lacked visual unity.

While Greenpeace wanted their new site to convey their vibrancy, urgency and irreverence, we also added ‘awe’, ‘hope’ and ‘action’ to the guiding principles. Building from our strong UX discovery phase, we simplified the main navigation to just two items and two calls to action, and stripped back the colour palette to only green, black and white to allow the organisation’s incredible imagery to really shine. In combination with our choice of the forceful headline typeface Sorren and the clarity of Plex for body copy, we had the building blocks for a strong and simple UI design.

We designed and built a dynamic mix of components – including galleries, in-page calls to action, related content promos and accordions – so the Greenpeace content team can keep their pages fresh and varied.

We also defined and implemented a comprehensive tracking plan based on a series of agreed KPIs. This provides an excellent basis to really understand how users interact with the site, helping Greenpeace modify forms, restructure calls to action and implement an agile content strategy in direct response to users’ needs.

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