What happened at Digital Camp?

In Short…

• Over 150 people came together on June 5 in Greece for Digital Camp
• People from 29 different Greenpeace offices and 10 external guests joined
• 40% of GP participants were new to Greenpeace
• It was the first time in 3 years that there was a global digital meeting
• We set out to raise the bar and increase capacity for digital practitioners and to bring the community closer together
• There were a total of 50 participant-driven planned sessions and 20 open sessions
• Team building and social interaction was a key objective for this event — we nailed it!
• The community learnt a lot, made new friends, had a lot of fun and left with clear outcomes
• Some hard, trackable outcomes include: 150 individual takeaways to work on after the event, 8 cross-border working groups, NRO mind maps, A new and tested skill share model for future events, & Tested new event technology for managing the agenda and participants (Sched).
• Overall, the evaluation has shown an overwhelming collection of positive feedback on many fronts and we have captured insights for optimising future events like these
• Big thank you to everyone who contributed in any way. This event would not of been possible without the efforts of everyone involved.

Digital Camp was a conference for the Greenpeace community to come together in Greece to share, discuss, learn and teach things related to the digital channel.

It had been 3 years since the last time that the Greenpeace Digital community had the opportunity to come together at a global level and there were many requests and expressions of interests for this community to come together again from around Greenpeace.

In brief, the objectives were to:

• Raise the bar of the digital work at Greenpeace
• Raise the digital practitioner’s capacity
• Bring the digital community closer together and strengthen the sense of truly being a part of a global organisation

Over 150 participants attended from 29 different Greenpeace offices and we had 10 external guests from Bernie Sanders Campaign, Obama Campaign 2012, Control Shift, Unicef, Spinas Civil Voices, and Latte Creative. 70% of attendees were from National Regional Office’s (NRO) and 40% had only been working at Greenpeace less than a year at the time of registering. A good turnout considering that our primary audience for this event was digital practitioners from Greenpeace National Regional Offices.

The majority of the sessions were planned, but it would be critical to ensure that the sessions are a) Relevant topics to the participants everyday lives and b) Run in a way that is engaging and flexible to the audience.

There were at least 30% of the sessions as ‘open’ sessions. Giving participants the opportunity to a) propose new topics, b) ask to repeat sessions c) Deep dive on a previous session or d) Volunteer to run a session.

The content was arranged into 5 tracks:

1. Reaching New Audiences (Maeve Doherty)
2. Journey & Reengagement (Elcio Figueiredo)
3. Campaigning & Storytelling (Lena Karvounaki & Paula Collet)
4. Insights & Analytics (Jeff Harrison)
5. Tech & Tools (Mark Campbell)

Day 1 was intended to create a ‘Boom!’ effect to get everyone acquainted with each other and comfortable enough to start conversations.

Day 2 & 3 mostly were comprised of planned and open sessions.

On the 3rd and 4th day (final day), We took people through some exercises to reflect and go away from the camp with a set of (a) individual initiatives to take back and (b) the opportunity to form working groups to continue working on after the event.

It was a very important piece of the agenda because it meant that participants would have the opportunity to (1) change the work they do, (2) change the way their NRO works, and/or (3) work together across borders to solve issues that they might face in their office.

Participants Outcomes

The result was 150 individual takeaways and 8 working groups formed with an initial plan to move the working group forward after the Digital Camp:

1. E-Activism
2. WhatsApp testing and sharing
3. Love & Optimise your Leads for TFR Conversion
4. Digital Project Planning Guide (or A better world for our digital projects — let’s build it together!)
5. ControlShift Community of Practice
6. Content Creators United
7. GDPR — General Data Protection Regulation
8. Best practises GP sharing platform

What’s next?

• We will be running a series of webinars to repeat some of the sessions for the people who couldn’t come to the event.
• The working groups will move forward and we will be following up to see how it’s going and if we can help make things move forward easier.
• Future regional and global skill shares will be considered based on the feedback and results from this event. It is not likely that there will be a global skill share on a yearly basis, but maybe we can split between regional and global.

If you have any questions please email Michael Parker <michael.parker@greenpeace.org> or Pasquale Gentile <pasquale.gentile@greenpeace.org>.

A very BIG thank you to everyone who participated and made this event special. A special thanks goes out to:

• The Greek office
• External guests — Amelia Showalter (Pantheon Analytics/Obama 2012), Salvatore Barbera (Latte Creative), Veera Juvonen (Spinas Civil Voices), Aline Muller (Unicef), Nathan Woodhull (Control Shift Labs), Kenneth Pennington (Bernie Sanders Campaign).
• Everyone who ran a session
• Mariadina Lili for the amazing logistics and doing it with a big smile.
• Alex for driving the van.
• All of the staff at Negroponte Resort
• Yannick Porter and his faciliation team: Yoel, Sina and Thetis.
• Track Leads: Jeff Harrison, Lena Karvounaki, Paula Collet, Mark Campbell, Maeve Doherty and Elcio Figueiredo.