Greenpeace International: The people behind our people power

Greenpeace is a global network of campaigning National and Regional Organisations (NROs), known for the mission to use people power and non-violent direct action in pursuit of a green and peaceful planet.

At the heart of our network lies a commitment to those who share our vision – our supporters around the globe. Their relationship with us is central to our mission and is at the heart of the Framework which guides our strategy and approach:

“We will put people power at the heart of our work – strengthening, amplifying and working with those who share our vision, hope and belief that a better world is possible”

In an increasingly challenging landscape for recruitment, retaining every supporter has become crucial. Growing their lifetime value and maximising their impact on our work, therefore, is a top priority. This led to Greenpeace launching the Drivers of Supporter Engagement pilot project, with eight NROs collaborating together with Greenpeace International to help improve the experience being offered to Greenpeace supporters across the globe.

We wanted to create a more engaged audience who would stand with us, donate and be the people behind our people power, as we continue to campaign for a better world.

The Greenpeace Global Fundraising Strategy is anchored around the ambition of growing our net donor numbers and our net income. This project helps us deliver against both of these ambitions.

The process: gathering global insight

In 2024, we partnered with About Loyalty to design a pilot research study that would uncover our key drivers of supporter engagement. We wanted to understand, in depth, what motivates our donors: what creates long-term engagement and value and, therefore, what we should be embedding at the heart of our supporter experiences.

Eight NROs agreed to take part in this initial pilot of the research but we are hopeful to expand this project to include more NROs in the future. We developed a range of hypotheses around why people give to Greenpeace in different countries, and what emotional connections will be core to each NRO’s long term engagement and loyalty.

We included About Loyalty’s questions to understand levels of commitment, satisfaction and trust, but we also wanted to understand how important our supporters’ values and identity are. How do their climate-related goals and fears impact on their loyalty? And which emotions are most important for us to evoke in our communications?

This led to us testing over 100 questions across the surveys in this pilot aimed at understanding their support.

Action from insight

Our goal was to understand and measure the drivers of supporter engagement – to discover what was most important in creating value for our audience at Greenpeace. The results spoke for themselves: we soon learnt that commitment, satisfaction and trust are the most significant drivers of support for us, as they are for other charities. And whilst the specifics varied, this overarching importance of commitment, satisfaction and trust was the case for every NRO in the study.

These findings highlighted what was working for each NRO, showed areas for improvement, and provided benchmarks to track their progress. It allows us to learn from offices which have different strengths and weaknesses, so we can support each other in testing ways to improve our loyalty scores. Each NRO is now able to understand the drivers of loyalty for their audiences, and how this varies across different segments.

Having a specific loyalty score for our supporters and for commitment, satisfaction and trust has enabled positive, strategic discussions in each NRO around the importance of investing in improving our supporter experience.

It’s been really valuable for us to understand just how important growing supporter engagement and loyalty is for each Greenpeace NRO, and to make the case for investment in this across the global network. The research has shown us where we need to invest to grow supporter commitment, satisfaction and trust and, perhaps more importantly, how we can learn from each other to start doing this.

By testing, understanding and improving what matters most to our supporters, we can ensure their continued commitment to our cause, securing more donations and building our people power to create stronger campaigns for a green and peaceful planet.

We now have a shared language for more detailed conversations about the importance of loyalty and its impact on income. It’s given us an important extra metric, with real substance behind it, which speaks to our organisational health that we can benchmark between offices and alongside other organisations in the outside world.

This project is already helping to inform the three-year fundraising planning cycles of a number of NROs, and we are excited to roll it out further.