The Project

FairSay was commissioned to analyse the performance of the Greenpeace UK's digital campaigning performance. Despite being excellent campaigners, Greenpeace UK had little insight into how it was performing online except through some shallow measures like open/click rates and web statistics. FairSay's task was to analyse the performance of the last two years of activity, compare it to best practice indicators and sector benchmarks, identify strengths and weakness and make recommendations for improving based on GP UK's goals and priorities.

Jamie Woolley's experience

"We commissioned Duane and the FairSay team to evaluate our performance in recruiting new supporters, retaining those we recruited, and increasing their participation. We knew there were many areas where we could improve our practices and this work was central to our programme of improvements. One of the key benefits of employing FairSay is that their work with other NGOs and not-for-profits allows them to provide benchmarking against the rest of the sector, providing a valuable wider context to our internal analysis.

With access to our advocacy and email databases, the team were able to pinpoint areas where we performed well and those where there was room for improvement. The recommendations ranged from those requiring small amounts of resources delivering good returns, to those that demand greater resources but will provide commensurate results over time.

Specific recommendations produced immediate benefits: adopting an automatic opt-in policy for our email actions has obviously increased recruitment rates and is rapidly becoming standard in advocacy circles, but this external validation helped bolster the case for making a small but crucial change. Other recommendations provided the impetus to prioritise changes that had already been discussed but not enacted, with similar results. Displaying social proof (such as live counts of emails sent to a target) and encouraging sharing at various stages in our communications are both now standard practice in our campaigns after we saw significant improvements in conversion and social recruitment..

The challenge with a comprehensive review such as the one we received was the wealth of solutions it presented, and finding the time to address them all. Those requiring greater time and development - such as welcome and reactivation plans for our email subscribers - are still on the list of things to tackle in the not-too-distant future. So we’ll be reaping the benefits of this analysis for some time to come.