Deploying a new technology via community advocacy: the P4 Form Builder
How 5 community case studies made the difference in the release of a new feature
* This post is co-authored with Suzi Grishpul
Community empowerment is the star around which Planet 4 revolves. All product updates, major decisions and even hiring of new product team members are done by engaging with the wonderful P4 community of practitioners. How could an engagement technology be developed without actually engaging the people using it?
This is the story (well, a collection of stories) of how the release of a major new feature, the Planet 4 Form Builder, was constructed around the pivotal work of the “early adopters”, colleagues in Greenpeace offices who started using the tool earlier on and agreed to share their experience with the community.
The P4 Form Builder
As the need for different form types (Polls, Quizzes, Email-to-target, etc), the wish to integrate them with other tools, the desire to allow lots of fields and even the ability to develop on top of the solution came up, the P4 team carried out an extensive requirements gathering exercise, ultimately resulting in the idea of an omni-comprehensive solution: the Form Builder.
Powered by Gravity Forms, a well maintained plugin developed by Rocketgenius, the Form Builder allows users to create simple and complex forms to collect information on a website, and (if needed) pass that information on to other systems.
To learn more about the process of assessing needs and selecting this plugin, check the Feature Brief, the Gravity Forms Proposal and the introductory slides. Or just watch the video below👇
The change management
Once the solution was agreed and the feature developed, the P4 team decided to embark on a different path to roll it out: while in the past we built plans to push similar big features to everyone at the same time (e.g. the campaign generator), this time we decided to first roll the feature out to a few admins who expressed interest and then build our communication plan based on their experience. Within a few months, while “the buzz” on Slack built up some excitement on the tool, the pilots were already mastering and using it to engage with their audiences.
Only at that time the “Big” comms, documentation and change management activities kicked in, for the rest of the community to finally get to know and be trained to use the form builder. We essentially introduced two big community engagement efforts in the release process: the piloting and the showcasing phases.
The peak of the engagement activities were two community calls in which the pilots agreed to showcase their experiences. The recordings were chopped into individual parts of the narrative, captured in the Handbook and dispatched to the community, to allow anyone who couldn’t make it to the calls to retrieve the content.
Case Study #1: a petition in Greenpeace Brasil 🇧🇷
The first inspiring story on how this new feature helps Greenpeace to engage with people around the world is from our Brazilian colleagues, and how they created a petition using the Form Builder, connecting it with their Hubspot instance 👇
Case Study #2: a quiz in Greenpeace Greece 🇬🇷
The second Form Builder story is about a koala-themed quiz built by our Greek colleagues, who decided to use the feature to collect leads 👇
Case Study #3: two forms (connected to Marketing Cloud) in Greenpeace Aotearoa 🇳🇿
The third case Study is about how our kiwi colleagues decided to use Gravity Form to build two forms, a volunteer collection and a petition one, connecting both to their Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance👇
Case Study #4: a “deep sea quiz” in Greenpeace Belgium 🇧🇪
The fourth story is by our Belgian colleagues and how they built a “which deep sea creature are you” quiz for a lead collection campaign using the Form Builder. 👇
Case Study #5: An Email-To-Target (ETT) form in Greenpeace Switzerland 🇨🇭
The last story is powered by our Swiss colleagues, who decided to build an ETT campaign using the Form Builder (connected to Sendgrid) 👇
Pros, cons and shoutouts
If you managed to arrive at this point it should be pretty clear what the PROs of using case studies to support a new feature’s deployment are: people are super interested in learning from others, excited to share their experience and keen to avoid reinventing the wheel. Plus, this shared change management approach fosters communication, relationships and community building. What more does a product team want?
Coming to challenges, it’s a lot of behind the scenes work, which must involve the whole product team. Everyone has to chip in to scout for case studies, engage with the members, provide input, build documentation and even chop the videos!
Form builder + community moving forward
After the pilot phase, we’re ready to start working on some custom-built features on top of Gravity Forms. These features include the rollout of the Email-to-target (building on the work of GP Switzerland), the implementation of Google Analytics for forms (to track form events) and the post-submission share buttons (check out the mockups!)
A Data Storage Working Group will also kick off to identify solutions to avoid Planet 4 becoming a permanent home for data.
All the above will of course be created, carried forward, live and breathe with and by the community, how else could it be, right? .
Lastly, a BIG THANK YOU to the 5 colleagues who shared their case studies, to the whole Planet 4 community for being amazing and maybe to you for being the next member to share your awesome work with us? (see how or just holler at planet4-pm-group@greenpeace.org)
