How Greenpeace rolled out an engagement platform globally

Implementation breakdown, rollout plan, challenges and lessons learned during this journey

*This post has been written in collaboration with Andrada Radu

This week Greenpeace completed the 23-month journey of rolling out Planet 4 across the organisation. Since we published the implementation plan, right after the launch of the pilot site, we had a long way ahead to finish shaping the plan and documentation that would allow us to complete the rollout of 45 sites in different National / Regional Offices (NROs) around the world.

We quickly found out that replacing 45 institutional websites in less than 2 years was aggressive, given that the same development team was planning to work on both content migration and the product roadmap. But having a clear plan, allocating one team member to focus entirely on implementations, and constantly referring to the Handbook made this possible.

Here’s how the product team and our colleagues around the globe working on each implementation managed to complete the rollout before the end of 2019, allowing the decommission of the current CMS and its servers in early 2020.

Breaking down the implementation plan

To allow multiple implementations at the same time, empower offices to proceed independently and provide the same amount of guidance and support to everyone, the team decided to break down the implementation plan in 3 phases (Preparation, Deployment and Go Live). The result was an average implementation time of 3 months, with the shortest done in 1 month and the longest in 6.

The tasks needed for each implementation were roughly estimated and given upfront to NROs to have an overview of the amount of work required and the duration of the implementation. Key factors that would affect the duration of each implementation were local resources, the number of languages in the site and the experience of the team members in the office implementing.

Phase #1 — Preparation

The purpose of this phase is for each office to rethink their content strategy to follow a taxonomy-based navigation that would better reflect current campaigns and activities happening in their region. Besides this, performing an accurate content audit is a key step to identify what to migrate to Planet 4 from the previous system, what to archive and what to re-write in a more engaging way.

Challenges and lessons learned

• Mindset change to adopt a new way of navigation. A new navigation system involves change management, particularly around the switch from an accordion (dropdown) menu to a more minimalistic menu on top, with tags and categories supporting navigation. Good documentation and examples from pilot offices facilitated this process.
• Creating a new taxonomy. It’s easy to just keep creating tags and categories for every topic, but this adds complexity to the navigation. Organising group brainstorming workshops with local teams helped in creating a better taxonomy.
• Detaching from old content. Some offices initially requested to migrate all their content (from 3,000 to 10,000 posts!) to P4, ignoring the chance a new website gives, to get a fresh start with the most recent and visited content. Constantly revisiting the mission of the new system made it easier to let go from some old content.
• Focus on the goal. In most cases, NRO teams were working on other projects while implementing Planet 4. Setting deadlines and constantly reminding about those, helped to keep focus on the implementation.

Phase #2 — Deployment

The purpose of this phase is to set up the infrastructure, populate the site and train editors. Each office is provided with a WP instance with Planet 4 theme and plugins and the focus is on creating content. The development team works on the migration of the selected content from Planet 3 to Planet 4 by running a scraper script in Planet 3 that generates an XML file to be then imported into Planet 4 with the new taxonomy. The migrations consist of 3 iterations with the same script to allow offices to test content quality and spot blocking issues before the final migration to production.

Challenges and lessons learned

• Learning the new system. Change is not easy, especially for those who have worked with the same CMS for many years. Providing trainings for different type of users (editor, advanced editor and Administrator), creating written and video documentation, and introducing colleagues to a practitioners’ community where they can share challenges and best practices, facilitated the learning process.
• Integrating custom systems. Planet 4 has an integration with a global (internally endorsed) petition system. However some offices use different systems, and finding a way to integrate their custom system in P4 was not always easy.
• Adjusting the system to fit all languages. Some alphabets required a change from the standard P4 fonts or needed additional development (like support for right-to-left reading alphabets). Providing a flexible tool to fulfil these needs has increased the system’s potential to achieve greater impact.
• Understanding cultural differences. Some people might let you know immediately if something is not on the right track, while others would wait for the weekly meeting to share it. If there are tasks with tight deadlines, make sure to have check ins often and always respect the different approach to challenges, delays and communication. Also be aware of considering different time zones when planning meetings.
• Migrate from a different system. Some offices were migrating to Planet 4 from a system different than Planet 3 so additional adjustments to the script needed to be done.
• Finding the right ownership balance. Offices own their website, and the Planet 4 team aim was to guide them and steer them to create the right site to fit local context and objectives. For deadline reasons or for unclarity on roles, the risk of the product team doing the actual work instead of the local office was a serious challenge we faced. Sticking to the process and keeping constant communication helped to ensure we were on track and right ownership of the local team.

Phase #3 — Go live

Once the website is ready and approved, and all functionality and analytics setup have been tested, the infra team does their magic to make greenpeace.org/[ Office-name ] point to the Planet 4 server and make the site live. Once live, a post-live check and some follow up activities take place, such as creating a DataStudio dashboard to better visualise the KPIs tracked in the site.

Challenges and lessons learned

• Launch according to the date planned. Most offices launched as planned, with some it was more difficult than others because of external events, holidays or just too much work. It was important to have constant progress checks to ensure the date of launch was realistic, in the case it was not then we needed to be flexible to change the date while careful not to impact other implementations.
• Coordinate a globally dispersed team around a single task. When working in a global project where developers, project managers, community managers and editors are dispersed, trying to agree on a time of launch can be hard. Analyse the best option, and make sure to have agreement amongst all the involved parties and communicate it.
• High availability and fast response. Bug fixes and new features in the product might sometimes have an impact on the implementation process. Make sure the team is aware of these changes, and is available to address any technical challenge.
• Recognise your mistakes. While implementing up to 12 sites at the same time many mistakes will happen and things will be forgotten. Be brave. Be solution orientated when these situations occur and learn from every challenge. It will motivate both you and the team.

Planet 4 presence per country

The rollout

Pilot

We had a plan, but not much specifics and documentation about the tasks involved. The pilot office, Greece, helped us have a more realistic idea of the amount of work required and allowed us to come up with a more realistic work plan for the early adopters.

Early Adopters

After Greece, came a waterfall implementation including New-Zealand, India, Netherlands, Brazil and Canada. The 5 early adopters helped us consider more aspects of offices with different characteristics, like multilingual, different petition and fundraising systems and overall different strategies and ways of creating content. These implementations helped us gather all the documentation needed to achieve a more mature Handbook that would enable the offices coming after these, to have a more self-guided experience.

3 Waves

The remaining 37 implementations were done in waves of around 12 NROs each. This planning would allow contingency room for delays due to unexpected events and would also allow capacity for other members from the development team to work on something else other than implementations, like bug fixes or new features that would keep us moving Planet 4 forward towards our vision.

Overview of number of offices implementing per month — Difference in colours indicate a different migration within the same month.

The above graph shows the overview of implementations done per month considering all phases of the implementation. The 3 waves can be seen more clearly in the graph below, which represents the development effort done by the development team for the migrations of content from Planet 3 to Planet 4.

Development effort of implementations per week (After Early adopters)

The effort required from the development team to work on the implementations was on average around 15% of the capacity of the team throughout the entire roll out period. Which can be translated into a total of approximately 1200 hours given our team during this period was made up of 3 back end developers and 1.5 front end developers.

With each implementation our community grew larger, and stronger. We have come closer by working together, sharing knowledge and supporting each other in our mission to make the change we want to see in our planet. It has been a long and enriching journey that has helped improved Planet 4 and reinforced collaboration between teams ❤

Get in touch!

Planet 4 is an open source project and we invite everyone to contribute so that together we make it the right tool that empowers people to make this world a better place. If you want to know how to contribute please reach out to the Planet 4 team by email or commenting in this post.