How the P4 community selected the new Popup solution

And how this new, distributed decision model works

Besides facilitating community spaces and making product-related decisions, an important part of the Planet 4 team’s work is to support stakeholders to select and use non-core / 3rd party tools needed to improve local engagement initiatives.

This practice is quite common among networks of organisations embracing globally shared systems, as it helps templates’ sharing, enables faster rollouts for newcomers and allows more competitive prices, due to bulk — purchase of licences.

An example of this type of effort is how we supported the Planet 4 community in selecting a new pop up tool, a feature not part of P4 core but still enabled through the platform.

The idea and the alternatives

It all started when a member of the community submitted an idea for ‘modal window popups”. Those popups would be used to engage with website users in a multitude of ways, depending on the context (link to petition or donation pages, embed content or breaking news).

The team then looked at how the solution could be implemented within the P4 system and identified three solid alternatives:

1. Provide the popups functionality within the Wordpress site using plugins
2. Design popup on third party platforms and serve them on the P4 site using Google Tag Manager
3. Develop a custom plugin directly in P4 to serve the popup functionality

The requirement analysis

What we did first was to look at which tools and solutions were already being used by the different offices of the Greenpeace network, to come up with a big list, matching what was already used with other solutions.

While quickly discarding the 3rd option (developing a plugin just for popups would have been a massive undertaking, for a non-core feature), we focused on the first two approaches: the plugin-based ones and the 3rd party tools. From an initial list of 17 tools, 10 were shortlisted and 4 ultimately evaluated.

There was a list of criteria we took into consideration which included:

• Features
• Pricing
• Integrations
• Account structure

We then listed all the requirements and established priorities that the ideal solution must or could have.

Some examples from the requirements list we used to analyse the list

The shortlist of solutions that covered most of the requirements included two Wordpress Plugins and two 3rd-party tools. After spending some time in testing, running demos and speaking with vendors, the Planet 4 team also made a recommendation for the best solution for each category.

The process by which the P4 community selected the new Popup solution

The voting and selection

Once these four solutions were clear, we shared the shortlist with our stakeholders, together with a list of requirements. We also provided demo videos from our testing and shared trial accounts to test the tools. And we shared all the preparatory work with the community during two community calls and walked them through the process.

Each National Regional Office (NRO) had 5 points to allocate between their preferred options, ideally leaving a comment or reason for such preference/s. In the end, the successful tool was the one with most points, a 3rd party tool called OptiMonk.

The Implementation

Once the community reached a consensus, the Planet 4 team dealt with the administrative side of things:

• Took care of the contract.
• Put together some essential documentation and looked for the resources available from the tool.
• Created the necessary accounts and granted access to the community.
• Offered trial accounts for NROs which had not yet decided whether to use the tool or not.
• Support the community with access and setting up the first popups.

Next steps

Now that the popup solution is the same across p4 sites, the community has the ideal space to start sharing campaign templates and designs within the networks of organizations. This would be something that the entire community could benefit from and would also help us be more agile and responsive as this is so much needed in the reality we operate today.

Last, but not least, we hope we managed to put in place a process that could be easily replicated for future situations of distributed decision making inside the community.

Let us know if your community or organization already has a distributed decision model in place and what that looks like, by commenting below, tweeting at #planet4 or via email.

*This post has been written in collaboration with Luca Tiralongo and Julia Mente.