Hacking Climate Policy
Our first mission as unanimous was to fuel traction around Klimaatzaak. What the heck is Klimaatzaak? It is a citizen movement that is suing the Belgian state on the ground that it is not doing enough to protect its citizens against the effects of global warming. A similar initiative in the Netherlands has managed to succeed in court to the effect of inflecting the climate policy.
We had to board that ship because it is exactly why we live and breath : hack new ways to empower citizens, onboard climate-conscious sympathizers, explore the territories beyond petition … make the internet relevant.
When we managed to get the attention of the Klimaatzaak team, they had a notoriety problem. Being a flemish movement they managed to enroll celebrities and recruit 11.000 plaintives. Only 600 of these were french speaking. They also had a usability problem but they didn’t knew about it. We decided to strike on two fronts.
Facebook : tackle Notoriety
We settled to tackle the notoriety issue by doing a coordinated campaign on Facebook. Facebook is a wonderful tool when you want to communicate on something positive. Our positive message message was : “Now you can do something rather than complaining”. We then produced a 1 minute video than became a 30 second video because, you know, less is really more, especially in a video, especially on Facebook. Subsequently we did an underground work on recruiting an army of sympathiser. Friends, familly, usual suspects, trendsetters, activists … every single progressive minded french Belgian was briefed and tooled to come out on January 17th. They were asked to go public in a status stating they enrolled as co-plaintiff and share the video. As we didn’t have the ability to leverage vertical endorsement by celebrities we went for horizontal, viral, peer-to-peer endorsement.
Product : Remove Friction
After planning the message and its dissemination we had to make sure we would be able to effectively recruits all that curiosity gathered on Facebook. And picture the process that was in place : I’m enthusiast so I go to the website, I fill in a form, I receive a pre-filled PDF and I am supposed to send it back to the team. By SNAIL MAIL! Stamped! Excuse my french, it was a mess. We have to change this.
First step is to convince the lawyer. His problem is to build opposability if some sneaky pervert send phony applications. We proved him that an online application authenticated by SMS would be quite opposable. Add robot detection and various other techniques to that mix and it became obvious that what we proposed was more opposable than the previous technique. Lawyer is sold. Goodbye stamps! We are ready for an online-only experience.
D-day
On d-day we sent messenger reminders to all our contacts and went live with the video. And happily witnessed the counter going up as people were signing-in as plaintives and sharing the video. Growth was super significative. The movement had grown by 30% on the first two days of the campaign.
Lessons learned
(i) Removing friction is the central
By my estimates there were at least 6000 people that were willing to apply but were not able to go through the old process. They immediately enrolled once we published the online-only form. This was a +50% in one month hack. Pretty significative.
(ii) The importance of social validation
Enrolling a armada of secret influencers before going public really helped catalyse the Facebook campaign effect. We really needed social validation to help remove the inhibitions.
(iii) One day of Facebook celebrity guarantees Media Access
Start with social media campaigns before sending your press release. Once you have reached the intersections of your network and the journalists’ you exists. If you appear more than once in their radar the same day you are a “phenomenon”.
