A New Warrior

Background

Since 1978 the Rainbow Warrior had allowed Greenpeace to gain numerous victories in their struggle to protect the planet.  However, the ship had reached the end of its natural life and the organisation needed a new ship, purpose-built for the significant challenges that lie ahead.

The problem was that Greenpeace does not accept donations from governments and corporations. To raise funds for the new ship, Greenpeace had to reach out to ordinary people around the world and get them to contribute.

Idea

Greenpeace supporters were offered the chance to purchase and own a piece of the new Rainbow Warrior at an e-commerce website: anewwarrior.com

Here visitors could buy any one of some 400,000 pieces of the new ship that were for sale at prices ranging from 1€ to 7000€. At the same time, a webcam showed them how the building of the ship was progressing in the German shipyard and a 3-D image of the ship allowed them to see how much had been donated to date.

Contributors receive a certificate of ownership and their name appears on the Contribution Wall on board the real Rainbow Warrior.

Results

Thousands of new owners posted their certificates on social networks, which created buzz and drove more trafic to the website.

With 0 euro media investment, the results to date are :

• 414,689  visitors from 171 countries
• 53,513 Items sold. Loudspeakers are sold out but there are still scuba gear and wetsuits to buy.
• So far, 301,345€  has been raised.

Our Thoughts

I don’t know if this is a completely new donation model but it looks like it. Most charities use direct marketing as a cudgel to beat the middle-classes with because guilt and shame for being relatively well-to-do clearly works. Up to a point.

What’s so fantastic about this, by contrast, is its transparency. You can see exactly where your money is going, not on admin and wages but on a pair of flippers.

What a brilliant way of getting sympathizers to become more emotionally involved. Every time you see a Greenpeace diver from now on, you’ll be shouting, “Hey, those are MY flippers.”

Ingenious too is being able to see what still needs to be bought. It’s the sort of device that gets people to return to the website a few times and maybe even to donate more than once.

Very clever thinking from DDB Paris.