Building a Community for Greenpeace Volunteers

Roles: Community manager, UX researcher

Project Overview

Greenwire was an international project designed to connect and manage Greenpeace volunteers across different countries. Initially developed by Greenpeace Netherlands, our office (Greenpeace Russia) became one of the pilot offices to localize and adapt the platform for Russian volunteers.

The project team evolved over time:

• Core team: 4–9 staff members

• Volunteer moderators/community managers: ~11 people

The Russian version of Greenpeace was launched in 2013 and operated until 2023, when Greenpeace Russia was closed.

The Challenge

Russia’s vast geography made it difficult to maintain strong connections with volunteers nationwide. We needed:

• A management tool for coordinating events and activities

• A community space to foster horizontal connections between volunteers, even across distant cities

Initial Approach

We started with a simple version of the website:

• Focus: Events and communication features

• Goal: Start interacting with users quickly to learn their needs, expectations, and behaviors through real-world usage

As an early pilot office, we actively tested, reported bugs, and co-developed new features with the international team.

Second Version

As the community grew, we shifted towards a structured engagement pathway based on Greenpeace’s "Ladder of Engagement" model — a framework categorizing supporters into six levels of involvement (from passive observers to active local leaders).

Key improvements:

• New sections: Organization info, local groups, events, resources for teachers and professionals

• Better support for users at different engagement levels. Online training opportunities

• We created extensive support pages like “How to Start,” “For Teachers,” and “Toolkits.”

(Yes, looking back, the menu became massive — but the idea was to give users access to every resource and opportunity.)

UX Research

Despite adding many features, analytics showed disappointing results. Many visitors did not engage with the platform after registration.

To understand the problem deeply, we conducted a three-phase UX research:

1. SUS (System Usability Scale)

• Goal: Get a quick, quantitative measure of usability

• Result: 58.5 out of 100 (Below 60 suggests serious usability issues → deeper research needed)

2. User Survey

We created a detailed survey focusing on two areas:

Goal 1: Identify technical pain points

Goal 2: Understand user profiles (background, motivations, interests)

Survey Design:

• Mostly multiple-choice questions with optional open-text fields

• Balanced breadth (quantitative) and depth (qualitative)

• 17% response rate (solid for a large user base)

  Insights:

  • Confusing navigation

  • Overwhelming first steps

  • Misalignment between user needs and content structure
    

  User Quote:
  "I entered the 'First Steps' section. There were so many things like local groups and activities. It was hard to find my bearings; I wanted to explore everything at once."

  3. User Interviews

  • Goal: Deepen understanding of survey findings

  • Participants: Diverse mix of the most active members (different levels of activity, roles, cities, ages)
    

  Focus Areas:

  • Expectations

  • Navigation struggles

  • Specific task flows (e.g., signing up for events, connecting with others)

    Outcome

    Based on the research:

    • We redesigned the platform architecture

    • Simplified navigation and welcome experience

    • Prioritized task-oriented flows over information overload

    • Created a new onboarding journey as an e-learning functionality so people can choose their time to learn, have a bit of gamification, and follow a clear pathway. 

    
    

    Key Takeaways

    • Early MVPs are vital for learning but must evolve with growing communities.

    • Combining quantitative and qualitative research provided a full picture of user challenges and helped build a more human-centered platform.

    • As in a lot of aspects, less is more, and users should see a clear path.