Web Sites’ Administrative Tools: Mailing List Manager
Admin tools for the mailing lists allowed us to segment and customize messages to various lists.
Prior to 2001, in-house web editors at Greenpeace had no access to or control over e-newsletter subscribers’ data. All communication with e-newletter subscribers was mediated through an account manager at a contract web hosting provider.
Effective January 2001, I established for Greenpeace a web hosting and software development relationship with Two Radical Technologies, a move which reduced the organization’s web hosting costs by 98% per month.
After working with 2Rad’s developers to replicate core functionality that had been proprietary to Greenpeace’s previous hosting firm, I wrote the specifications for a Mailing Lists Manager that allowed us to quickly view the number of subscribers for each electronic mailing list, find a subscriber either by name or by e-mail address, add a subscriber, and create new lists.
Mailing Lists Manager allowed Web Editors to preset uniquely a variety of elements related to each list.
The Mailing Lists Manager also gave Greenpeace web editors complete control over a variety of mailing list settings.
Editors could enter text for a preset welcome message and determine whether or not a message is automatically sent to new subscribers, determine text to be post-fixed to every unique mailing, set the “from” and “reply to” addresses uniquely for each list, enter a short description which appears dynamically in the Subscription Center on the main web site, and determine whether or not a list is available to the public.
This feature was particularly useful for Greenpeace as it allowed the organization to communicate electronically with its members via a private list but centralized the control of all lists in one tool.
Web Sites’ Administrative Tools: Take Action Tool
Modularizing the addition of actions to various sites saved time and standardized the look and feel of action opportunities thus lowering the barrier to action.
Creating, editing, and getting response statistics for online actions was another key piece of functionality that was mediated by Greenpeace’s web hosting provider prior to January 2001.
Working from specifications I created, 2Rad developers coded a centralized Take Action Tool which allowed Greenpeace web editors to manage all facets of online actions.
The Take Action Tool evolved over time from the original specification which called only for the web editors to be able to add and either make active or inactive online actions. When feedback from Greenpeace’s e-activists indicated they were curious about the results of actions in which they had participated, I wrote the specifications for an Action Results Center which was dynamically tied to the Take Action Tool.
Creation of the Action Results Center required that we associate each online action with a particular campaign or initiative by creating the “action type” flag. Since an online action might not fit within one of Greenpeace’s campaign areas, I also specified that editors should have the ability to create new action types in real-time. As the organization came to use online activism more heavily, we found that some online actions, such as those with public comment periods bounded by specific deadlines, were only useful if they could be set to expire automatically. The ability to do this was also added to the Take Action Tool’s original specifications. Centralizing the control over each of these items simplified the user interface for Greenpeace’s web editors.
Greenpeace USA became part of the Greenpeace Planet system in 2007 adopting a new design and a new information architecture.
