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Once upon a time, we discovered…

from Dogmatic Defenders to Champions of the Impossible
from Dogmatic Defenders to Champions of the Impossible

For the last several weeks, a beautifully mixed group of 30+ people and I have been working on the Content Strategy and Story work stream of the Planet 4 project.

Our goal was to create a style guide for content and messaging, but we lucked out. A huge body of work already existed that had this goal in mind – the work of the Story Team. In fact, there’s even a document that’s called “the Greenpeace Brand Guide”, which we could use as a jumping off point for our Story and Content guide, the main deliverable of our collection work within the Discovery Phase.

We kicked off our work with a special call on the Content Strategy and Story. 3 main documents and associated tasks were shared:

Some guidance notes helped us become oriented to the tasks at hand, and we talked about how to accomplish these tasks. I introduced the spreadsheet to collect the outputs of our work.

The spreadsheet has 4 tabs.

  • The “inventory”, with high-level docs that guide the tone/voice of Greenpeace (as an organization)
  • A variety of “job stories”
  • Good and bad “messaging examples”.
  • Our ideas to revamp the “brand guide” – which parts could be reused, what is missing, what should not be included.

We discussed this work in the Engagement Community Calls, and eventually came up with our final deliverable, the wiki Story Guide. We decided to use the acronym S.T.O.R.Y. cause in the end, that’s what it is, right? In details:

A fundamental, complementary section is about Mindsets: Stories we live by, which details a number of cultural and social beliefs that have become common in our modern societies. Finally, there’s some links to other Greenpeace style and story guides.

Thanks to this fine group of folks and everyone who has been contributing to the complete overhaul of Greenpeace’s web presences. The Discovery phase collected and consolidated pre-existing work to inform the upcoming phase, the Concept Phase.

This work will continue to grow and evolve. We put it on a wiki for a reason! We’re looking forward to seeing how the community reacts to this work, so please have a look and leave us your comments!

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