How does it work?

Greenpeace Spain had a cross-departmental group called the Online Group, which consisted of representation from fundraising, digital, offline mobilisation, database management, and others (you can read more about that group here).

The group tackled one incredibly important project: integrating the organization’s various databases into one, cross-departmental database.

That shared database includes information on actions people have taken online, donations they’ve made, and events they’ve attended.

“Different departments were silo’d. Often one was in competition with other departments to promote their activities, and there wasn’t a real collaboration between departments. In Volunteers we had cyberactivist lists. But those were not coordinated with the people who had the member database. That was a traditional database for people who had donated. And there was a database of supporters. So we were emailing about cyberactions and sometimes it was almost the same people who were volunteers, cyberactivists and supporters. They maybe got the info three times. We were not coordinated.”
– Araceli Segura, Volunteer Coordinator

What’s the impact?

  • Supporter-centric view: Having a shared database obviously helps different departments coordinate their communications and avoid sending conflicting messages to their supporters. But it also helped all teams think more closely about the supporter experience, from the perspective of the people they were trying to reach.

“We don’t want supporters to only pay a donation. If we have 100,000 supporters, we want to have 100,000 activists. We need to integrate all the databases because we consider that one supporter as a potential activist.”
– Mario Rodríguez Vargas, Executive Director

  • More than tech: Integrating databases is obviously a big win from a technological perspective. But it also breaks down barriers between teams internally. As Eva Saldana said:

“Before that it was really crazy. Fundraising might say no, those are my people. Other departments might say no these are my people. That was crazy. Now it doesn’t happen anymore. We have all the people together. That is the power, we can use all this information to work together, to put all this energy into our project.”
– Eva Saldaña Buenache, Mobilisation Director