Every time we see traffic coming from a discussion forum pointing out that the Kleercut campaign site is using the popular Drupal open-source content-management system, it becomes more convincing that there is a philosophical or political alignment between the progressive community and the free-software movement.
When we look further and find the Wikipedia entry on Kimberly-Clark and Kleenex, an article on CorpWatch and another in the ever-popular Grist magazine — all sites supported by free and open-source software — it became a sign that we needed to speak up and add our story to the growing collection of literature on grassroots, open-source-powered campaigns.
It’s simple: Kimberly-Clark, the world’s largest manufacturer of tissue products, famous for its Kleenex brand, destroys ancient forests around the world. It does this to create consumer products that are used once and then thrown away or flushed down the toilet. Kimberly-Clark has been linked to the clear-cutting of ancient forests in Canada and the United States, including forests that are home to threatened wildlife like the woodland caribou and wolverine. The Kleercut campaign is an international corporate campaign to pressure Kimberly-Clark to clean up its act.
The Kleercut campaign launched in mid-November 2004 and has steadily grown into one of the more successful online forest campaigns in recent Canadian history. Month-over-month, more activists have visited the site, taken action, spread the word to others and joined the Forest Defenders e-mail list, which has grown at rate of about 1000 new sign-ups each month.
At the core of the Kleercut.net Web site is the highly regarded Drupal content-management system — that much is obvious to most folks who take time to look under the hood. Although the campaign is only taking advantage of a small number of the available features, Drupal has proven itself (once again) to be lightweight, fast and flexible enough to meet a wide range of online campaigning needs.
However, the campaign’s success and growth are less about technology than about the open source networks that support projects like Drupal and CivicSpace. Specifically, it is the people, the ideas, and the free exchange of information across progressive activist networks that have helped to make the Kleercut campaign possible. From the dedicated Greenpeace forest campaigners, communications and Web staff, and volunteers — who are spread across Canada and the U.S. and working 24-7 — to the far-flung network of progressive “geeks” and online publications that have provided key direction and promotion at critical points in the campaign’s development. These networks have organically come together when needed to breathe life into a logo, a Web site and a simple idea: it isn’t necessary to wipe away ancient forests just to have Kleenex tissue paper.
At a very basic level, Drupal provides the public face for the campaign on the Web. It also has made it possible for campaigners to update the bilingual site at a moment’s notice — keeping the work of dedicated volunteer activists and their important campaign updates front and centre. This includes everything from adding new fact sheets, campaign material, and activist toolkits, to photo galleries of Greenpeace forest campaigners and volunteer activists adopting a local grocery store or challenging Kimberly-Clark on its own turf. We’ve also used Drupal effectively to list Kleercut events happening in communities across Canada and the U.S.
Sometime in August 2004, several small gatherings were held at Greenpeace to discuss a soon-to-be-launched anti-corporate campaign. In those meetings the campaign objectives, the strategy for achieving them and the tactics to be employed were all detailed. Drupal and CivicSpace were both discussed early on. There was a push to stay focused on the campaign plan and not the technology and eventually we ended up with a campaign calendar and a preliminary wire frame of the site and no firm technology commitments.
As the details were worked out, the Vancouver-based design studio Cowie and Fox worked magic on the Kleercut logo and branding.
Our next obstacle was determining how to empower online activists to get involved with the campaign through a series of interactions, like signing online petitions, sending targeted faxes and e-mails to Kimberly-Clark decision makers, forwarding postcards to friends, and receiving regular communication from the Kleercut campaigners about specific actions.
The challenge for the Kleercut campaign was that free and open-source campaign toolsets available in September 2004 were either:
Early on, we had contacted Zack Rosen from CivicSpace to ask about the status of phpList integration with Drupal or the CivicSapce project. Zack had been in touch with phpList’s developer, Michiel, to discuss the work that was being done on a mass-mailer module that would be able to connect to a variety of database-driven mailing engines. We also pulled Mike Gifford of OpenConcept into the conversation to explore the work he had done to integrate other similar tools into the back-end content-management system.
(Since then, several modules have been developed for CivicSpace to support advocacy, including petitions, tell-a-friend tools and a targeted e-mail delivery.)
Along the way, we also explored the following options:
In each case, the people we connected with were helpful beyond words; it was an illustration of the fluidity and openness in the network that connects so many of the progressive software developers and tech-oriented activists.
Ultimately, it was timing that pushed us to look at other options for the e-mail deployment and, ultimately, for the rest of the activist toolset that exists on the Kleercut.net site. The final decision to use Drupal instead of the CivicSpace branch for basic content management was a last minute choice made on a plane between Toronto and San Francisco. The Drupal team had announced a new stable release; CivicSpace was still based on an earlier version of Drupal. The user interface and theme engine improvements made the choice clear: the site had to be built in the next week and there wasn’t time to wait for CivicSpace to merge the newer version of Drupal into its code.
Over the course of the campaign, many “weak connections” (what social-network enthusiast would loosely refer to as people you know who aren’t close friends or family) have helped an organic network of dedicated and talented Web developers, online strategists and traditional campaigners coalesce into a well-organized and well-connected team. This is happening across North America and the world: from the early work done to mobilize for the historic Battle for Seattle, the Quebec City Summit or the more recent counter-conventions to the Republican National Convention and G8 gatherings.
An integral part of these mobilizations is the trust networks that are built over time, through face-to-face interactions. Groups like the Aspiration Technology Foundation in the U.S. is catalyzing these networks through events like the Advocacy Developers Convergence, Penguin Day and the SMSsummit or SMSactive. Similar, but much larger and focused on a range of communications issues, are events like the Designs on Democracy conference. And, for the past four years in British Columbia (that’s in Canada for all you Yanks!), a small group of people have gathered on Cortes Island — surrounded by old growth forest and ocean — to have an intimate discussion about the role of integrity, reflection, relationships and technology in campaigning, advocacy and social change.
It was though gatherings and networks like these that we were able to learn about the approaches and tools being used across the U.S. and Canada and to meet the people behind them. One organization at these gatherings was the recently launched ActionWorks.ca* — a social enterprise that was started to support the work of WildCanada.net, with the aim of offering their action centre technology to other NGOs as an earned-income initiative.
(*Sadly, ActionWorks has recently announced to its clients that it will not be able to continue and will be closing its doors. This leaves a relatively large hole in the landscape of advocacy tools for bilingual Canadian campaigns. If you know about French language tools in Quebec or France that are off the radar, please let us know!)
On November 18, 2004, the Kleercut.net site launched in English and French with full ActionWorks.ca integration to deliver bilingual e-mail and fax advocacy, send-to-a-friend postcards, “my actions” pages, and e-mail list management.
The next several months were a combination of building momentum and awareness around the campaign, both online and, more importantly, off-line — on the streets and in the stores where people shop. Street engagement, press conferences and store adoptions helped to build interest and intensity and made for great imagery on the Web site. Short articles and blog posts covered a range of Greenpeace-supported actions and a growing number of volunteer-supported actions. And, finally, we reached out to progressive online publications and news media like Grist, Corporation Watch, and Indymedia.org to amplify the message, in addition to working with tongue-in-cheek initiatives like Act for Love, the online dating site for activists.
In addition to the online articles and cross-site promotion of the campaign, Greenpeace Canada leveraged its own mailing list, in addition to using lists run by Greenpeace International and WildCanada.net, to increase the reach of the campaign to more than 150,000 activists in Canada and Europe. There was also outreach to a number of well-trafficked blogs and discussion forums to raise the issue of forest destruction and to point people to the Kleercut.net site. It’s rumoured that there will be even more covert “electronic-ops” in the months to come (though we can’t tell you exactly what).
What’s been most interesting to watch is the steady climb of the Kleercut site in Google’s rankings, as more and more network capital is built at a grassroots level. The more sites that get out the Kleercut message and point back to the site, the higher the ranking. Six months ago, the site didn’t even rank on Google — as of July 2005, the site is about No. 8 when searching for Kleenex and Kimberly-Clark.
We’re aiming for No. 1.
In addition to putting the pressure on Kimberly-Clark on the Web, the campaign has been building a grassroots network of local activists across Canada and, more recently, the United States. Building on the experience of campaigns like the Billionaires for Bush in the U.S. — which leveraged a large network of local chapters to deliver innovative street theatre (capturing national media attention) — tools were launched to support local autonomous organization, specifically the Kleercut Groups (powered by the open source Sympa mailing list and hosted at NPOgroups.org) and the Kleercut Action Pack.
We realized early on that the success of our online activism is very closely tied to the success of our grassroots “in person” activism. They are very interrelated and support each other. We firmly believe that a campaign is successful when it bridges the technology gap and is based on coalition building and empowering the average person to take action.
Action Pack in hand, motivated and environmentally concerned citizens are taking a stand in their community and saying no to ancient forest destruction by Kimberly-Clark and Kleenex. Already there have been store adoptions from coast-to-coast across Canada and the U.S., and there are more local groups forming every day. The objective: a one-on-one, neighbor-to-neighbor, citizen-to-citizen movement that delivers the message along with the trust that exists in those local networks. The result: a magnitude of increased consumer pressure on Kimberly-Clark to end its environmentally irresponsible practices.
And there is much more being planned...new tools, new actions and new partners on the campaign. To stay tuned and to get updates, please take one minute right now to join the Forest Defenders list, to take action and send a message to Kimberly-Clark and to spread the word about this campaign.
If you’d like to help even more, please post a link to this article on your site (or reproduce it entirely). And, if you’re a Web developer, Flash designer, blogger, online campaigner, writer, editor, illustrator or just plain talented and pissed-off at Kleenex, please get in touch with us.
The Kleercut campaign team,
Christy, Earl, Eric, Phillip and Richard.