Welcome to the Green Action Week 2024 Guide. The steps below will take you on a journey as you plan your Green Action Week campaign. Your activity should speak to your goal to bring about systemic change related to sustainable consumption, it should contribute to building a Sharing Community, and campaign activities should be visible and showcase tangible actions.
As part of this year’s activities, we invite you to host an exhibition featuring the artworks created during the 2023 sustainable consumption envisioning workshops. If you’re interested, click here to read more.
How to Use This Guide
This guide is a support tool to help your organisation design a creative and impactful Green Action Week campaign. You might decide on one activity or a series of activities. We encourage you to use this guide to make sure that:
- Your Green Action Week plan meets the criteria for the campaign.
- Your activity/activities connect with the change that you want to see in the world.
- You reach the people that you want to influence to bring about change.
This guide is designed to be used by a team to think through and brainstorm activities for Green Action Week. It takes your team through a step-by-step process of imagining activities that will further your existing work, elevate your call to action and broaden your reach and influence.
We suggest that you set aside dedicated time to use this planning tool in a comfortable space. You will need some drawing materials and paper, as well as sticky notes if you have them. You could start off the session by explaining to your team:
- What Green Action Week is all about (click here for more information).
- The purpose of the session, which is to come up with an exciting and impactful campaign.
- That all ideas are welcome – be creative first and practical later!
Key Elements of a Green Action Week Campaign
The aim of the global Green Action Week campaign is to boost calls for sustainable consumption and to generate greater access to sustainable goods and services. Campaign activities should try to:
- Encourage consumer action on a particular issue.
- Help build new or existing networks and partnerships.
- Showcase a solution to a pressing problem (hunger, exclusion and marginalisation, waste, etc.)
- Have a clear call to action.
- Be measurable to enable results monitoring.
- Contribute to building a sharing community.
- Incorporate ways to include vulnerable and marginalised voices, particularly of women.
The goal is to bring about larger cultural or systemic change by sharing the stories of participants around the world in Green Action Week to raise awareness of what is possible.
Planning Your Campaign
We have designed some tools to help you think through campaign activities that could strengthen your organisation’s existing work related to sustainable consumption and make sure that your campaign activity reaches the stakeholders you need to influence. A campaign activity is a great way to do something practical that can help your organisation extend its influence or showcase its solutions to current challenges to a wider network. Download the planning pack pdf here or follow the steps below.
The more we share, the more we have.
Leonard Nimoy
1) Set Your Campaign Goal
- Brainstorm campaign idea
- Address the cause, not the symptom
- Make your goal clear
a) Brainstorm Campaign Goals
Brainstorm ideas with a team. Ask everyone to write down 3 ideas for a campaign goal (take about 5 minutes), then ask them to pass their ideas to the person on their right, who will add to the idea (take about 5 minutes).
Do this until the idea has passed through everyone in the room. If you have a big team, then set a time limit like 30 minutes and then stop. Once each idea has at least three or four people’s input, ask your team to present the ideas, discuss them and decide which goal you will adopt for the campaign.
b) Address The Cause, Not The Symptom
Is your end goal a symptom or a cause? It is better to focus energy on resolving the causes of unsustainable consumption and not the symptoms. See the image of the tree below that shows the difference between these.
c) Make Your Goal Clear
Choose the most appropriate goals from the brainstorming session and write this out as the end goal of the campaign. Some examples are given below.
WE WANT TO STOP OCEAN POLLUTION
BECAUSE IT RESULTS IN CLEANER AND HEALTHIER SEAS
WE WANT TO PROMOTE RENEWABLE ENERGY
BECAUSE IT RESULTS IN SELF SUFFICIENCY AND SLOWS CLIMATE CHANGE
WE WANT TO SUPPORT SEED SOVEREIGNTY
BECAUSE IT RESULTS IN ABUNDANT INDIGENOUS FOOD IN THE FUTURE
WE WANT TO STOP CLOTHING WASTE & POLLUTION
BECAUSE IT RESULTS IN A CLEANER PLANET FOR OUR CHILDREN
What does your organisation want to do and why? Fill in the blanks.
WE WANT TO …………………………………………………………………………………….
BECAUSE IT RESULTS IN …………………………………………………………………
Select Your Stakeholders
To achieve your goal, who do you need to work with and who do you need to influence? For example, could your campaign be stronger if your organisation partnered with other organisations or institutions? And, very importantly, which stakeholders do you need to reach to bring about the change you want to see – consumers, policymakers, communities, etc.?
Plan Campaign Activities
- Brainstorm creative campaign activities that will support your goal.
- Check that campaign activities meet the Green Action Week criteria.
- Link them to a Sharing Community concept.
- Finalise your campaign activities.
a) Brainstorm Activities
Now you have a goal for your campaign, brainstorm about what activity/activities your organisation can undertake that will help you reach that goal.
Prompts to help your team to think about campaign activities could be:
- What activity/activities will bring about the desired change (your goal)?
- What activity/activities will reach the people we need to influence?
- What activities will have the most impact?
There are many ways to brainstorm ideas:
One way is to ask your team to write their ideas down on sticky notes and put them up on a wall or board (about 5-7 minutes), then give everyone about 10 minutes to add to the existing ideas or add new ones. Reject no ideas at this stage. You can then group ideas that are similar and discuss each idea with the team, selecting the ones that seem the most impactful.
b) Check That Activities Meet The Criteria
Check the activities against the criteria for a Green Action Week campaign. Do they?
- Encourage consumer action on a particular issue?
- Help build new or existing networks and partnerships?
- Showcase a solution to a pressing problem (hunger, biodiversity loss, economic/political exclusion, pollution, extractive industries, unequal access to resources and marginalisation, waste, etc.).
- Have a clear call to action?
- Enable results monitoring by being measurable?
- Incorporate ways to include vulnerable and marginalised voices, particularly of women?
- Contribute to building a Sharing Community?
The goal is to bring about larger cultural or systemic change by sharing the stories of participants around the world in Green Action Week to raise awareness of what is possible.
c) Map Your Contribution to Sharing Community
Green Action Week focuses on showcasing different elements of Sharing Community – the many different ways that we can consume more sustainably while building community collaboration to overcome some of the challenges that we face.
A sharing community is united in common visions related to strong community and cooperation networks, sustainable and safe food and farming systems, equitable access to the economy and resources, clean environments, recognition of all knowledge systems, and more.
Mark on the map where your campaign activities contribute to building Sharing Community. You can add more to the map if what you want to do is not covered here. Email us a copy of your additions so that we can update It throughout the campaign.
d) Finalise Your Activities
What activities will your organisation undertake for its campaign? Fill in the blanks.
WE WILL UNDERTAKE THE FOLLOWING ACTIVITIES
TO REACH OR INFLUENCE THE FOLLOWING STAKEHOLDERS
TO ENCOURAGE THEM TO
4) Make Your Campaign SMART
Your campaign goal and activities should be S.M.A.R.T
(Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Realistic, and Timely).
Watch this short 1-minute video explaining each step.
Specific The more specific your goal, the easier it will be to reach it!
Measurable How will you know that your activities are making the difference you want to see – whether that is raising awareness with a particular group of people, influencing policymakers, or changing behaviour.
Accountable Allocate responsibility to different team members for making it happen!
Realistic It is important to set goals and plan activities that are achievable with the resources that you have.
Timely Set deadlines for key milestones in planning, organising, hosting and promoting your campaign to make sure that it achieves maximum impact.
5) Write Your Campaign Statement
Write out your full campaign statement, see example below:
WE WANT TO USE STREET THEATRE (Campaign Activities)
TO ENCOURAGE CONSUMERS (Target Stakeholders)
TO USE RECYCLABLE SHOPPING BAGS (Campaign Purpose)
TO STOP THE USE OF PLASTIC BAGS THAT END UP POLLUTING OCEANS (Campaign Goal).
WE WANT TO ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
TO REACH/INFLUENCE ……………………………………………………………………………………………………
TO ENCOURAGE/CHANGE/SHIFT ……………………………………………………………………………………
TO RESULT IN ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
WE WANT TO
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
TO REACH/INFLUENCE
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
TO ENCOURAGE/CHANGE/SHIFT …………………………………………………………………………………………………………
TO RESULT IN …………………………………………………………………………………………………………
6) Scale Your Campaign
There are many ways to scale the impact of your campaign. You can work with partners and leverage their networks as well as your own to raise awareness of your campaign, you can make sure to invite the media to some of your campaign events, you can share your images and stories in the lead up to and during the campaign, and you can actively participate in Green Action Week global activities. See below for how to get involved.
- Tag your social media posts with #greenactionweek2024 and #SharingCommunity so that we can share on our platforms and networks, and remember to tag us @GreenActionWeek
- Participate in the co-created webinar series with participants to share knowledge across countries and regions.
Join Green Action Week 2024
Once you’ve planned your activity, fill in the form via the link below and we’ll be in touch.
