Monday, December 22, 2014

Forestry, operations, supporter engagement: the stuff of Greenfleet

Reflecting on a big year at Greenfleet...

In forestry, we built on a review report early in the year, and developed the Technical Advisory Committee, revamped our site identification approaches, mapped our paper files across to our digital system, became a member of the international Gold Standard Foundation and employed a new General Manager, Re-vegetation. There are great plans for new approaches to monitoring, an innovative approach to blue carbon and the implementation of the land pipeline.

In our operations, we focused on our systems and how they enabled our staff and supporters to be better served. We took the next step of increasing the effectiveness of Salesforce by providing a direct path for our supporters to donate, launched a new clear and useful web-site, trialled a change to out accounting system from MYOB to Xero, ensured that Board papers are developed in a timely manner, communicated more regularly to all stakeholders and oversaw some staffing changes to better align skills and tasks. We will continue to build our systems through the coming years.

In our supporter engagement, we focused on the need to integrate our corporate supporters, our workplace giving and our individual supporters in a deeper engagement with Greenfleet. We re-developed our certificates, co-branded stickers and other marketing collateral, more methodically connected to our corporate supporters through email and phone calls, increased our social media presence significantly, conducted the inaugural Chairman's Lunch with corporate supporters, tried some new campaign approaches and reached out to new sectors such as superannuation and insurance to develop new products. Next year will have a major focus on new products and supporters.

Complexities and challenges remain. We face some interesting policy debates on forestry and biodiversity over the coming months. Climate change will be in the focus of our global community in Paris at the end of next year. And we struggle with the endless policy reversals of governments, as well as the naked ideology of some governments. But I think we can be fundamentally optimistic about our organisation’s future.