Greenpeace at the Climate Clinic for a debate on coal vs renewables.
We've just found out we're up for another web award: The People's Choice Website of the Year Award. If you like what we do here in cyberspace, please tootle over and vote!
Strangely, we've won two other awards in the past few weeks. EfficienCity, our virtual town showcasing decentralised energy, has won the W3 Best in Show for animation. (The W3 or World Wide Web Consortium are the folks who decide the standards for the web. The criteria they judge include creativity, usability, navigation, functionality, visual design, and ease of use, so all credit to our friends at BiroCreative who built EfficienCity.)
As well as making us feel warm and fluffy (and maybe occasioning the odd free beer from our colleagues), web awards are really valuable to us; they get the word out about our campaigns to new people, some of whom like what they see and decide to get involved. That involvement - whether it's taking action or supporting us financially - is what we depend on to win campaigns.
But our work on the web is pretty much the most visible part of the work we do as an organisation; something we talk about less often is the work we do behind the scenes to pressure people in government to take the bold steps needed to protect the planet.
Our policy unit works with people from across the political arena to identify the best political targets and opportunities (including who receives the emails we sometimes ask you to write); to ensure politicians are kept up to speed with our campaigns; to disseminate quality materials; and to deliver events for MPs in Westminster and at the party conferences.
It turns out that the victims targets of this political work rate it as highly effective; MPs and House of Lords panellists have voted us the best environmental charity when it comes to communicating with parliament.
And if you've emailed, faxed or visited your MP as part of a Greenpeace campaign, this award belongs in part to you. Well done.
