Posted on: December 1st, 2009 by Reuben Turner

The launch of Greenpeace’s ‘love letters to the future’ has drawn inevitable comparisons with the Letter to the Future, a campaign which we helped the RSPB to launch here in the UK.

There’s a big difference of course, in that the Greenpeace campaign asks those who want to get involved to create their own multimedia ‘love letter’.

The RSPB campaign, meanwhile, provides people with a pre-written letter (a manifesto for a ‘green bailout’) that they can either decide to sign or not.
How obvious!

After all, the Greenpeace campaign is, at least in theory, far more in tune with modern audiences. It’s about giving people the tools to create their own actions. Allowing them to own the issue. Co-creation. User-generated content. Web 2.0.

Having said that, ‘love letters to the future’ is also chasing the same audience everyone else is chasing – the early adopters, the Twitterers, the people with their own YouTube channel. The people in fashionable trousers. Not necessarily comfy, corduroy ones.

The trouble is, while these people set the trends, they’re still a tiny minority. We tend to talk about how many people are on Twitter, rather than how many aren’t (in January this year, Twitter was only the 291st most popular website in the UK). And even on Twitter, the 90-9-1 rule applies – 1% are super users, 9% regular users, while the vast majority sign up, occasionally read other people’s tweets and not much else.
And that’s why we considered asking people to write their own letter – then rejected the idea. We did so in favour of a powerful, emotional manifesto that people can simply agree to. A manifesto for a future worthy of our children. A mass manifesto aimed at, well, pretty much everyone.

The RSPB’s Letter to the Future is aimed at the 9%, with a view to converting a good-sized proportion of the 90%. The RSPB doesn’t necessarily want or need to chase the 1%. It has a million members – more, I never tire of telling people, than the membership of all the UK’s political parties combined. It’s a movement for the majority, not the minority. But who’s thinking about them these days?

By the way, if you haven’t got the time to write your own, you can sign the RSPB’s Letter to the Future here.