Case Study 2

Public interest groups claim to work for the good of the whole society, not just one part of it. Public interest groups often have very different ideas as to how to improve society. Many public interest groups tackle a number of related issues. Greenpeace, for example, works to protect ecosystems around the world and to educate the public about dangers to the environment. They are a huge organization built around fixing the environment and making the world a better place. Greenpeace is a non-governmental organization that was started back in 1972 in Vancouver, BC. The founders of Greenpeace started it all in the late 1960s when the U.S had plans for a nuclear weapon test in the island of Amchitka, which is one of the worlds most earthquake-prone regions. In 1970 they sailed ships off towards Amchitka to stop the U.S from detonating another bomb there. Even though they got sent back, they felt sympathy for the protesters and decided not to continue with their plans to set of the bombs at that location.
Greenpeace is now an organization, which uses non-violent, creative confrontation to expose global environmental problems, and to force the solutions, which are essential to a green and peaceful future. This being their main mission they have many different ways that they go about doing this. These are some ways listed by them of how they are living up to their mission statement, by doing things like: Catalyzing an energy revolution to address the number one threat facing the planet: climate change. Defending the oceans by challenging wasteful and destructive fishing, and creating a global network of marine reserves. Protecting the world's ancient forests and the animals, plants and people that depend on them. Working for disarmament and peace by tackling the causes of conflict and calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. Creating a toxic free future with safer alternatives to hazardous chemicals in today's products and manufacturing, and Campaigning for sustainable agriculture by rejecting genetically engineered organisms, protecting biodiversity and encouraging socially responsible farming. They want to basically create a perfect world to live in were violence is to a low and the environment is treated right. This is what basically their vision for the future is. For example, for their campaign for Forests, their main vision is to have zero deforestation by 2020.

An incident like this would be huge for an organization like Greenpeace. Greenpeace is set to help better the environment and promotes peace. Having a animal die and Greenpeace being at fault for it could really hurt how the organization is looked at because they can be thought that they are not really trying their best to keep the environment, that they claim they care about so much, in the best condition they can. We know that one calf whale was killed and the boats propellers injured the mother. We need to verify how this incident actually happened and what was the main cause of it. Investigations that would need to be done is to look into how the boats ended up colliding into each other, since this was the main problem to how this all happened. Greenpeace needs to better train its people to make sure that confusions like this don’t happen. There are many reasons that a situation like this could have taken place. The crew members of the boats might have not been well trained or maybe did not know exactly what they were doing and by that letting the boats get to close to each other and causing the boats to collide. Another reason might be that maybe the boats were not working properly or had some type of malfunction causing them to steer to close to each other and the crew members did not know how to fix the problem. Greenpeace would really have to look into how it happened and make sure they have the right equipment and people for the job so that something like this doesn’t happen again. Greenpeace will have to also further investigate what its crewmembers were doing during this operation. Not knowing how it exactly happened is hard to say what they would have to further do to for this incident not to happen again since it could have been a simple mistake or an accident and nothing to do with how to crew members were trained or how the equipment was running, but Greenpeace does, now that an incident like this happened, have to make sure that everything is right before going into a venture like this. They will have to double-check all their equipment and double check all their crewmembers to see if everything is fully functional before going in. For an organization like this to have something like this happen is a very bad look, so that is why they will always have to make sure that the boats and crew is on check.

The key stakeholders that have been affected in this incident is the media, employees, community, and. The media was the first to blow the whole incident for everyone to know and is a serious threat to Greenpeace because it can make them really look bad. In this situation the media should be told that, Greenpeace is very disappointed that a situation like this has happened. That they will do everything they can to fix this and make sure it will never happen again. They will look into how this happened and be fully prepared so that there is no way it can happen again. Media should also be told that they had no intention of hurting those animals and that they were only trying to protect this but had no control of the outcome that happened. We are truly sorry and wish that everyone could forgive us as we are only trying to better the environment and make the world a better place. The employees may now be scared to work for a company like Greenpeace now because they might not be sure if they are safe working here seeing how couple of their crewmembers got injured. To the employees it should be said, that we are very sorry for something like this to happen to the people who put there hard work in and time to help us. We will do everything we can to help those employees that got injured and make sure that something like this will never happen again. That employees working for Greenpeace should feel 100% safe while on the job. The community now may be looking down on Greenpeace since their only job is to protect the environment and they just did the opposite by killing the whales. The community could now be blaming them for the whales dying and not have faith in the organization that they are true to their word. Also the community is a big reason why this company runs since the organization is big on taking donations to run their operations, maybe with a situation like this people start to less donate seeing how they don’t even do their job. The message given out to the community is that, At Greenpeace we only care about the environment and nothing that happened that day was intentional. We hope that you can still have faith in us for building a better world and this was only a mistake that we will look into and make sure something like this never happens again. We are trying to save the planet and nothing else that is the whole reason why we started and hope you can still believe in us since that is what were always going to do.

For a short term Greenpeace will start to better train employees and let them know that all employees will be trained to their best capabilities before going on a trip like this, also that all boats and equipment will be double-checked. They need to let everyone know that they will right away start to better their crew and have all their equipment checked so that the people can feel confident again donating and supporting this organization. Their medium term communications should be that they would always have routine checkups and the company will have maintenance checks. Have them know that everything will always be running smoothly and that they will always be sure that what was said in the short term plans will be always done. For long term, they will be say that they will start upgrading their boats and spending more money on training their crew and having better equipment so that they know that everything is perfect and will have no problems.