Answer with action. It’s like dating site for those who care about our planet. Patagonia Action Works connects grassroots organizations working on environmental issues with passionate individuals who want to get involved. This platform allows local environmental groups to connect with our customer base within their communities, where they can post opportunities that will help them strengthen their cause. Through skilled volunteering, events, donations, and petitions, communities are able to work together to solve some of the most pressing environmental threats facing the world today. This tool applies modern e-commerce techniques to an activist network. We use email, social media, and content in the brand’s shopping experience to give more people an opportunity to engage with Patagonia Action Works, and bring more groups together.

Patagonia Action Works was executed through an extremely collaborative process between the creative agency and our digital and environmental coordination teams over fifteen months. The complexity of turning an internal grant system into a public facing platform required brainstorming, prototyping, user testing, service provider partnerships, and the formation of an internal team to keep it running. An easy to use, custom-built dashboard gives grassroots environmental groups the power, capabilities, and reach of true enterprise fundraising or political tools. Our team operating PAW is in direct contact with grantees – and this relationship is pivotal because the population of the site with grantee opportunities drives the platform’s existence. To further support them, we integrate PAW into our e-commerce site and highlight grantee’s actions, events, and petitions via targeted, local social ads using our corporate social accounts in order to make more meaningful matches.

Patagonia Action Works leverages our unique consumer audience and activist community to support grassroots organizations that protect, restore, and sustain our precious ecosystems. Access to that informed and engaged audience resulted in 79,500 meaningful advocacy actions – skills-based volunteering, event attendance, petition signatures, and direct donations – generating over $1,100,000 in value created over the first three months. During this time, skill-based volunteering resulted in over 4,900 hours donated for high-value skills such as web development, language translation, accounting, and marketing strategy. Moving past digital “clicktivism”, these actions help grassroots environmental organizations build long-term capacity to achieve their goals. With over 1.2B impressions to date, this tool allows grantees to work locally in the areas of biodiversity, climate, communities, land, and water. Growing this motivated and committed network will empower environmental action groups to do their work better than ever and help connect communities in new and important ways.