What do you mean you don't have a website?

This morning, on my way back to the office, a marching brass band, 10 three-meter tall cardboard smokestacks and a few dozen people in black t-shirts carrying black balloons that read ‘NO MORE COAL’ headed the other direction towards the European Parliament building. I asked a girl for the group’s website address, hoping to learn more.

“We don’t have a website”, but she handed me a flyer.

What do you mean you don’t have a website?! She explained “We’re a coalition of groups, so you can get information on any of our websites”.

The groups involved, according to the black and white flyer, are WWF, CAN Europe, Greenpeace, Friends of Earth Europe, die klima-allianz, Christian aid, and the World Development Movement. Clearly this coalition invested a lot of time and money into the event, and I can’t help but think that they made a massive oversight by not having a website or a microsite for the event.

The cynic may point out that since Fleishman-Hillard offers a full-service digital group that builds anything from fancy emails to websites of all shapes and sizes, then of course we would argue that every event needs its own website. But in this day and age, with the low costs of websites, I can’t see any reason to not have at least a one page microsite or a dedicated page on an existing website, no matter how short-lived the event.

Just on the other side of Place du Luxembourg, one can see a digitally-driven campaign. Vattenfall has placed a massive digital screen asking people to go online and ‘Sign the climate manifesto’. The engaging website has a live webcam of the screen on Place du Luxembourg and a video of what happens when you ‘sign’ the online manifesto.