Shake the Pillars

Православни иконииконимебели от чамMobiles are not on the radar for many organizations – and they really should be.  But not in the way you might expect.

Mobile apps and mobile web are getting a lot attention, but they are still only tiny slices of the big Internet pie. I’m thinking about mobile email — an audience that is already connected to your communications streams, and is very likely being ignored.

Take the example from a large Canadian advocacy organization with a well-developed online presence. Web visitors using mobile devices grew from 0.5% in 2009 to 2.0% in 2010 . That’s pretty strong growth – 400% fromyear to year — but still such small numbers that the Mobile Web sits safely in the “we’ll do something next year” file.

It’s an entirely different picture if you look at email, where email broadcasts over the past three months averaged between 6-8% open rate on mobile devices (vs. desktop and browser-based email readers). That translates to thousands of connected constituents who are using a mobile devices to stay informed on this organization’s activities. That’s an audience that deserves a bit of attention, and raises a few immediate questions.

What do mobile email users see when they open your email newsletter?

The mobile market is very fragmented with many different devices and email programs, so it’s pretty difficult to generalize about the experience of mobile email, except to say that it ranges from poor to terrible when viewing messages that have not been optimized for small screens. Newsletters designed for larger computer screens require awkward side-to-side scrolling and/or zooming when viewed on a small mobile screen.  (Tablet computers like the iPad are a bit of an exception – lots of viewing space, but still not the best experience because thumbs are a lot stubbier than mouse pointers when trying to hit links).

What do mobile email users want to see when they open your email newsletter?

That question is certainly not being asked often enough for all newsletter channels, let alone mobile readers. Email is the most popular activity on mobiles (42%, versus 10% for social media), and 90% of mobile email users share the same account between their mobile device and their desktop/laptop.  IBM researchers characterize mobile email behaviour as largely ‘triage’ – deciding what needs to be dealt with immediately and what can be left for later. This also includes scanning for items of immediate interest (to fill a few minutes while waiting for the bus, for instance). This is where organizations can focus some attention — what is going to get the attention and interest of a mobile email reader?  A few good ideas: alerts, cyberactions, quizzes, slideshows, videos, top-10 lists, book reviews. (If these sounds a bit familiar, they are also on the list of best practices for email newsletters in general.)

Designing newsletters for mobile email readers

Chris Studabaker from the online marketing firm Exact Target has shared a few valuable pointers on designing email newsletters for mobile readers while still maintaining a high quality experience on desktops and laptops.

Here are a few highlights:

• Be concise and condense your content into short, direct pieces
• Present visible, clickable calls to action that connect to mobile-optimized webpages
• Format your newsletter in a single column if possible. Some mobile readers will reformat column text to fit a more narrow viewable screen.
• If your newsletter has multiple columns, keep your column widths to 320 pixels or less. That width will fit comfortably on many mobile devices
• Maximize the impact of your subject line. Only the first 35 characters are usually visible on a mobile reader.
• Preheaders are valuable (for open rate) and costly (takes up space on initial screen. Keep preheaders to 90 characters or less.  Try using an invisible image with <Alt> text to hide your preheader when the message is opened.
• ‘Above the fold’ for mobile readers should be considered no larger than 320 x 230 px (iPhone
• Clickable buttons should be large enough to be easily pressed with finger (size, spacing)

View Chris’s full webinar presentation “Email Design in the Age of the Mobile Inbox“.

ъглови легла с ракла

I love it when someone takes a complex task, such as planning an online campaign,  and cuts it down to its simplest, core elements.  Thanks to Colin Delany at epolitics.com for passing along this accessible tripod model for online campaign planning:

The basic idea (which I stole from Josh McConaha a while back) is that most online advocacy campaigns end up with three essential components:

• An online hub (usually a website although it could be a MySpace profile, a Facebook fan page or a blog)
  
• raman amplifierSome way of keeping in touch with people (usually email though it could also be Twitter or a social network)
  
• Online outreach (everything from blogger relations to video to social networking)
  

People often get overwhelmed by the sheer number of communications options available online — paralyzed by the plethora of channels! But the tripod model puts the pieces in context without isolating them from each other, since each reinforces the other: online outreach sends people to the website, where they’re captured on an email list, which in turn keeps them involved in online outreach, and so on.

This goes into my toolbox, alongside the ladder of engagement, as easy starting points for sitting down with a campaign team to sketch out basic campaign structure.

> Read Colin’s full post

Greenpeace campaigning veteran Brian Fitzgerald writes about a truly global online action, lining up Greenpeace’s 40+ world-wide offices to push a single effort for Earth Day 2009. This is a simple and clear example of how multi-national organizations can harness the potential of their global activist networks.

Today was a good day. Greenpeace offices around the world did something extraordinary for Earth Day.  We set aside our national differences, we erased our borders, and focused on doing one simple thing globally.

All we did was drive a video up into the upper ranks of the most popular items on YouTube and create a minuscule, viral outbreak of hope for our planet’s future.  But to do that, we combined the forces of our mailing lists around the world (3 million strong), our blogger network, the marketing expertise of our  fundraisers, the interweb expertise of our digital communications departments and web-footed friends, and we used them to push a piece that was stitched together from the work of countless activists who
have taken inspiring actions for the last three decades.

> Read the full blog post

Just been sorting through notes from the ecampaigning forum 2009 which wrapped up a couple of days back in Oxford – might as well type them out here…

there was even less room during coffee breaks ..

This was my first time back to ecf in two years, so I was interested to see if and how it had evolved in that time.  Good news – the venue was new (to me) but the event is still pretty much the same – an open, casual and yet highly focused opportunity for front-line ecampaigners, agencies, and new media activists to get together to swap notes and experiences on what’s working, what’s not, what’s coming next, what’s already passed..

Some personal observations: The open format sessions felt more comfortable than in previous times,  due for sure to the admirable facilitation work by Sofia B. and her team, and also to the familiarity of many attendees who’ve been here before and know how the ‘unconference’ format works. Everyone got up to speed quickly.  I called together an early session on the topic of  ‘mobiles’, which became an interesting exchange of experiences of ngos using mobiles for campaigning and mobilization but didn’t really generate the kind of collaborative discussion and inspired thinking that happened in some of the later sessions ..  takes some time to warm up the ol’ brain ..

Some other highlights:

Sam Graham-Felsen, chief blogger from the Obama campaign who lifted the curtain to show us some of the machine that created the biggest, most successful online movement in history – including the stunning sum of $500 million raised online (2/3 of the total $750 million raised by the campaign). His session covered engaging grassroots, bulding the message around the people, using online video, and of course heaps and heaps of email (some 2,000 different messages broadcast out over the 18 months of the campaign).  Session following his presentation on making an Obama campaign for Climate Change had trouble finding a solid bridge – i.e. moving from a campaign of Hope for the future to a campaign of Fear for the future, and other difficult chasms to cross, but the encouraging analysis was that the tools and know-how are all there – the main difference is just more effective planning and execution (plus a really big pile of money).

Gene Hashmi from Greenpeace India wh showed off ecampaigning ninja moves that his team have rained down on the Tata Corp – see диваниhttp://www.greenpeace.org/turtles tokeep them reeling – pushing the limit, asking for more, and “begging forgiveness, not permission” generates energy and innovationin mass mobilization, even if it is a losing cause (still waiting to see notes from a followup session on “how to message a losing campaign”.

Tonee Ndungu from Kenya wowwing the audience with his tale of guerilla bluetooth broadcasting and viral networking based on hidden transmitters at bus stops, plus an innovative just-make-it-work model for getting donations and sending money to people in need during the post-election violence in Kenya in early 2008.  This is what the post-desktop/laptop future of ecampaigning looks like.  Best line: “Gene, listen, we can take down Tata in 15 minutes.  Believe me, I know how.”

Breakout session facilitated by Patrick Olszowski on “original ideas in ecampaigning”. Great antidote to my general grumbling about the lack of new ideas – just repeating and refining the old ones. The next wave of ecampaigning innovation may just as likely start with some facebook and twitter-wielding volunteer as with the seasoned and resourced ecampaigner in the head office — we should think more about opening up our planning processes and giving larger, looser frames to our participants/supporters/activists allowing them to bring their own creative ideas into the mix.

Twitter rules:  Legend has it that Rolf Kleef held a session last year to tell 4 other ecampaigners about twitter (the next big thing) and this year the tweets were flying in cloud formation through the sessions/plenaries and meal breaks. The #ecf09 hashtag broke into the top “Trending on Twitter” ranks (until approx 7 am New York time when all the US twitters woke up). Inside the plenary hall, the persistent rattling of fingers tapping ‘soft-keys’ made the place feel a bit like a las-vegas casino — or a college lecture hall    Most useful discovery: Tweetdeck – suddenly it all makes sense!

Final thoughts – the ecampaigning forum is one of the do-not-miss items on my annual agenda – was nice to be back again. It’s one of a very very few places where ecampaigning colleagues within and across organizations have a chance to get away from their never-ending inboxes and to-do lists, and do the necessary networking building and peer-sharing that keeps us all moving forward. Extra ice cream for Duane and everyone else on the ecf team who work so hard to keep it going!

Small Places is an Amnesty music/arts/film festival that’s happening across Canada (and around the world) to promote human rights leading up to the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).  In Canada, we’re supporting a wide range of grassroots events, plus touring concerts from well-known music artists like David Usher and Alanis Morrisette and we’re relying heavily on our online presence to promote the event and generate buzz.

Right from the start we identified that we needed to have a social media strategy at the heart of the campaign – but with limited resources and a lot of ground to cover, what’s the best approach?

It’s one thing thing to say “we need to cover all of the major social networks”, but with every new node that you add to the mix there’s an increase in the maintenance costs, and also an extra draw on your available promotion and mobilization energy.  Just how thin can you spread yourself before you completely lose focus, and end up miring your campaign in the mud?

We’ve had to focus on being as efficient as possible in our use of resources — it doesn’t make sense to be uploading videos into three or four different places, or cross-posting blog posts just to supply the different online streams. Our solution has been to set up a framework for feeding different types of content from one “home” location into the other streams via RSS feeds and widgets.

Here’s how we’ve arranged our social media architecture:

1.  Blog on the Small Places website:
http://www.amnesty.ca/smallplaces/?cat=3

The web hub is our our Small Places micro site – built on WordPress, allowing us to easily generate feeds and incorporate various widgets for youtube, flickr, other feeds, etc.  This is where we post our blog entries, (tagged with ShareThis to allow for easy social bookmarking).  We also direct traffic to our social media properties with large prominent buttons leading to Facebook, MySpace and Youtube.  On the sidebar of the blog, we have set up a feed of Youtube videos in a mini-player – they are being fed from our Small Places Canada youtube channel.

2.  Facebook fan page:

http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Small-Places-Tour-Canada/11885864986

Got quite a bit happening here …   including favorites pages linking to the artists, latest blog posts are automatically displayed via an RSS reader, a feed of photos from Flickr, plus our video feed from YouTube. This helps to ensure that  here, and a list of upcoming events (concerts) are posted here as Facebook events (individual events may be shared with facebook friends)

3.  MySpace page:

http://www.myspace.com/smallplacescanada

This is the main location where we’re connecting with the musicians and artists and fans who support small places. We’re adding bands and performers as friends, and encouraging them to post amnesty-support messages on their own MySpace profiles.  We’re feeding videos here from our Youtube channel.

4.  YouTube Channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/smallplacescanada

This is where we post our videos – mostly PSAs with supporting artists at the moment, but we will be mixing it up with more user-submitted video as we go along.  These videos are automatically be fed into our blog and also onto our facebook page and MySpace page.  This channel is where we tell our members/volunteers to upload their own videos of small places events, or send them to us to be posted.

5.  Flickr

I don’t have the url handy at the moment, but we have a flickr channel set up to feed photos into various locations, including our blog and facebook pages, and posslby also MySpace.

6.  Widget for blogs/facebook/myspace

This is still in development — the idea is for a widget that we can pass to our supporting artists and our activists/members to put on their own blogs and profile pages. The Small Places widget will be a channel where we can feature updated content, new videos, announcements, and timely news that will draw traffic in through our various social network promotions.

That pretty much covers the plumbing .. the challenge now is to make it all run.

We’ve just had another national election here in Canada – a small-ish event in the midst of the global financial meltdown and the US election across our southern border, but it has generated a short burst of interest  here in online tools for winning political campaigns.

Canadian elections tend to be short, frenzied affairs because they only last 5 weeks and can be called at pretty much any time.  We don’t go through the long buildup that the Americans do every four years and that means it’s a real race to to get supporters mobilized and build momentum, which places a big emphasis on being fastest out of the starting blocks and getting as many people on-board as quickly as possible.

This election was marked by the concerted effort of a wide range of environmental and social justice NGOs to urge their members to support parties opposed to the right-wing Conservatives.  Many online campaigns focused on strategic voting – urging voters to rally together behind a common candidate, so as not to split the progressive vote, and allow the Conservatives to win in ridings where there was actually a majority of voters opposed to them.

It turns out that one of the most interesting, and effective tools that social justice and environmental groups have available is also one of the most simple — a modest widget that allows voters to type in their postal code and send a message directly to their local candidates.

This example to the left is from Advocacy Online, and was put out as simple widget to be added to an organization’s website. It picked up by a number of NGOs and activist groups and about a dozen sites were using it by the end of the election. It appeared a bit late in the election so it didn’t become as wide-spread as might have if it was out there earlier, but still Advocacy Online has reported that over 70,000 Canadians used the tool to connect with their local candidates.  That’s pretty impressive – especially in an election that has recorded the lowest voter turnout of all time for a Canadian election.

I first saw this type of “send a message to your local candidates” tool for the first time a couple of elections ago, when I was on the team of a local NDP candidate in Toronto, watching over the new media campaigning side of things. When a few Canadian NGOs started using these “contact your candidates” tools, we began receiving emails from residents in our riding, containing not only their name and contact details, but also identifying an important issue of concern for them.  It didn’t take long to realize that this was gold for our data team – voters actually stepping forward and identifying themselves — here’s a blog post that i wrote after the last election that describes (in part) how the email-your-candidate contributed to our winning effort:  http://www.shakethepillars.com/?p=31

I don’t think we really saw at the time the potential of the tool on a larger scale.  Seems to me that if this simple election widget was adopted in a coordinated way by a movement-wide group of ngos and activists, it could have a meaningful impact – driving a lot of potential voters, volunteers and donors straight into the hands of local candidates. This could really boost the on-the-ground riding-level campaigning where important election battles are won or lost.  It would be very valuable for a door-to-door election canvassers to have data at their fingertips showing that a person at a particular home or apartment had sent in an email to their candidate related to climate change or poverty or other issue.

I don’t know how many local candidates/campaigns would actually have the capacity and systems to effectively process this stream of incoming emails, but there are increasingly sophisticated new media tools being used by election campaigns at all levels, and with a bit of prep work to orient key constituency offices and nation headquarters,  an effective system could be developed. I know at least one national party in Canada has a voter data system that can track this info, and incorporate it into local canvassing printouts for their door-to-door canvassers.

This really seems like going step beyond the call to “vote strategically”.  It’s a stronger, more-demanding call to action to activists and grassroots members to think beyond just how they are going to vote, and an invitation to them to get more actively involved with the local on-the-ground campaigns and candidates in their riding where they can work to influence the actual election result.

Final note: Advocacy online has just announced a US election widget – maybe a bit late in that game, but then again one week in election politics can be an eternity …

A while ago I attended a think tank meeting  in London to look at the technical requirements for a single platform for  fundraising, membership management and activist mobilization for a global NGO. This is an area of increasing interest for the big international NGOs like Oxfam, Red Cross/Red Crescent, Greenpeace, Amnesty and Unicef, partly as a result of the growth of the internet, which brings the global audience into reach, and also because of the active expansion of many western NGOs into emerging markets in the global south.

What we mean by the term ‘Global NGO’ is pretty unclear.  Global civil society, and global movements have been around for decadea, but in practice there isn’t really such a thing as a n actual global NGO – i.e. an NGO that operates on a truly global scale, with equal presence and activity in all parts of the world. The biggest globe-spanning NGO brand names (such as those mentioned above), operate more like multinational corporations than truly global organizations. They have strong country-based offices only in regions where they have a historic base or fundraising/program operations, and they have a global headquarters or secretariat that coordinates and supports these national centres, each of which operates with a great deal of autonomy and inward focus.

Not surprisingly, decision-making and coordination between the various national offices and the international secretariats can be very complex, difficult, and highly political. Each national office has its own history, capacity, vision ,and priorities and these do not often line up neatly behind any sort of global decision.

Putting aside for the moment the very good points that can be made in support of maintaining a diversity of systems within an organization,  it not an easy exercise to imagine a single technical framework for a globe-spanning technical system that would meet all of the needs of the constituent offices, because the capacities (skills, budget, infrastructure) are so varied between different sections/countries/regions.  Some offices have minimal or no technical capacity while others may be highly sophisticated, and highly demanding in the tools they require.

Still, the basic building blocks of a global technical framework for NGOs can start to be sketched out, based on a loose grouping of country office profiles into three groups:

Established markets – in so called ‘western’ countres where organizations have strong resource bases, well-developed fundraising programs, and highly skilled staff.

Expanding markets – in nations and regions where organizations are actively investing in developing new programs, expanding offices and operations, based on the potential for growth of membership, income and impact.

Emerging markets – in nations and regions where NGOs are not actively developing markets, and likely have no permanent staff or field operations, but where there still may be important individual supporters, contacts or programs that require some level of technical service support.

Each of these groupings has very different needs from a technical system for online engagement:

1) For emerging markets: a global just-the-basics system that offers a basic set of online engagement options for the global audience – simple things like make a donation, email sign up, and a simple petition/activism tool.  Nothing would be localized to the country of origin – typically this would be just a generic “international” level signup/donate to service the audience in places where the NGO has no effective on-the-ground presence.

2) For expanding markets: the tools that national offices would need in expanding markets, where the global NGO is actively investing in building presence and infrastructure, would likely be localized, customizable version of the basic tools outlined above – donation, email signup, activism – plus possibly a social networking platform.  The most important factors would be localization of languages, using local currencies for donations, and linking with in-country banking systems for donation processing.  All of these would functions would need to be highly customizable, and easily managed both from a global administrator, and local, in-country staff.

3) For established markets: the need is for a  fully-integrated suite of top-end online communication, member and data management, fundraising and activism tools.  Probably this system would need to be modular, and would be open-architecture, or at least offer an api-interfaces so that external/third-party tools could be connected.

The model for a single technical system that can cover this broad scope of needs while still allowing for the necessary localization (language, culture, infrastructure, etc.) to be of maximum value, whatever the level of the user, seems unlikely. What seems more likely is a suite or collection of services that meet the typical-case needs of operations in each of the three above designated areas:

This is a post I wrote a couple of years back on the FundraisingInnovation blog about a simple engagement model that I find helpful in constructing online actions and campaigns. (thanks to Steph Legault of HighWater Mark for the original concept)

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The “Ladder of Engagement” is a model for visualizing how organizations can build a base of more committed supporters for activism, campaigning, advocacy and fundraising.

The Ladder of Engagement sets out a simple scale for ranking different activities that online supporters may enage in. Low on the ladder are quick and easy items such as signing an online petition or forwarding an email to a friend. At the top of the ladder are the most involving forms of activism, including meeting with elected officials, organizing local actions, and making donations.

High Engagement		Recruit friends/family
		Upgrade monthly donation Signup for monthly giving Renew single donation Make single donation Write a letter Attend a ‘real world’ event Sign petition Viral / Tell a friend Send an epostcard Subscribe to e-Alerts / Issue Alerts Subscribe to eNewsletter Enter a contest
Low Engagement		Visit website

Over time, an individual supporter would be expected to engage in a variety activities, both high and low on the ladder. The goal of an online engagement strategy is not just get increased numbers of people involved, but also to encourage them to climb the ladder of engagement.

Some of an organization’s supporters will climb the ladder of engagement as a natural evolution of their relationship with that organization. Others can be assisted by specific messaging that encourages them to deepen their commitment and invite them to do more. This must be done carefully so that the past activities they have taken part in are not de-valued, but that they are also shown some of the higher steps on the ladder.

A Thank you/Acknowledgement message that someone may receive after participating in an action or activity can be one of the key tools for encouraging them to climb the ladder — for instance, encouraging someone who has just signed an online petition to subscribe an eAlert list on this issue, or asking a new online donor to forward a current campaign message to a number of their friends or colleagues.

The ladder of engagement is also sometimes presented as a pyramid – illustrating that relatively few of an organization’s supporters will climb to the highest steps on the ladder, and most will remain in the lower-engagement levels. One of the ways to expand the upper levels of the pyramid is to broaden participation at the lower levels – the “base” – so a strategy to expand numbers of supporters engaged at a lower levels is a means to achieving greater participation through to the upper levels.

At Amnesty Canada we’ve been exploring Facebook for the past six months or so as an online venue where we can engage our members/activists and the general public to promote our campaigns and actions. One experiment that I launched in the days leading up to our annual Write for Rights letter writing marathon is an online petition built within Facebook that allows people to join an online petition action without leaving the safety and comfort of their own profiles.

Online petitions certainly aren’t new, and Facebook already has several examples of online petition applications. So why build a Facebook application only for our own purposes?

1. We already have an active Facebook audience and we see this as a natural progression – offering these Facebook subscribers more things that they can do for human rights without having to move to a different location;
2. We can tap into the powerful viral potential in Facebook where it’s common for people to forward applications and other interesting items to their friends – some groups can grow very quickly to tens of thousands of members over a span of a few weeks (or days)
3. We chose a case that should resonate with Facebook users – a Chinese journalist and poet who was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for sending an email to an overseas colleague. Yahoo! has been implicated in helping to identify Shi Tao, and has been accused of caving in to the demands of the Chinese authorities in providing the details that led to Shi Tao’s identification and arrest.
4. We combined the facebook petition with an existing web petition, so we cast the net wider without dividing our audience

It turned out to be relatively easy to build the base application – not much more complicated than building a standard php/mysql online petition page, but Facebook’s application platform is seriously lacking in documentation, so quite a bit of the time I spent on the development was searching around to find hints, tips and examples of working code.

Have a look at verison 1.0 working here here: http://apps.facebook.com/free_shi_tao

This petition appears both inside Facebook and outside on Amnesty’s main website, but they share a common database, so that the total signatures is a combined global total. The facebook version is essentially a different skin applied to the front end of the petition engine.The “outside facebook” version of the Free Shi Tao petition is here:
http://www.amnesty.ca/writeathon/shi_tao_petition.php

A few specific points of function/strategy:

The action of signing the petition generates a new entry on the signers facebook profile, something like:

George Irish just signed the Petition to Free Shi Tao, a journalist jailed in china for sending an email. Click here to sign the petition

This message is also inserted into the signer’s newsfeed so that their friends are notified of the action. However, there is something unpredictable about how newsfeed entries are added – sometimes the newsfeed item was added, sometimes not ..

One of the main “why” reasons to build a facebook version for an online petition is tap into the powerful tell-a-friend tools in Facebook – that’s how you can get really easy and rapid viral marketing going, and it’s . After someone signs the petition, they are shown a list of all their friends, and they can just check off the ones they want to send the invitation to – very simple point and click viral marketing. ( This is subject to the limits imposed by Facebook on how many invitations can be sent over one specific time period).

Finally, when someone installs the petition application, it establishes a permanent window on their profile . Ideally this would be used to provide updated information, such as how many people have signed the petition, and also it should show a selection of the best public comments that have been posted (version 2.0 of this app will have that function included).