Shake the Pillars

This is a post I wrote a couple of years back on the FundraisingInnovation blog about a simple engagment 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).

Okay, Amnesty International isn’t often thought of as a “fun” organization. There are few topics more serious and disturbing than human rights abuses. However, a movement can’t sustain itself for long without recognizing and celebrating its achievements, and without generating positive energy to keep its members going.

Amnesty International has been the recipient of a very generous gift from Yoko Ono - permission to record and publish a CD of songs from John Lennon’s solo songbook to raise awareness and money for Amnesty’s human rights work around the world. This summer a special Double-CD album was released: Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur, featuring a wide selection of “global artists” like U2, Green Day, Avril Lavigne, the Black Eyed Peas, and R.E.M. recording their own version of John Lennon classics.

At Amnesty International’s office in Ottawa (Canada) we put together a team to develop ideas for promoting the music CD, and using it to reach out to the public. Our team (including youth/student and public awareness organizers) came up with a brilliant idea, picking up on the John Lennon/Yoko Ono theme and building an outreach effort around the famous Bed-in for Peace that John and Yoko carried out in the summer of 1969 (in Montreal and Amsterdam).

“Get in Bed for Darfur” was created as an outreach project to the general public, inviting them to join Amnesty in speaking out for peace in Darfur. Our bed-ins team travelled to a variety of music concerts, venues, and public festivals where the music & activism theme would fit it, and set up a big tie-dyed bed and colourful signage. We viewed this project as an exercise in “anti-tabling” - a break away from the usual Amnesty presentation at public event of a table full of brochures and take-action postcards. It’s different: fun, colourful, and engaging!

Here are a few example photos taken at Bed-in events. (more can be seen at http://www.amnesty.ca/instantkarma/bedins)

Our unique setup with its colourful signs and innovative messaging attracted more than the usual attention at public events - especially when we were located in the “causes” corner. (other NGOs were seen on occassion pushing their tables closer to our bed to catch some of the crowds we were attracting). People generally had no trouble “getting” the idea - even those in the under-25 age set - and were genuinely appreciative of the opportunity to engage in a fun, easy action to join the global effort to stop the violence in Darfur.

Time for some e-campaigning tactics-talk. We asked everyone to sign a release allowing us to us their bed-in photo in our public campaigning, and we also collected their email addresses so we could invite them to view their photo on the Bed-ins for Darfur website (http://www.amnesty.ca/instantkarma/bedins). Subsequent emails have invited them to join our mailing list, sign up for our Youth and Student program, and to extend a special offer to them: donate $50 to Amnesty and we’ll send you the InstantKarma CD for free. To date we have raised close to $15,000 from this promotion.

So what is next? Our grassroots organizing team is already making plans for next summer, and envision a larger, cross-country outreach campaign visiting many different music venues and festivals, carrying on the experiment with alternative tabling, and continuing to put the fun back in human rights.

Take part in this action for a Free Burma!
http://www.free-burma.org/

International bloggers are preparing an action to support the peaceful revolution in Burma. We want to set a sign for freedom and show our sympathy for these people who are fighting their cruel regime without weapons. These Bloggers are planning to refrain from posting to their blogs on October 4 and just put up one Banner then, underlined with the words “Free Burma!”.
1. Publish a posting (Bulletin Board, Forum, Blog, Social Network, Static Website…) on the 4th of October with the header: “Free Burma!”

2. Tag it if you can with “Free Burma”

3. Choose a graphic from our Graphics page and

4. Link to www.free-burma.org there your readers will find some informations about the campaign and Burma and a participant list which you can join. Even if you’re a webmaster of a bulletin board or social network you will find a special Group List to join.

5. Feel free to write any additional text you want

If you have no website or blog we need you even more: Please help us to spread the word across the internet, tell your neighbours, friends or kids and first of all: Sign our list of participants!

Is Second Life a valuable tool for activism, or largely a waste of time and money?

Reporter/film-maker Josh Levy has produced a thoughtful and thought-provoking web video chronicling his experiences investigating the potential of Second Life as a tool/platform for activism. It’s well worth checking out - both by online campaigners looking to better understand how to link SL into their advocacy work, and also by Second Life aficionados who want to inject some more meaningful content into their virtual lifestyles.

Levy explores a series of virtual landscapes, including virtual Capitol Hill, Better World island, and Camp Darfur. He discusses activism motivations and learnings directly with some of the creative minds/hands behind these virtual landscapes and venues, and wraps up with own impressions on the potential for Second Life to be a venue for activism.

One observation Levy makes is that despite its “billing” as a world where many thousands of people interact, the Second Life experience is often lonely, and experiences are personalized rather than shared. This is most profoundly true in his visit to Camp Darfur, which is modeled more as a museum exhibit or monument than as an immersive experience in a virtual refugee camp. The concept of virtual museum/monument may be a more comfortable lens for understanding the potential of Second Life as a motivator/catalyst for activism, and links to another of Levy’s observations that experiences in SL can be emotionally engaging as well as informative. It may be that this is a valuable direction for activist organizations to consider in approaching Second Life - to start from the emotional code of their campaigns, and follow that path of engagement - building virtual monuments or exhibits.

Virtual monuments already exist - see http://www.annefranktree.com/ for a powerful example that invites people to create a virtual tree leaf in Anne Frank’s memory, and read the leaves placed by others - more than 130,000 so far.

Giving individuals a place to tell their own stories is a powerful means to capture emotional content that can deepen the meaning of a campaign and help people make a personal connection with an issue, and there seem to be some very good opportunities in Second Life for this kind of presentation. One of the venues that Levy visits (the Peace and Justice Center) contains a collection of individual notes and personal stories about people affected by the Iraq War, and another location has a field full of signs erected by a wide variety of people and causes - both good opportunities for allowing visitors to make their own statements.

To view Josh Levy’s movie A Better World in Second Life?, visit: http://www.levjoy.com/betterworld

We often say that online advocacy should be more than just clicking on buttons to sign petitions and send emails to politicians. In truth though, I don’t often see online actions or campaigns that effectively move online action-takers beyond the role of “mouse-click-activist” and into a deeper form of engagement with a campaign or organization or movement.

Committed online action-takers are great resources for generating numbers on petitions and email-to-politicans, but convincing them to get past their computer screen interface, and climb the “real-world” ladder of activist engagement can be difficult. It’s not very often that we have the opportunity to construct a clear alignment of an online action with a specific “ladder-climbing” engagement opportunity that is a natural follow-on. That’s why a recent example from Amnesty Canada is worth noting.

In March 2007, two leading women activists in Iran were detained for speaking out publicly in the weeks leading up to International Womens Day, March 8th. Amnesty Canada sent out an urgent e-appeal within 48 hours to its newsletter list of 20,000 plus subscribers, urging people to take a typical click-to-take-action (send a protest email to the Iranian Ambassador to Canada). More than 2,400 emails were sent by Amnesty Canada’s newsletter subscribers.

When the 2 activists were released just several days later, Amnesty sent an email update back to the people who participated in the online action with the good news, and explained that this case is an example of how Amnesty is able to respond immediately when there is a human rights crisis - especially in the first 72 hours after an activist has been picked up and is being held in police custody. The email described that is exactly the role that Amnesty’s Urgent Action network performs - that thousand of people around the world have signed up to receive notices of urgent cases, and who are prepared to react immediately with letters, faxes, emails, phone calls, etc. when there is a human rights emergency. The email closed with an invitation to join Amnesty Canada’s Urgent Action network.

This invitation to “step up” the ladder of engagement picks up directly from the core message that taking urgent action can get positive results, and is a natural way for people to deepen their commitment to help defend human rights. It’s rare that an online “click” action and the “go deeper” invitation align so closely.

As a result of the followup invitation, more than 300 new members joined Amnesty Canada’s Urgent Action Network - increasing it’s size by nearly 25% - a hugely positive step forward in building this important action tool for Amnesty Canada.

Emails:

#1 Action alert: http://www.amnesty.ca/eappeals/iran_women.html

#2 Followup invitation: http://www.amnesty.ca/eappeals/UAinvite.html

I have just attended a planning session about using the virtual world Second Life for activism which took place, quite appropriately, inside Second Life itself. The picture here (click for larger version) shows a few of the Second Life activists who met up an ornate virtual meeting room. That’s me with the grey hair and t-shirt.

Second Life is getting a lot of attention these days, and there are all sorts of different marketing and promotion pieces popping up in this virtual world - from international NGOs, to political candidates, to progressive magazines and book clubs … Our meeting was to look at the best approach to Second Life for an international activist organization.

Here are some of my notes from the session:

1. Our activists and volunteers are already starting to set up their own things here, so we should try to help and guide them. We’re considering holding regular virtual meetings inside Second Life for volunteers who want to help out.
2. Building permanent structures (buildings. kiosks, virtual offices, etc.) can be risky - either they end up being empty most of the time, or they can be defaced. See: here and here.
3. Holding virtual events could be an easier place to start - they are more fun, more campaign focused, and offer greater chances for interactivity with visitors than a few brochures sitting on a virtual table. Ideally we should choose a campaign event that is already planned to happen in the real world, and then organize a parallel event in Second Life - that way we can benefit from all of the other promotion and marketing.
4. Virtual clothing, such as t-shirts, are a great way to give people something that promotes our presence in Second Life. (in the photo, I’m wearing an IFAW virtual t-shirt - perhaps they should consider putting their logo on both sides …)
5. We might want to use the approach of street canvassers, at our own or other events, and try to engage people to talk about our campaign or organization. We could ask people to sign up for our enewsletter (maybe a special Second Life edition?) and to make a donation. (The American Cancer Society has made virtual donation boxes to collect contributions in Second Life)

By the way, if you are looking for me in Second Life, my name is Shaker Otoole.

I’ve been working out of Istanbul for the past couple of weeks, helping Greenpeace Mediterranean manage web and new media comms as they launch a high profile ship tour through the arabian gulf and eastern mediterranean sea by the Rainbow Warrior. I’ll be working back and forth a bit between Ottawa and Istanbul over the next few months.
I’m refamiliarizing myself with the global web tools and publishing platform that Greenpeace International has developed over the past few years, and I’m impressed by how their systems have become truly global in scope. It shows up in small ways, such as viewing the single, shared list of 100+ internal email lists that covers every GP office, region and campaign, and also in more siginficant ways, like working with Planet2 - Greenpeace’s global content management system that lets you browse and search pretty much every GP website around the world at once and be able to clone images, articles, etc. over to your own site - including proper captions, photo credits, licensing info - with a single click. Sweet!

Building a broad content management and sharing environment like this is as much about creating the culture as it is about creating the tools, and Greenpeace is making slow, but steady progress to develop a cadre of content managers who really do think globally and publish locally.

This past week we brought the Let The Sun Shine ship tour website online, marking the start of focused effort to engage the public in the Arabian gulf states and eastern Mediterranean in an alternative energy/climate change and nuclear disarmament campaign. It’s an experiment in web publishing from a different kind of mobile platform - a Greenpeace ship. My counterpart Hussein Fakih, who is the regular webbie for this office is posting blog updates, photos and articles from the ship (in English and Arabic) either through wireless net when they are in port, or by satellite email when they are not anywhere near a terrestrial connection.

Of course, Greenpeace does this sort of thing all the time, as anyone who has been following events the around Japan’s antarctic whale hunting fleet will already be aware from watching youtube videos posted directly from onboard the Greenpeace Esperanza near the coast of Antarctica (okay, so that expedition has a bigger budget for telecomms than we do).

My other task here at GP Med is to help with capacity building and strategic comms/fundraising planning. GP Med is a fairly new and small office in a region that Greenpeace is targetting for development in the coming years. If the past year’s growth in website traffic is any indication, then the future looks bright (and busy).

The Greenepeace Mediterranean office runs 4 websites (english, arabic, hebrew and turkish) and they are averaging between them something like 200% growth in visitors over the past year.

More interesting is where that growth is happening. Visitors to the website from Arabic-speaking countries from the gulf states through the middle east and across North Africa have grown between 400-800% in the past 12 months — an incredible, emeging onlne audience that is really the first of its kind for Greenpeace - a pan-arabic information gateway.

Very interesting …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpcUQE3f36o]

Time to start getting cuddly with those cetaceans.. Here’s the teaser video from the upcoming WhaleLove campaign from Greenpeace Japan.Check out the website at http://www.whalelove.jp and signup for the free newsletter and other downloadables ..

Watch all of the Whale-Love Wagon episodes released so far, click here.

I’ve been meaning to feature this great example of mobile activism for a while - finally figured out how to capture the mobile screens to show as well as tell.

It should come as no surprise that leading edge examples of mobile phone activism can be found in Japan. Keitai (mobile phones) have been a mainstream feature of society there for longer than just about anywhere else.

Mobile phone web browsing is approaching a 50/50 footing with traditional PC-based surfing in Japan, making it a significant platform to consider in all aspects of online communication. I recently sat in on a web planning meeting in Tokyo where equal attention was given to the both the PC and mobile versions of the web site. In fact, the two versions were being developed somewhat separately, with each version boasting its own unique interface logic and feature set. Far different from the “mobile site as stripped down version of the PC web site” approach that’s the norm elsewhere.
I was also given a demonstration of a new mobile web campaign from Greenpeace Japan that points to the opportunity and potential power of these devices in the hands of individual campaigners or supporters.

Greenpeace Japan has recently launched an anti-GMO (genetically-modified organisms) campaign, aimed at informing and empowering consumers to support GMO-free products and put pressure on the food industry to provide more choice and better labelling of GMO content in foods. Greenpeace has a handy printed guide to GMO-free shopping that consumers can carry with them and look up items while they are shopping, and this guide is also available to be browsed on the Greenpeace Japan website. Food items are rated with a green face (good), yellow face, (not so good), and a red face (bad) based on the presence of GMOs. (They also have the cutest campaign logo I’ve seen in years)
The GMO-free shopping guide is also browsable on mobile web, which creates the opportunity for a shopper to check food products on the fly, while walking up and down the grocery store aisles.

And here’s where it gets really cool … Not only can shoppers see whether an individual product merits a green, yellow or red face, they can also read background information about the source company that produces that item and in particular, their customer feedback telephone number (I’m sure you can see where this is going). Many Japanese mobile browsers are configured to automatically identify and hot-link phone numbers on webpages - so it’s just a one-button click to ring the company and leave them a phone message about just why their product is not being purchased today.

It’s a great example of consumer-empowerment, and food-for-thought on the potential for mobile-powered consumer campaigns as mobile web browsing becomes more widely embraced by North American audiences.

Additional features being considered by Greenpeace Japan include: a feedback function where users of the guide can submit their own choice of food items to be evaluated and included in the online GMO-free guide (and in the next printed edition); and a GMO-free QR code reader that would mean consumers would be able to scan the unique mobile-friendly bar code that are printed some products and get an immediate green, red or yellow face.