Shake the Pillars

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

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 …