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.
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:
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.
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)
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.
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 …
Just read an interesting post on Steve Bridges’ blog nfp 2.0 that does a nice job of profiling how the emergent next generation of internet tools and practices map onto the traditional operations of nonprofits and identifying the opportunities and challenges that are part of this new territory.
Some useful high-view perspectives:
Before you get your feet to comfortable beneath your desk, remember that you should maintain a 360-degree joined-up view of your organisation at all times. Work across teams and departments.
Your role is to create a buzz around your cause (and secondarily, your not-for-profit ‘brand’). But resist any desire (or pressure) to “own†the cause. Far better to identify the communities where your supporters and activists are already and join in the conversation. After all, whose cause it anyway?
Develop social media optimisation across all your online communications. This means working tirelessly with communications, fundraising, campaigns…
And some good practical advice:
Get into web widgets. While you’re not in the world domination business, your own website can still be a magnet. Create something useful (e.g. your events calendar, appeal running totals) that your dispersed supporters can add to their own blogs.
Coach your colleagues on blogging. Help them through the inevitable rough patches. Continually give feedback on how to write, and how to be generous.
Here are a few thoughts on using SMS/Mobile-text devices for campaign engagment
SMS/Texting is considered an emerging media for engaging young/hip audiences with an organization’s campaign work. The commercial sector has been exploring SMS/Texting and mobile phone-based markets for several years and has built an active marketplace around downloadable content such as Ringtones, Games, MP3 files, screensavers, background graphics and even video clips on multimedia phones. These commercial engagements are centred on the point-of-sale/content-delivery model where information flows primarily in one direction - from vendor to purchaser. In this model, the mobile phone functions mainly as a purchasing/acquisition device that links the user directly to the vendor.
In the context of a mass mobilization campaigns, focusing on content download and delivery (ringtones, screensavers, games, etc.) as a form of engaging the SMS/Mobile market limits range of SMS/Text communications to being just another single-directional channel for delivering campaign content – reinforcing a communication mode that is a one-to-many push-broadcast model. Individuals sign up to receive SMS/Text-based information related to the campaign and over the course of the campaign they receive a range of different content, but it is all driven from the ‘centre’, and its delivery to campaign subscribers is viewed as the end of that particular transaction.
The commercial content-sales/push model is only one means yo employ SMS/Texting devices for campaign engagement. The social networking aspect of SMS/MobileText can be an important element of campaign promotion – one that reflects more accurately the way that SMS/MobileText technologies are used. Billions of SMS messages are sent every day, and the majority of these are personal messages sent from person to person rather than being content delivery based on commercial subscription/push models.
This is based on the core function of SMS/Texting/Mobile phone technologies for connecting individuals with their social networks – friends, family, colleagues, etc. – rather than being focused on information searching and delivery (as per the Web/Internet). SMS/Texting is more like Email than the Web – it is a medium for content exchange, not content delivery. SMS/Text should be primarily viewed as a peer-to-peer medium. In general, when someone is using their SMS/Text device, the most accessible functions they have available are related to sending messages to the people in their address books/contact lists.
Peer-to-peer messaging is an important opportunity for campaign promotion and mobilization. Social networking tools and approaches to campaign promotion can be used to tap into the existing SMS/Text/mobile phone networks of campaign supporters – engaging them as message-relayers and “sneezers†who will forward campaign materials to their contact lists and peer networks. ‘Send to a friend’ messages can be presented as a core action activity for campaign supporters, and mass networking targets can be identified and promoted to involve supporters in actively spreading the world about the campaign. Other means to leverage the social networks of campaign supporters can be tested through the direct promotions such as contests and points-reward systems. As well, active support for self-organized and locally-focused action groups and networks can motivate campaign supporters to be active message forwarders.
Here are some potential scenarios for promoting peer-to-peer social networking through SMS-based campaign messaging:
Scenario One: Identifying and supporting message forwarders (“sneezersâ€)
When individuals register to join the campaign – via SMS or Email or Web, they are asked if they would like to help promote the campaign by being special SMS promoters who would operate as viral message forwarders (“sneezersâ€) to their contact lists. These sneezers would receive special messaging related to the ongoing campaign, recognizing them as special campaign volunteers and supporting their role as important network builders
Scenario Two: SMS Viral Call
A campaign message delivered via SMS to the list of subscribed activists. This action contains background and instructions to participate in a special SMS action, but also contains a specific encouragement to forward this action to selected contacts in recipients’ address books as a way to help spread the word and make the campaign more effective. This form of campaign marketing is very effective – it can reach a highly targeted audience with little or no additional investment by the organization – since both the audience filtering and delivery cost are borne by the message forwarders. This form of SMS Viral call should be issued only at peak campaign moments to ensure the highest response rate. Optionally, a special message to could be sent to identified “sneezers†that instructs them to promote the campaign to their contact lists, and encourage pass-along follow-ons.
When a campaign participant engages in an SMS action – whether downloading a file or texting a short code to take action on a petition, they receive a follow-up message from the campaign coordinators that encourages them to tell others about the action they have just taken. The message to be forwarded is pre-prepared, and requires only that the participant select the contacts from their address book to receive the special message telling them about the action, and inviting them to participate as well. An optional personal note could be added as well by the original participant.
I’m starting a series of posts here to look at different aspects of engaging campaign activists and supporters online. There have been a number of interesting campaigns launched lately by some of the major activist and politicals orgs. It there seems to be a set of common practices emerging as online campaigners pick up on the successes of earlier efforts. So I’m going to start a list of what seems to be working, and take a look at eac oneh in turn over the coming weeks/months. I’ll try to point to best / worst practices, and relate back to theory when I can. Who knows, this could turn into some sort of working document …
Online engagement can be approached from any number of different angles. Here are a few of the building blocks on online activist engagement:
1. Campaigns are stories
2. Campaigns evolves over time and participants should be re-engaged in each phase
3. Participants should be visible actors within the campaign
4. Recruitment into the campaign should be active and assumed
5. New members/signups should be drawn immediately into meaningful action
6. Open source campaigning — allow participants into the tent
7. Participants should be encouraged to self-organize and generate their own activities within the campaign framework
8. High-value members should be identified and cultivated
9. Grow the activist base from within as well as from outside
10. Investing ($) in the campaign leads to greater sense of engagement
UK-based online campaign veteran Chris Rose has been publishing excepts from his recently-released book: How to Win Campaigns: 100 Steps to Success on his CampaignStrategies.org website.
His current excerpt Be Multidimensional addresses a core aspect of building an effective mass engagement strategy: ensuring that your campaign has a broad base of appeal, and that it resonates with a multi-faceted audience. If your campaign is built around too narrow a viewpoint, then its mobilization potential will be limited..
A campaign has more chance of success if it communicates in many dimensions. Ideally each of the points on a critical path should register in each dimension.
In terms of argument and the research needed for it, this means being able to make a case in each. In terms of perception, the campaign to be visible in each dimension. Ask yourself what the picture would be, what you would be doing at each point (the photo test). For example (diagram below) there might be scientific, technical, political, economic and emotional dimensions, and maybe ethical, moral, historical, cultural or others.
I’ve been thinking about different forms of online activism and wondering if they can be grouped into differnet models based on the scope of individual interpretation and creativity demanded from the partcipants. (I’m using a couple of simple “game” metaphors to label these models to make them easier to describe, but i haven’t field-tested these labels very widely yet, so I hope they’re reasonably clear).
“Simon Says” actions are planned and set out in detail by campaign’s coordinator, and come with a set of specific instructions detailing what participants need to do in order to take part. The name “Simon Says’ comes from an english childhood game where one person calls out simple instructions and everyone else obeys: “Simon says … put your hands on your head”– that sort of thing. Online petitions would fall into this category - especially the ones that have just a field for name and email address — there is only one, fixed way to participate. As well, forward-to-a-friend and send-a- letter-to-a-politician action can also be largely “Simon Says” kinds of activities. The strength of these activities is in their accessibility - they are easy to do, require very little thought, and are great tools for engaging new contacts into a campaign. The danger is that Simon Says actions can get repetitive and if they are not presented in the full campaign context, can seem small and unimportant. This can lead to activists dropping out because they don’t feel their indiivdual input is valued, and that they’re being viewed like a bunch of trained monkeys.
“Mini-putt” actions get their label from those mini-golf couses with twisty paths and obstacles such as windmills and ramps. These kinds of actions require some thought and planning on the part of each participant. While everyone has the same goal - get the ball into the cup - each individual has to make their own way to achieving this goal. Some may shoot through the windmill, others might go around it, and others might try something completely different. Mini-putt actions tend to be built around mobilization or mass-participation activities. Meetups, house parties and other peer-to-peer activiites all incorporate elements of the Mini-putt model. There is an overall goal but each individual makes decisions about the exact format they will use to participate.
As an example, each year Amnesty Canada runs a national writeathon (http://www.amnesty.ca/writeathon) that invites amnesty supporters to hold a pary or get-together to write letters in support of prisoners of conscience. Some write alone; other choose to invite people over to their homes, others meet in cafes, church rooms, or barber shops; and whole schools may participate en mass. The goal is the same - write as many letters as possible, but the formats are many and varied.
Mini-putt actions are a way to drawing people deeper into a campaign - inviting them to make an investment of time, energy and creativity as a way of recognizing that they can make a valuable personal contribution to the overall campaign. These activities can increase the loyalty and commitment of participants - especially if the action is something that is fun and expressive as well as outcome-oriented. However, only a particular subset of campaign supporters are likely to participate in mini-putt actions, maybe because of time constraints, or lack of commitment to the cause, or simple personal preference, but those who do particpate are likely to be repeat participants, and may be predisposed to do even more to support the campaign.
Of course, this is all mostly just theory - I don’t think that in practice there’s really such thing as a 100% ‘Simon Says’ or 100% ‘Mini-Putt’ action - usually it’s a mix of both models. Take for instance the recent photo-blog anti-whaling site launched by Greenpeace. (http://whales.greenpeace.org). In this campaign, there is a simple base action - take a picture holding a printed message and upload it - but the possibility is there for more complex, creative activities to generate that image - some hold group photo-events, others take art-style photos and others write evocative personal comments to accompany their image.
In the world of professional sports, they say the best way to build a die-hard loyal fan base is always to be the runner-up and not the champion. It true in the city where I live, Toronto, where our home ice hockey team hasn’t won the championship since 1968, and we have the most loyal, long-suffering fans in the league. By contrast, our professional baseball team won the championship several years in a row back in the 90’s and as they have followed that success with more recent failure, their fanbase as dwindled.
This is a phenomenon I have seen in campaigns as well. In a successful campaign, a lot of momentum is built, and a supporter base is mobilized, but often, in the aftermath of victory, everyone feels happy that a job was well done, and the focused energy fizzles out, rather than be re-directed or captured to feed other causes.
I was recently involved with a political movement to keep Canada from signing onto supporting George Bush’s Star Wars program. We held rallies and built a large online petition list to deliver our message to the Canadian government. It seemed that the anti-Star Wars movement could become a focus point for a broad coalition of left-wing opposition groups. But then the government made a surprise announcement that they had decided not to sign onto Star Wars after all. It seemed to be a great victory, but in the aftermath, the opposition movement has stalled, and over the past six months, most of the momentum has slipped away while we’ve waited for the next big issue to emerge.
It cna be a fairly straightforward thing to get people’s interest and support when you show them an outrageous wrong that must be righted. It’s much harder to keep their attention when they feel that the job is done, and it can be especially difficiult if that victory is won unexpectedly, far sooner than anyone expected. Movements are built across multiple campaigns led by multiple actors, so it’s important to have a well-executed winning strategy so that a victory isn’t followed by a loss of momentum.
Winning strategies can function by handing the campaign momentum over to a new cause, or by banking it to be mobilized again at some future point. Handing over can be done with a new call to action that links the vicitory that has just been achieved to a larger movement and directs support to ongoing related actions. Banking the momentum can be tricker, but consists primarily of a fundraising and communication strategy that wraps up the campaign “story”, acknowledges everyone’s vital support in achieving such an important victory, and converts their sense of goodwill and accomplishment into dollars.
Call to Action is a new book that advocates a stronger emphasis on direct response marketing techniques on the web.
According to Jeffery and Brian Eisenberg, the book’s authors, “Virtually all Web sites have a persuasive purpose: to get someone to subscribe, to register, to inquire or to buy something,” and the extent to which the website content and design serves to drive visitors to take these actions should be the crucial measure of success.
The book is targetted to an e-commerce/business audience, but the core points hit home for nonprofits and campaign activists - especially around typical action items such as advocacy, volunteer recruitment and online donatons. Website visitors should be able to identify in a handful of seconds exactly what it is that you want them to do - if not, then they are more likely to surf off somewhere else without engaging with your website beyond a cursory glance.
Web Marketing guy Gerry McGovern has posted a review of the book.
This reminds me of Steve Krug’s excellent book on web usability Don’t make me think, which has become my personal bible on website design. Well worth the read for his common-sense analysis of how a web design that understands and responds to basic human nature can greatly enhance the usability, and hence, the popularity of your website.
Online engagement fundraising and marketing for social change and activist organizations including Amnesty, Greenpeace, Oxfam and progressive political parties.
Shake the Pillars is my blog about innovative ideas and practices in online activism and public engagement for social change.
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.
Just read an interesting post on Steve Bridges’ blog 
