Shake the Pillars

Greenpeace campaigning veteran Brian Fitzgerald backgammon free casino money free craps game play free black jack craps video poker strategy play black jack online how to win video poker casino game online uk best casino online casino secure online gambling jackpot casino online casino black jack learn to play craps how to win at video poker craps online blackjack casino game online casino betting free on line video poker casino games no download casino online gambling casino play free casino slots video poker machine bonus video poker free on line slots double bonus video poker free video poker games free casinos roulette online craps rules free on line casino rules of craps online casino free money blackjack 21 internet casino how to play craps free casino game download fortunelounge online casino free casino download free casino card game free roulette game free casino play no deposit free money casino internet casino online 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!

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 …

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.

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’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 targeting 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 Greenpeace 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, emerging online 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.

Just back from Japan where I have been participating in the development of a brand new Greenpeace campaign that’s really like nothing you’ve ever seen from the intrepid zodiac-speeding, smokestack climbing, gonzo activists of the 80’s and 90’s. The new site has just launched - mostly to an internal audience, but open as well to the general public - just not widely publicized yet.

http://www.whalelove.jp ( Japanese version)

http://www.whalelove.org/en/wagon (English version)

It’s a new whaling campaign to combat the growing “scientific” whale hunt that Japan has been pursuing for the past few years in the southern seas around Antarctica. However, this new campaign is taking an approach not often associated with Greenpeace - a soft approach. Greenpeace has been ostracized by the mainstream Japanese media for its aggressive anti-whaling campaigns in the past, so in order to more effectively reach out to the Japanese public (the majority of whom do not actually support the commercial whale hunt) the WhaleLove campaign is all about opening up the whaling debate, without being “preachy”, and without taking the hard line that in the past has just further entrenched both sides.

The campaign will be licking off in full force in January with the launch of a Reality “WebTV” show - WhaleLove wagon, which will be 10 part webisode series following a group of japanese and foreign youth as they travel around the country learning more about whales, and the traditional relationship between Japanese society and the great sea behemoths. It’s going to be an interesting journey into uncharted waters … more updates to come.

As profiled in an earlier post, Greenpeace International’s new “open source” campaign model launched a few days ago. The IGo Greenpeace campaign is throwing open the doors to invite everyone around the world to participate in planning the upcoming campaign to end the south sea sanctuary whale hunt in the waters off Antarctica. 

Haven’t you always dreamed about being on one of those inflatable Greenpeace zodiacs? Go to the IGo website and read through the 250+ ideas that have already been submitted. You can vote for which proposals you think Greenpeace should carry forward, and you can post your own great ideas for saving the whales. 

Check out my own submitted ideas while you’re at it (2 good, 1 bad):  here, here and here.