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
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:
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?
- 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;
- 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)
- 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.
- 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).
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
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 …)
- 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 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 browseable 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.
With MySpace and other social networking communities now firmly rooted in the internet mainstream, activist organizations are starting to think about just how to integrate these kinds of spaces into advocacy and mobilization campaigns. A few organizations have set up early footholds: Amnesty USA’s youth program has a rich, well developed MySpace page, and organizations like Oceana and WWF USA have popular MySpace pages as well. However, these pages are mostly about building an expansive sense of community - as in “friends of …”, and feel more like big, unorganized social gatherings than targeted and focused campaign communities. But that has to be expected - MySpace wasn’t built to be a campaigning platform, so it’s probably not going to be a suitable stand-alone home site for many campaigns, and will more likely play a complimentary role as a recruitment and outreach engine - that’s where it’s real strengths seem to be.
The prime attraction for setting up a MySpace campaign page is the potential for building an organic, self-propagating network of friends and friends-of-friends who link to your MySpace page and become an channel for delivering campaign messages and engaging potential activists and donors.
One of the big challenges that I see at this point is the gawd-awful interface that MySpace provides. Its like stepping back into those “build-your-own-webage” tools that were around in the late 90’s when the web was still a new and somewhat loosely defined medium - before professional web designers established the base design language that we’re now familiar with for making web pages that “work” (headers/footers, navigation menus, breadcrumb trails, etc.). It certainly doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy to build engaging MySpace websites to enthuse and mobilize campaign supporters.
Fortunately the geek community has already started playing around with the MySpace system and are discovering some of the tricks to break the mold, and create MySpace page layouts that are more customizable and brandable. I have started playing in my own sandbox (MySpace profile) to start exploring building up a branded MySpace page for campaigning.
Have look here: http://www.myspace.com/hjcnewmedia and let me know if you’ve got any good suggestions or other example sites to look at. It’s pretty basic at this point - just a start, really.
I’ll be updating this MySpace profile as I learn more, so keep an eye on this link, and I’m happy to provide the CSS code if anyone is interested.
I recently attended a working session with Greenpeace International about a new project they are developing that is challenging the traditional way they plan and execute their campaigns (i.e. normally behind closed doors).
This fall a new online community website will appear that will invite Greenpeace members, supporters, and environmentalists from around the world to help plan and execute a new global campaign. It is been dubbed “open source campaigning”, and is an experiment in tappig into the collective intelligence of the environmental activist community.
It’s going to be fun and unpredictable, and not without risks, but it’s seen as a way of injecting new energy and creativity into the process that Greenpeace uses in developing and delivering its campaigns. It’s also innovative in that the project is being lead by a team from Greenpeace’s Argentina office in Buenos Aires, and not in Europe or North America. (It’s the same core team who delivered the highly successful Virtual No Whaling march in 2005, that mobilized more than 70,000 online activists to upload photos and statements to bring a powerful visual message to the International Whaling Commission meeting in South Korea).
The first phase of this new open source campaigning project is going to be internal to Greenpeace staff/volunteers only, but it will be opened to the global public in the 2nd round, and I’ll post more information when it’s available.
Beth Kanter at NetSquared has posted a nice roundup of some early entries in the nonprofit / youtube mashup category. The success of youtube is putting some new spark into the “what can nonprofits do with online video” discussion - read Beth’s article here, and watch for more developments to come quickly as this year’s hot online trend rolls out into mainstream society.
My innner fundraiser is eager to point out that submissions of personal video testimonials recorded by donors about why they chose to give to a particular cause or campaign could be very powerful tool for pitching to new donors. Youtube style video uploads would add a whole new level of storytelling and emotional impact to the personal fundraising pages that are supported by companies like Justgiving, Artez and GiveMeaning.
