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.
On Thursday, June 16, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) launched a major publicity campaign across Africa, giving SMS users in 15 countries the opportunity to join the ‘world’s largest’ anti-poverty campaign that has already signed up many thousands of supporters in developed countries.
TV ads featuring African celebrities will be widely shown to raise awareness, and to encourage viewers to use cell phone SMS to join the campaign by sending the text message “say no 2 poverty” to a special number. The messages received will be presented to African leaders and to G8 leaders at the upcoming summit in Scotland.
> here is the full article on the GCAP website
Mobile-enabled politics are still far from true networked solidarity — and may do unaffiliated activists more harm than good.
Douglas Rushkoff at The Feature has posted a commentary on the state of SMS (Short Message Service)-bsaed activism, focusing in particular on recent examples such as U2’s use of SMS at concerts to get ‘texters’ to support anti-poverty campaigns, and the People for the American Way’s work to build a Mass Immediate Response system of SMS users standing at ready to launch SMS attack waves at right-wing Senators opposing progressive legistation.
Rushkoff recognizes the potential for short-term payoff in ‘activating’ large numbers of cell-phone wielding supporters who may otherwise tend to be politically apathetic:
These temporary, provisional affiliations seem tailor-made for this generation of activists: they get to take action, but they don’t have to commit themselves to a group or institution that might turn around and screw them, later.
However, Rushkoff is skeptical of the long-term effectiveness of these tactics in building stronger progressive movements:
These are not true bottom-up, spontaneous, grass-roots expressions of networked solidarity, nor even representations of groups willing to follow up on their stated convictions; they are simply instances of large numbers of people momentarily willing to take their orders from above.
For the past month Greenpeace has been running a new international campaign to protest against moves toward renewed whale hunting in South Korea. Online mobilization is a key element of this campaign, and the No Whaling website (http://whales.greenpeace.org) is an impressive photo-blog and mass-recruitment vehicle.
Already more than 20,000 people from around the world have signed on and uploaded photos of themselves holding protest signs against the renewed whale hunt. Greenpeace is calling this a virtual march and plans to project the 20,000 plus images on the wall of a strategically located building on June 19th when whaling-resumption talks are taking place.
This combination of online and street-style campaigning gives us a snapshot of the potential for real ’shake the pillars’ movement building, and it seems destined to be a model for future online/offline campaign actions.
One of the best elements of the site can be seen by going to search page and selecting a country from the drop down list, then click on Search to see a listing of all the people images and comments sent in from that country. It would be nice to see this listing promoted more on the front page, and also the total of signups from each country.
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.
Howard Rheingold has released a research report, produced for the Institute for the Future, into the state of new and emerging technologies for social cooperation, such as mesh networks, smart mobs, blogs, RFID tags, etc.
In an article on The Feature, Rheingold provides a summary of the report’s intent and contents:
this report and accompanying graphic map are offered as resources to the developers, designers, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, operators, service providers and activists who seek to use these new tools to alleviate suffering, create wealth, educate, liberate, create and inform
Accompanying the report is a wall-chart style diagram showing how these new technologies interrelate and link to emerging social practices. Very handy … I’ll be printing a copy to stick up over my desk..
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.
