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).
