Greenpeace campaigning veteran Brian Fitzgerald writesabout a truly global online action, lining up Greenpeace’s 40+ world-wide offices to push a single effortfor 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.
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.
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:
Filed under: eActivism — irishg @ February 25, 2008 11:22 am
This is a post I wrote a couple of years back on the FundraisingInnovation blog about a simple engagement model that I find helpful in constructing online actions and campaigns. (thanks to Steph Legault of HighWater Mark for the original concept)
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The “Ladder of Engagement” is a model for visualizing how organizations can build a base of more committed supporters for activism, campaigning, advocacy and fundraising.
The Ladder of Engagement sets out a simple scale for ranking different activities that online supporters may enage in. Low on the ladder are quick and easy items such as signing an online petition or forwarding an email to a friend. At the top of the ladder are the most involving forms of activism, including meeting with elected officials, organizing local actions, and making donations.
High Engagement
Recruit friends/family
Upgrade monthly donation
Signup for monthly giving
Renew single donation
Make single donation
Write a letter
Attend a ‘real world’ event
Sign petition
Viral / Tell a friend
Send an epostcard
Subscribe to e-Alerts / Issue Alerts
Subscribe to eNewsletter
Enter a contest
Low Engagement
Visit website
Over time, an individual supporter would be expected to engage in a variety activities, both high and low on the ladder. The goal of an online engagement strategy is not just get increased numbers of people involved, but also to encourage them to climb the ladder of engagement.
Some of an organization’s supporters will climb the ladder of engagement as a natural evolution of their relationship with that organization. Others can be assisted by specific messaging that encourages them to deepen their commitment and invite them to do more. This must be done carefully so that the past activities they have taken part in are not de-valued, but that they are also shown some of the higher steps on the ladder.
A Thank you/Acknowledgement message that someone may receive after participating in an action or activity can be one of the key tools for encouraging them to climb the ladder — for instance, encouraging someone who has just signed an online petition to subscribe an eAlert list on this issue, or asking a new online donor to forward a current campaign message to a number of their friends or colleagues.
The ladder of engagement is also sometimes presented as a pyramid – illustrating that relatively few of an organization’s supporters will climb to the highest steps on the ladder, and most will remain in the lower-engagement levels. One of the ways to expand the upper levels of the pyramid is to broaden participation at the lower levels – the “base” – so a strategy to expand numbers of supporters engaged at a lower levels is a means to achieving greater participation through to the upper levels.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
Online engagement fundraising and marketing for social change and activist organizations including Amnesty, Greenpeace, Oxfam and progressive political parties.
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.
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.
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 
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.
Virtual monuments already exist – see 
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).
