Online Campaigns
Raising Change
Did it feel like Change or charity?
Doing a workshop at the “Raising Change” conference (San Francisco) had me reflecting a whole lot on fundraising strategies for the movement. A lot of those wonderings revolved around “social networking sites and fundraising” - the topic I presented. Is it a viable new way? Is it worth trying out? What can you expect to gain or lose in the short and long run? What does it mean to your offline fundraising? Really meaty questions I would say. Fortunately I had a large energetic group in the workshop which enhanced the usefulness of the session: there was a lot of wisdom passed around from our collective experience.
It was an impressive turnout by the way: the total number of people at the conference hovered around 600. As a young fundraiser, its invigorating being around peers in this sort of setting: “a social justice fundraising conference” (as described by the organizers). Albeit the fact that I’m reminded that we have a long road to travel. The gospel according to my workshop was simple: Social Networking sites are yet another possibility to raise change but are anything but a magic formula for fundraising. Read that as: Good fundraising communications and strategies used offline are relevant to online fundraising.
One of the more important lesson’s I’ve picked up from our Power of Change campaign is to remember we’re raising support for Change not begging for charity! The basic ingredient of a movement is a committed people. People, who commit time, People who commit to hard work, people who commit their resources, etc. Raising change is establishing a partnership with folks that support the movement and making sure we have the resources we need to further small “d” democracy.
If you’re interested in using social networking sites to fundraise and wonder how to do it effectively, this little exercise below could be a start in thinking about it.
Reflect on experiences you have had with folks sending you online appeals – through, email, e-newsletters, face book applications, etc.
- Was the design attractive?
- Was the content well catered to you?
- Did it reach you at a good time?
- Did the problem and the action have some logical consistency?
- Was the action easy enough to follow?
- Did it feel like change or charity?
Peace Kwame
Political Inclination of MySpace users:
Seems like the MySpace folks are working to build a case against the idea that MySpace users are politically disengaged. A recent survey
. . .revealed a few key facts: that MySpace's young user base is more politically engaged and active than the U.S. population at large, that they tend to be politically independent, and that they plan to vote in the 2008 election.
Read the rest - it is quite interesting at MySpace touts early success with political polling initiative
Web Worker Daily » A Look Inside MoveOn.org «
Web Worker Daily has a "Look Inside Virtual Company MoveOn.org" it isn't much of a look that you don't already know if you know about MoveOn, but vaguely interesting - the virtual retreat sounds torturous, but I suppose if you've got a good headset, then it might be okay.
More interesting would have been a review of the headsets, phone systems, and other hardware and software they use. I mean, they can't really run everything on Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, and other online technologies - certainly not with their membership databases and other member related information, right?
twitter: am I the only one who sees some real potential here?
Twitter's had quite a bit of buzz lately. If you haven't heard of it, maybe its because you've got better things to do with your time than subscribe to a service that enables you and other twitter users you know to update each other on the minutiae of your lives via the web, cell phone text message, or rss.
But wait, maybe, just maybe there's something else here. Stay with me for a moment here:
Take twitter, not as potentially annoying social phenomena likened to the latest form of cat blogging, but instead as a communications platform that does a few things really well and really easily:
- enables short text posting through a web form, from your cell phone, or through an instant messenger account
- publishes that short message on the web
- pushes that short message out to your network of subscribers via: web site, rss or cell phone text message
Do you see it yet? How about some scenarios:
- GOTV work? GOTV staff posts a "remember to vote" message on twitter 1 week, 3 days, 1 day, on the day, and then every hour for the last 5 hours of election day. Could this get annoying? Maybe, maybe not depending on constituency. Include a link or phone number to find out where to vote/get a ride/or for election protection info for extra points.
- do you do lobby days? spend a chunk of your state's legislative session at the capitol? Twitter just became your best bet for super fast updates to supporters and to your website.
Those are just two examples. There are many many more, and I hope that you're thinking about and planning to use some of them. Twitter's not perfect - far from it. Currently, the site can be painfully slow as the number of users outweighs the resources of the server twitter.com is sitting on, but I'd be surprised if that didn't change soon.
What is really cool about twitter is that it is totally permission based - you can't just collect someone's cell phone and and spam them with sms text messages - they have to register at twitter and ask to receive your updates. It may add a layer of complexity, but it means that folks that do subscribe to your updates probably really want to hear from you.
From an organizing perspective, it would be very cool if twitter supported groups, but given how many people are clamoring for this functionality, I hope to see it soon.
What are your thoughts about where and how twitter could be used in community organizing?
Politicking on YouTube
just when you hoped it was going to be a quiet election season for the internet:
When Republican Sen. Conrad Burns briefly struggled to keep his eyes open at a Montana farm bill hearing last Thursday, a state Democratic party operative was right there taping it. Within hours, the video of Burns was on YouTube and available to viewers around the world.
Not at all surprising that campaigns are using YouTube and similar services for this kind of thing. At a recent PTP training, I gained some insight into how groups are using MySpace in similar ways.
I'd love to hear about community organizing groups that are doing any work with video along these lines - we generally see groups invest in putting their video content on their website. What I'm curious about is the thought process behind releasing video on something like YouTube, where the audience is potentially larger, but the message, and importantly, the context, more dilute. Maybe. As I've said before, I don't entirely grok this "new media" thing and how it intersects with the work that we do at PTP.
Dave’s got some interesting idea on internet use for political candidates
Dave Winer's got some interesting ideas in his list of things that would be "would be more useful than the family members [that would be members of the Edwards family] blogging:"
check out the list
Discontent around Since Sliced Bread
this page contains a nice summary of the SEIU's Since Sliced Bread site and some of the discontent surrounding it.
In case you're not familiar with it, the goal of SEIU's site - http://www.sinceslicedbread.com was to solicit new and fresh ideas that
"are original and creative, [and] have the best chance of practical success and would most effectively:
- Grow the economy
- Create good-paying jobs that allow people to raise a family, afford health insurance, pay for their children's college education, get additional training and save for retirement
- Encourage existing companies to expand and entrepreneurs to start new ones"
the site was the vehicle for a contest offer $100,000 to the finalist with the best idea "since sliced bread" yeah, you get the idea.
As the contest moved into the final stages of voting, a fair bit of push back came from a number of places. The site I linked at the beginning of this post summarizes and links to some commentary on this push back and draws a number of interesting lessons about this type of online engagement.
An Introduction to Activism on the Internet
Thanks to the ONE/Northwest KnowledgeBase for their pointer to this quite comprehensive run down on Activism on the Internet.
EchoDitto: Online fundraising best practices
Best Practices | EchoDitto is a nice summary of their lessons learned from engaging in online fundraising. There's nothing earth-shattering, but it is a great summary of what it takes to do effective fundraising online. Not surprisingly, many of the tips also apply to online communication in general.
