Why it works: Tweets come and go (in fact over 70% of tweets go unread), but sharing content via Facebook can be very impactful among networks of friends. After all, your profile picture is similar to the top fold of a newspaper – it’s often the first thing your followers see and interact with on Facebook. This can be a very powerful tool for advocating your cause if used correctly.

Why it’s challenging: You may be asking followers to change their profile pictures to a particular logo or color, but what is that really achieving? Of course, this is the main argument for critics of slactivism. Without a call to action, it can be difficult to really see value. “Facebook pictivist” campaigns also lack metrics and measurement. There is really no good way to quantify and track the numbers of users participating in the viral campaign, which is important when advocating for support and funding.

How to do it right: There are three things to remember if you consider using the “Facebook pictivist” approach for your campaigns.

• Call to Action: Having users change their photos to a pink ribbon in remembrance of breast cancer may be honorable, but your campaign needs to drive people to action. This can be as simple as including a ‘call to action’ tagline and URL address to get followers to do something beyond social media.
• One Piece of the Puzzle: Remember that a “change-your-Facebook-picture-to-support-the-cause” campaign is simply one tactic. You should not rely on it solely to achieve your goals. If even applicable, it should be just one approach among a whole suite of tactics that make up your broader strategy.
• Be creative: Simply put, the campaign needs to be different in order to garner mass appeal. Facebook users have seen the turn-my-profile a color motif and they may have even transformed their photo into a cartoon for child abuse awareness in the previous years. Think creatively to bring consumers something they haven’t seen or done before. Use the new Facebook’s timeline and cover photos to create something unique.

1. Younger people are more engaged than senior citizens.

Pew found that 79 percent of Americans aged 18-24 and 80 percent of Americans aged 34-44 say they discuss politics offline, while only 68 percent of Americans over the age of 65 do the same. (Americans between the ages of 45 and 64 are way more likely to report being directly involved in civic groups offline than people of any other age, though.)

Conventional wisdom holds that the smartest political play for a politician is to tour churches and senior centers, because that’s where the voters are. But according to this survey, a significantly greater proportion of younger Americans are paying attention. The survey found that people in all age groups under 65 are significantly more likely to be talking about politics than people over 65.

Elsewhere in the survey results, the tables show that “engagement” is roughly the same across partisan lines. There’s no significant difference between how many Republicans and Democrats are likely to be involved in politics, online or off. (Independents are slightly less likely to be engaged.)

2. Slacktivists are a minority.

Thirty-nine percent of Americans told Pew they had performed some sort of political activity on a social network in the year leading up to their survey — but they are, by and large, using social media as just one part of a more robust engagement with civic life. Just eight percent of American adults, engage in political activity purely on social networks.

So if you’re running a political campaign, social networking might be a way to reach new supporters who will take action on other channels. But if a supporter is only willing to stay with you on social networks, that supporter is part of a group that just won’t scale — and they’re probably not a great donor prospect, either.

3. Lines of color, education and class in civic life extend online.

Pew found that whites were significantly more likely to take action, online and offline, than Hispanic Americans. The survey also found slightly more white Americans than black Americans reported being engaged, but not to a significant degree.

Education, race and class present barriers to interaction offline, but do not present barriers to getting online and onto social networks. Once people of lower income or who have not completed college, and to a lesser extent people of color, get online, however, it’s clear that the same barriers exist around participation in civic life there as exist in meatspace.

Of course it doesn’t have to be this way. There was a barrier in age that supposedly separated the predominantly older voter from the predominantly younger American tuned out from activity in their community, too, and people are at least saying that this barrier has fallen. It certainly follows that someone who has to work 60 hours a week or flat-out can’t afford a babysitter won’t make that town hall meeting — but if younger Americans are more likely to be online as well as active, then perhaps the moment is ripe to build an Internet-driven tool that will solve that problem for younger Americans.

4. The “Occupy” target market is still active.

In the survey report, Pew senior researcher Aaron Smith flags for us a combination of data that show Americans affected by the economic downturn are likely to be active in civic life.

Smith writes that Pew has identified 56 percent of the population that has either had to cut back on the amount or quantity of food they purchase, put off medical or dental treatment, or have delayed making a rent or house payment in the year before their survey as a result of the economic slowdown.

People in that 56 percent, he writes, are no less likely than the rest of America to own a cellphone, use the Internet or use social networking. And they are just as likely to trip any of a wide variety of indicators of civic engagement, from conversing on social media about politics, speaking out publicly online or offline, receiving political outreach or participating in a protest.

In fact, in some cases — such as attending an organized protest — these people are more likely to be involved than other Americans.

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There are a couple of principles to abide by to keep groups manageable:

1. Think of groups as in one of two categories: temporary or permanent. Differentiating temporary and permanent groups, as well as periodically removing the temporary groups can help keep your groups down to a manageable number. Use a naming convention to indicate temporary groups (and if possible, to indicate who created the group and/or what program/campaign/department it’s used for). Have an internal discussion about when it’s okay to disable temporary groups. PTP’s protocol is that any temporary group can be disabled at any time, but we usually ask first.

 2. Name them in a consistent way. As suggested above, a helpful group name indicates a) whether it’s a temporary or permanent group b) what it’s used for and/or c) who it belongs to, if necessary/applicable.

Temporary groups might be marked with a special character at the beginning of the name – we use an underscore.  Here’s an example of a consistent naming protocol put into practice. _ denotes that the group is temporary; ORG means the group is related to and used for organizing work, while CM and FR stand for communications and fundraising.

You can also see how a naming protocol helps alphabetize (some) groups.

3. Use smart groups whenever possible and know that smart groups can always be created again, as long as you know what the underlying criteria are. Not-so-smart groups (static groups) cannot be easily re-created, so delete them only when you know they won’t be used again. If you’re unsure, it’s better to disable them.

• It can steer you wrong. A couple of weeks ago I ran subject line tests for a fundraiser to a very active segment of the Mozilla list. The winning segment on open rates came in at 49.1%, while the worst was 40.9%. But the worst performing segment on opens had 53% more donations. And the second-place segment on clicks was outperformed on donations by the third-place performer.

• It can cause you unnecessary work. Before you run that test, look at previous performance of similar appeals, and the variation in donations between particularly good and particularly bad appeals. Then plug the sample size of your tests and some potential returns into a statistical significance calculator. If it seems unlikely that you’ll get significantly different results on your donations between segments, then don’t run the test. There’s a very good chance you might be steered wrong by the limited results you get only watching opens and clicks, and your time is better spent making sure you’ve come up with the best appeal possible.

Read more of NOI’s helpful advice on email strategies here: http://bit.ly/181ETBu

The editor PowerBase uses is called CKeditor. It has some new buttons and a slightly different look. This tip focuses on the button called Styles.

Styles are special, saved formatting that can help you save time and keep your newsletters consistent. Rather than changing size, font face, and color, we suggest you use a style when possible. Here’s a look at some of the available styles. To the left, you’ll see text formatted with each of these styles:

Italic title can be used to quickly bold, enlarge, and italicize text. Particularly helpful for emails is the style called Special Container. This puts a gray box around text to make it stand out from the text around it. You might want to use this for a quote or a key point.

To use Styles, highlight the text you want to apply a style to. Select the style from the dropdown menu, and it will automatically get the formatting you’ve chosen.

In the image below, we’ve adapted an article from commondreams.org as if we were sending out an email blast. We’ve used styles to format different parts of the text. You can see that we’ve used Italic Title, Subtitle, Special Container, Marker: Yellow, and Cited Work. You can also highlight a block of text and click “Inline Quotation” to automatically enclose it in quotation marks.

The sample below is perhaps a bit busy for an email, but at least gives a sense of how you might highlight or draw attention to different pieces of your message using styles.

An important note is that you can, and should, also use styles in your word processing software (Open Office or Word, for example). Learn more about that here on our Word tutorial recording.

This PowerBase Training for New Staff is designed to introduce new staff the features of PowerBase.