About the Topic

Campaigning can mean many different things and we want to keep the definition of the topic fairly open for this chat, in order to keep insights, resources and conversation in the Q/A format as open to valuable input as possible.  Here are some ways that campaigning can be framed for the purpose of this chat:

• moving canvassing door to door to online networks
• political action
• local community building
• tying communications, partners, and actions together via social media
• social change projects or programs locally or globally

The way we examine the use of social media in campaigning can be further framed in some of these ways:

1. change campaigns (internal vs external), also organization type variations
2. social media change campaigns (specific nuances)
3. change campaigns vs political campaigns (similarities vs differences)
4. educational campaigns (organizational / institutional / internet) riffing off of last month’s topic
5. building campaign coalitions & recruiting campaign champions

How to Participate

Share your ideas now:

You can share your ideas about the topic as well as any resources, case studies, examples, research etc. by leaving a comment on this blog post.  Or, you can tag your resources or posts using Delicious with the tag “4change” and we’ll pick it up for you.

Join the Twitter chat:

1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
2. To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for #4Change
3. Jump in to the conversation by adding #4Change to your Twitter message
4. Feeling brave? Check out TweetChat – it’s a great application that integrates with your Twitter account and makes chats more fun! You can turn it off after the chat.

Rules for #4Change Chat

1. #4Change will be structured around a series of questions which all participants can respond to. Send your questions to @memeshift to have them considered.
2. Introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join.
3. Stay on topic!
4. Be cool.

Details

• Date: January, 14th 2010
• When: 2 – 4 pm US Pacific Time, 5 – 7 pm US Eastern Time, 10pm – 12am London, UK (Late!)
• Where: Twitter (search for #4Change)
• Topic: Campaigning: How is social/new media affecting the the way we build and conduct campaigns? and more!

We’ll update this post with specific questions to be asked during the chat and will capture resources and conversations from the chat, too.  Send us your ideas!

As I announced recently, Advocacy Online and Fairsay have jointly produced a benchmark report to examine key e-campaigning performance measures. The benchmark data is derived from the activity of over 2 million supporters from 50 campaigning organisations in the UK, Canada, and several other countries.  In addition to the benchmark data, the project also includes an e-campaigning survey that has been carried by Jess Day, an independent e-campaigning consultant. (I also referenced the report in my latest presentation slides about social media use by individuals in nonprofit organizations.)

The report was launched this last week at an event in London (and via webcast).  I want to share some of the highlights from the launch presentations of Duane Raymond and Jess Day, but if you want to skip ahead to the download, you can scroll to the bottom!

Report Highlights

65% of actions reviewed in the report asked people to add their own message (whether this was a petition, or post, etc.) – this is great because letting your supporters personalize or otherwise get more involved in your actions will only help build a commitment to the outcome of your campaign or action as well as encourage your supporters to ask their friends or colleagues to participate as well.

Resources or capacity are still an issue – the big organizations do better with online actions.  This isn’t really a surprise as bigger organizations naturally have more people/staff and time, technical capacity and so on (many groups working on advocacy have only a couple people vs a large organization with hundreds).

Only 43% of actions linked to background information. People may worry that if someone clicks on an action button, say, on your homepage, and then you provide them links to more information about the topic of the action, that they will click away and never actually complete the action.  Nope. People may want more background information but that’s because they are interested!  Most all of the actions reviewed in the report that even those that did link to background information, those pages didn’t link back to the action! That’s why people aren’t completing the action!  Remember to link to actions from everywhere on your site that is related to the action!!!

58% of the actions scored full marks for visibility within their websites. That’s not a very high number for succeeding at visibility of actions on the one space online you have complete control: your own website.  There are lots of places where actions could be included to be more visible, like the above note of including them on background information (or blog posts!).

11% of campaigns had no target (meaning, “join the campaign”).  Be sure that if you are just trying to get supporters, or grow your list of interested people who could sign a petition or do other actions later on in your campaign or work, that you create an action that isn’t seen as empty or short term (literally just “we want your email”).

37% of the actions did not generate a thank you email after taking action; 74% sent poor quality thank you emails; and 69% do not send a follow up email within one month of a supporter taking action. This is bad news!  After someone donates, signs up or completes any other action for your organization is prime time for providing relevant follow-up options to get more involved, learn more, or support your organization/campaign in other ways.

50% of organizations had databases that included 40% or more of inactive supporters. It doesn’t help your cause to have people in your database that aren’t really there.  Provide ways for people to update their contact information or change their email address.

“If you stand back from the survey data these is one very clear message: strategic personalization and targeting are on a level of sophistication that many groups are still struggling to reach.” This means specifically working on segmenting your database and testing messages.  Track your supporters’ actions to know who you should target for which actions and when.  Succeeding at this, though, isn’t reliant on the tools but staff time and knowledge about how to do it.

Download Reports

Visit the Advocacy Online website for more details and downloads.

• Advocacy Online summary document – download
• benchmark data (author:  Duane Raymond) – download
• e-action review (author:  Jess Day) – download
• e-campaigning survey (author:  Jess Day) – download

What’s LOUDER?

LOUDER will be the new online home for campaigners. The free and accessible site draws together a range of social media tools for people who want to change the world.

Through Louder you will be able to create a microsite for your campaign with the most used ‘change-tools’ the web has to offer. You will be able to connect to and manage profiles on other social media sites helping you coordinate supporter action.

To help make your campaign louder you will be able to connect up with other campaigns and those running them. Providing a much needed online space for campaigners, from international NGOs to grass roots activists, to link up collaborate and share experiences.

Why I like Louder:

I’ve been playing around with the new platform a bit and am quite excited about it.  I think it has a lot of potential to join with campaigning tools like Fairsay’s tool for Plone and collaborative tools like Zanby.

I like that Louder…

1. lets you create and distribute content all over the web
2. bring in content you create elsewhere
3. lets you work on a campaign without everything being “live”
4. uses a straightforward process to set up modules and then drag/drop to design your page
5. is being developed by folks IN the nonprofit and campaigning for change sector, so they “get it” already

Dive in!

LOUDER is in a “progressive beta” phase now and is working fast and furiously to built out more and more functionality for campaigners.  You can visit their roadmap to see what’s in the pipeline of development and share your ideas about what you’d like the platform to do for you.

Some things currently in the works include:

• Newslist and newsletter management
• Email MPs/MEPs/Councillors and other influential people
• Contact management tools
• Collaborative tools for planning campaigns
• The ability to connect to Facebook accounts

What do you think?

What are you waiting for? Go check out LOUDER now!

And let me know what you think, too

You can download an outline of what the report will cover and a list of the participating organisations.

Join me!

I’ll be heading to the in-person event to hear about the 2009 report, case studies, and more.  If you are in London, you can join me!  If you aren’t in London, you can join in via a webinar!

The in-person event is being hosted at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in central London on October 13th 2009. The event will start at 4:00pm (BST) with registration and coffee, followed by a presentation of the report’s key findings starting at 4:30pm. This will be followed by a presentation by 2 organisations that contributed data to the study, plus Q&A and a drinks reception.

The webinar is scheduled to start at the same time as the in-person events: October 13th 2009 at 4:30pm BST.

Learn more about the event and register here!