You could set up a whole blog about what we can learn from the Obama presidential campaign, but just a quick post to flag up this interesting article in the Guardian about Thomas Gensemer, MD of Blue State Digital, the company that ran the hugely successful Obama online effort, which raised over $500 million and recruited 13.5 million supporters.
While the focus of the article is about how political parties should use the web, it has lots of lessons that could transfer over to campaigning NGOs. A few key points;
On using the web as a mobilising tool –
Rather than merely join this network, passively clicking a button to donate or express an allegiance to Obama, members were encouraged to go out into the real world to knock on doors, hand out leaflets and spread the word. The site then encouraged these efforts to be recorded and shared with the online community, making the user feel empowered and on the front line of the campaign
Obama saw technology as the only way to transfer traditional community organising to a national level, with volunteers and donors signing up online and then being encouraged to go out to recruit further volunteers, hold meetings and house parties, spread the message.
On the web as a gimick v’s a communication tool
Now Labour MPs are using Twitter, but the political capital that went into getting a couple of MPs to Twitter probably wasn’t worth it. Prescott’s petition on the bankers has 15,000 signatures, but what are they asking people to do? You could have asked for different things that would create a greater sense of engagement. None of this is a technology challenge; it’s an organisational challenge, being willing to communicate with people.
Read the whole article here, which includes a short video of Gensemer reviewing the websites of the Labour and Conservative parties.
UPDATE – Gensemer also spoke to an audience at City University while he was in the UK. The reports from the talk make fascinating reading. You can also view a video here and download the powerpoint slides here.
Tag: campaign tools
Will twitter change campaigning?
It can only be a matter of time before the verb ‘to twet’ ends up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Last month the BBC reported that the micro-blogging phenomenon had for the first time made it into the top 20 most used social networking sites and that Twitter grew ten fold in 2008.
So should campaigners care? Rachel at The Charity Place has a whole number of excellent posts about Twitter and how to get started, w
hile Econsultancy asks if more charities should be using Twitter.
Enough has already been written about twitter to generate a lifetime of tweets, so I just want to summarise a few ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ for campaigners.
For Twitter
– Its free
– Its instant – within moments you can be updating your followers about a new action they can take, a campaign victory to report. No longer do you need to build and send an e-mail or wait until the next campaign publications to tell your supporters.
– So what if you fail – working with social media means a change in attitudes for many, its forcing organisations to be less risk adverse, perhaps a difficult things for NGOs who are aware that everything is paid for by donations, but isn’t the spirit of social media to try things, knowing that some with fail, but many will succeed.
– Politicans are using it – The Economist reports on the use of Twitter among US senators , OK so the UK is different but number 10 has been twittering for the last 12 months, and now a number of MPs are.
– Its growing and fast– are we witnessing a ‘tipping point’ for twitter?
Against Twitter
– Who uses it? Twitter may have experienced phenomenal growth in a short time, but who actually uses it? Labour Home asks a good question. Is Twitter just the domain of a small circle of ‘early adopters’ or is it about to break into the mainstream.
– Its more than a just another PR channel – it seems that those who have been most successful with Twitter have embraced the fact its a conversation not another place to post your press release to, but doing this well has time implications.
–You need the right technology – unless you have a web enabled mobile its hard to really follow people. But sales of the iPhone and other similar phones would suggest that more and more people are adopting these
– Does anyone care – Tweetminster is a wonderful idea, but will most MPs respond to a question/comment via Twitter – especially when they’re isn’t any evidence that the followers are from their own constituencies.
Instinctively I’m an ‘early adopter’ so I think Twitter is a great thing. My early adventures (at a UN conference and on a trip to Liberia) have been fun and insightful for thinking about the possibilities of Twitter.
From those experiences I’ve learnt that you need to put some serious time into promoting your feed, and then keeping the messages going to build up a head of steam. Equally you need to invest in putting time into replying to others and building a network on line. Twitter is not going to replace the more traditional methods of communicating with decision makers, but it might be a new one, an opportunity to demonstrate concerns and put issues onto the agenda within moments.
Have we taken the fun out of Flash Mobs?
Last month, on a cold winters morning, I joined 100 other people on the banks of the River Thames to take part in a ‘Flash Squat‘ organised by the End Water Poverty campaign to highlight the fact that despite 2008 being the UN Year of Sanitation around the world billions were still denied access to the loo.
This week I’ve been invited to join a banana mob in London to celebrate the end of Fairtrade Fortnight. I’ll be going along, it seems like a fun way to make the end, and I hope the event will help to raise publicity and get more people demanding Fairtrade products in their shops, supermarkets and workplaces.
But judging by this comment in the London Paper it seems that the sudden love of a Flash Mobs by charities hasn’t been met with universal approval! The writer argues that by hijacking the idea, charities are guilty of taking the fun out of the flash mob. So should we plead guilty? Have we taken the fun out of Flash Mobs? I think we can confidently plead not guilty.
Campaigns have a long history of adapting mainstream ideas to get across their message, they’re cheap to organise (surely a bonus in these credit crunch days) and it seems that Flash Mobs still seem to have media currency – something that can be hard to generate at the best of times.
From a policy change perspective, we probably need to be honest with ourselves that these events don’t have much impact on decision makers, although as my colleague remarked after the Flash Squat, I bet most MPs staff read the London Paper on the way home from the office, but from a publicity perspective they can work brilliantly and that seems like a good reason to do them.
At some point they’ll start to lose their when they lose their originality, but until that happens it, I look forward to joining in with many more flash mobs.