Digital illusions

It's been a lot of months since I last blogged, and in the spirit of the hypocritical I've been working on a new project to encourage, cajole, inspire and support like minded people to blog about things I care about, making the best use of materials I provide, and in their own words. The idea is similar to Mumsnet, but I think I pinched it from Amnesty. Methinks it's time to revive this blog.

Internally we live in rightful fear that we send too many emails to people. This is true in the absolute, and worse when you consider that such minded people receive emails from every other organisation under the moon. As email fatigue becomes more oppressive, and organisations such as Avaaz and 38 degrees do us no favours here, the thinking is that we should get ever better as segmenting [pdf] our email lists. As if one can divine precisely what folk want to read – oh for such hubris.

We often segment by issue (e.g. Peace), but as an organisation we'll usually highly focused on one campaign at a time. So if you are a recent clicktivist, then you will inevitably become typecast by the Zeitgeist of our communications. If we segment such that we only send you emails about that issue, you'll become more entrenched as a specialist, while one suspects forward thinking, progressive folk are in the main pluralists. We lack the unwavering fanaticism of say the Tea Party.

This concerns me, if we confuse recency, and the short term fickle nature of clicktivism with a Cyclopean interest in our current comms. The data I have crunched, and the open rates that I have passed over, would provide suitable anecdotes to support such concerns.

So if I worry about segmenting clicktivists based on issues, should I have such concerns about segmenting based on whether folk want to get active online or offline?

My thinking about inviting people to blog, and connecting people together who already blog, is to develop new deeper paths of engagement for activists who want to do more online. Perhaps in activists who want to do more are already engaged offline, and clicktivists are not so much defined by the digital tools they use, but by lazyness, lack of time and/or lack of capacity to do activism for more than a 60 second burst.

Still there is that man on the Isle of Harris who wants to do something.....