Doublethink and Doublespeak

Back in 2010 I set to sea to express confusion that offline activism had fallen out of fashion in a new digital world. Or perhaps I was hoping to learn to swim in that world by practicing my writing strokes – I can’t recall.

The new hope of mobilisation was the evolution into a more people powered organisation, getting the numbers and enabling people to act. Which felt like a previous episode c 2002/2003 casting active supporters into the same offline role – this isn’t exactly another chapter of Revelations.

Then there’s fragmented divisions about what mobilisation means? To the bosses it’s getting big numbers of sign ups, which means fundraising leads, like many marketing asks -i.e. income to fuel dull policy and politics work. To the folk in the trenches mobilisation is leveraging the power of the people to win campaign. Forcing companies to listen to their perception of their customers, or politicians to hear the voices of those they plausibly represent, or the media to magnify the stories of the many till those with power take heed. In summary the objectives of mobilisation was never to be fundraising targets, the goal is not to make money but to win campaigns. If the invisible elbow of mobilisation, i.e. our externality,  is fundraising then that’s excellent., and if winning campaigns encourages people to donate that’s how it should be.

So then is a blog somewhere where I’ve argued mobilisation as ‘getting people to do shit’, or perhaps ‘getting people to do useful shit’. With a personal goal of ‘getting people to do more shit’ against an organisation background of ‘getting more people to do shit’. With a nagging voice that perhaps we should be ‘enabling people to do shit’.

Recently returned from months working in India (something for a retrospective) I was lured into the restructuring of mobilisation teams, online, offline and mobiles into the ideology of the pyramid of engagement. I.e. one team focused on reach / outreach – finding new people to work with the organisation, one team focused on digital platforms and innovation - to enable people to stay active with campaigns and one team focused on engagement - to bring people closer to us, engaging them in discussion and deeper levels of activism online and offline.

Last night’s conversations in the pub about the next global restructuring sweeping our way, is the emerging role of engagement. Merging comms (old media), mobilisation (digital) with fundraising (street), and a hint of offline to do something new? Picking at the role descriptions of say an offline engagement manager, they reveal themselves as fundraising roles – probably representing DD expertise, which bodes badly for the digital roles and the collective engagement structure.

So if the passion and thinking behind mobilisation has become synonymous with lead generation and fundraising. And the new vision of engagement is destined to be subsumed by fundraising then in the battle of Doublethink and Doublespeak we need to invent new words and ideas to describe the work that we do – to give people the power to create change, online and offline, and to keep the wolf from our back.

Gothic Activism

Today’s most intriguing highlight has to be the invitation to speak at this year’s Altfest, the UK's largest alternative festival – and maybe only unless you count Whitby? Topic to be determined, but with the likes of Marilyn Manson, the Cult and VNV nation headlining it’s going to be a fun one. At least so long as they don’t try and find a climate sceptic to argue the toss, like previously organisers at the Synergy Project.

But then I got to thinking about how to tailor progressive and environmental messages to the audience, i.e. the assembled mass of the black clad tribe – and/or how to cope with the post punk nihilism and modern Goth / emo apathy?

After a few moments of fond recollections of the ‘Eco Goths against Apathy’ group that we played with for Witchfest one year, and then reincarnated for the Airplot special interest groups project (an idea I'd like to resurrect) clearly more research is in order.

So tonight heralds hunting for hidden messages in my music collection. I’ll resort to playing songs backwards if I have less luck, and to keep the Christian extremists happy. But VNV have opened well, with the lyrics to Foreward (Futureperfect 2009).

This is your world.
These are your people.
You can live for yourself today,
or help build tomorrow for everyone.

Das ist deine Welt.
Das sind deine Mitmenschen.
Du kannst heute für dich leben,
Oder für alle die Zukunft von morgen aufbauen.

C'est ton monde.
Ce sont tes gens.
Aujourd'hui tu pourrais penser qu'à toi,
ou aider à construire un lendemain pour tous.

Still the night is young, there is plenty to drink, and I am not alone, I am not afraid, I am not unhappy……

Digging and Dreaming

The struggle I have with this blog, is that when I’m doing activism I am hesitant to write anything profound about the why of it - or to incriminate myself, and when I have the energy to write about the why of it - I lack the inspiration that comes from the doing of it. Thus it had been what 2 years since I've visited here which accounts for the dust and the cobwebs,

But of late I have been chasing round the world and burning too much carbon to work with activists, volunteers, communities and organisations from Brazil to India, to the Philippines and beyond. So perhaps there are some new stories to tell, and enough of a pause and a reflection to revive this blog? Or to decide to stick a stake through its heart before heading on to the next narrative in the Middle East.

So here goes, the clock is ticking - if I can commit to composing something before the sun rises then there may be life here yet.

Recipe for numbers

Foolishly on a Saturday morning I checked my inbox, to discover what will undoubtedly be another restructuring of a mobilisation department, not because they want bigger numbers but because they want to build a more integrated structure that will naturally attract bigger numbers - by the magic of management. So my first piece of advice would be to stop with the restructuring already – and get on with the job.

But wiser heads than I, are there to advise. So for the sake of a non-specialist opinion and a memory of a pub conversation here’s my recipe for online campaigns that achieve a step change in the volume of people interacting with a campaign. There’s also a nagging something that this is something an organisation gets one go at, and once they’ve had their big splash it’s much harder to do a second – especially if you relentlessly phone those signups for money – but a different diatribe.

1) Great campaigns – If you’re inspired by your campaign then others will be too. If it has a wow factor, of a 'WTF you did what' moment when you explain it then even better. If it’s focused on some technical EU legislation that you don’t really understand then don’t do it. More importantly you need to be able to explain why someone’s support will actually help achieve change - ideally in under a minute. Big companies do listen to their customers; politicians listen to their constituents but artificial constructs and generic pledges don’t really convince anyone and are much harder work. People powered campaigns are only convincing if the people actually have power to effect change.

If you’re running a big petition campaign and you don’t know what to do with the petition then you’re in trouble. If in doubt ask the people who sign it, what they want to do with it – send it by FedEx, or project it on the side of Sydney opera house. Ideally do several things with it, at key milestones and give people an incentive to tell you what to do next and then to get the numbers to that point. Oh and you can probably cost benefit doing big stunts vs the number of fundraising leads. If in doubt crowd source your campaign plans.

2) Capture the moment – either be reactive or lucky or plan to be reactive. BPs deep water horizon create a storm and the right campaign launching at the same time captured the energy of that storm. Organisations like Avaaz, 38 degrees, Get Up etc , do well at this and are optimised for such ambulance chasing – but anyone can do it. Care 2 and MoveOn do it as a buisness model. But ambulance chasing is a mean description, maybe it’s more like hitching your horse to the bandwagon.

The difficulty is in being reactive, and spotting the opportunity. Tools like ControlShift or Greenpeace X, do a good job of grabbing the space for others to create the opportunity. And I wonder if one can have a couple of campaign packs on standby waiting for the hook and theme. i.e. you desging your innovative digital campaign, stick it in a box, and then open the box when you need it. One could probably do most of the build in anticipation.

3) Unity of focus – in my experience the big numbers come from doing one thing well. And this really does mean one thing, so not a priority with lots of little whippets biting at its heels. But absolute unity of focus. And no you can’t do your rapid response, pet project as well - often as not rapid response is simply the argument for poorly planned, and if it is a rapid respone what are you actually going to achieve or is this simply the need to be seen to do something, to justify the salary.

The old FoE Big Ask campaign had this kind of focus and fro what I understand so did the Argentinan forest law campaign. When the office empties to go out on the streets to collect petitions. When the ED is campaigning next to the volunteers, when every single staff member is working on the one big project and all other output is on hold as the comms channels genuinely reflect the urgency of the situation. Then people pay attention.

4) Cool creative shit – clever new ideas like the Turkish fish game go viral because they’re clever. So giving people the space to surf around, looking for inspiration and then the confidence to build it works. Plan something that creates a buzz, by being buzzworthy. Drowning your talent in day to day Facebook updates, competing campaign meetings, dull legal arguments about risks, and awkward sign off processes doesn’t just clip their wings, it breaks every small bone in their bodies. Let them fly and again do one thing awesomely.

5) Long term capacity building – sometimes the illusion of the moment, and the step change in the numbers of people involved is that an illusion. Cf Kony 2012 or the Obama campaign. After years (usually 2+) of legwork, or building groups, and doing grassroots outreach to build a strong, sustainable network of people the moment comes to deploy that network to magnify the issue 10 fold, and attract new people doing so.

The difficulty comes from building and maintaining that network, which despite what senior management believes is neither easy, nor something that sits on a shelf waiting to be used - we do not have a warehouse full of grassroots activists waiting for the call. If you want a sustained network you have to put the energy in to keep, what is after all a collective of people, sustained.

6) Blind luck – sometimes big numbers just happens. You can plan the above, or do something dull and the story changes, or you’re the last one standing when the media come looking on a dull news day – or the phase of the moon generator is working overdrive, or to be honest to make any of this stuff work you kind of need to just get lucky. Reputations are built on one off successes and often lighting doesn’t strike again.

7) The other stuff – ok buy that lists of leads, spend loads of money on a video you want to go viral, adopt every last celebrity you can find, take on that paid ad on prime time TV. Test your tech and emails to death, try the little ideas and do the best practice – with an eye to list growth as a weekly necessity – what are you doing this week. But don’t expect the great leap forward simply from doing what everyone else is doing – but do this anyway.

So I reckon I've got examples for all of these, and maybe this is to be continued, if I ever get that  break from the machinations of management to propose that new vision, instead of doing any work.

Shards of Imagination

So it’s a funny thing what catches peoples imagination, or at least the media attention which then feeds the public’s sense of what’s important. Today’s action at the Shard certainly did that, and I wonder why? Is the audacity of climbing what is a bloody big building? The idea that all the climbers were woman – not bearded men? Was it the synergy of online and offline activism, and the live streaming Ice Climb – which was well cool? Or was it simply a slow media day?

The organisation has a reputation for dramatic actions, which over the years has grown less newsworthy to a jaded media. Climbing building and cranes, boarding ships and shutting down polluting factories is just as dangerous physically and legally as it was in the 80’s but rarely generated a peep out of the mainstream channels. Is this because the media is bored of such things or is the public (I don’t think so) or is it because our media has slipped into the hands of corporate interests who actively discourage such reporting? And I’d include the Beeb in that camp, who are subject to the most pernicious of establishment and corporate lobbying – the quite chat over dinner.

So why did this resonate? My instinct would be to argue for the digital elements. That anyone could tune in and be part of the protest. And of course the very real concern that they weren’t going to make it – so it was worth coming back for more. One of the conversations on the ground between a friend and some professional riggers who routinely clean the building was that they were simply carrying too much weight – that they couldn’t do it. Including the bloody great big banner and art installation that never got used. His response was that they were failing to allow for determination, and dedication to the issues, which went well beyond the physical challenge.

But the crowds at the base suggested that offline networking still works as well as online. That people hear what’s happening from their colleagues as well as the news and a website. And they feel the need to go be physically present. It seems surreal that the idea of talking to the crowds, or leafleting them, or even signing them up as Arctic Defenders was an afterthought and a last minute scramble. The organisation needs to remember its roots in talking to real people face to face, not just from behind the screen.

And me? Well I was between here and there, back from Ireland and heading to Bangkok to work with an Indonesian forests project. Which put me in a frustratingly non arresatble world running media footage and carrying expensive heavy objects. Which proved to be long, and hard work, compared to deploying ladders or getting arrested doing so – but nothing of course compared to climbing what is a bloody big building. I’m still impressed.

Laboratory experiments in Asia

So I wonder about the sympathetic magic associated with this blog. It started as an argument as to whether digital activism and mobilisation was where my future led, or whether old school organising was still as valid a path to change as ever. Then I ended up working in the digital field.

Now 2+ years later the pendulum has returned, and I seem to find myself back working with offline organisers, volunteer coordinators, network developers and more. With an experimental mandate, and a sack of money (ok a moderate budget), to go out into the world and make good things happen. Folk who believe in chaos theory, the complexities of the modern world, and change management would be delighted by the lack of project plans.

But the challenge is enormous for starters the countries I now working with; India, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, ML China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan I reckon together summarise half the planets population – and I’ve not been to none of them - well not yet.

Equally I’ve been around a while, have an open mind, ask more questions than make assumptions, am scared shitless, think I might have a basic understanding of face, understand some of the uncertainties, and have low expectations that I’m the herald of the revolution so perhaps I can get be moderately useful to people I like – and it’s going to be epic finding out.

Urban Explorers

Over several years the idea of turning ones activist skills; climbing (rope access), boating, the ability to open locked doors quickly, into something as futile as poking around disused industrial sites has had a growing appeal. Finally I tracked down some forums devoted to such nihilistic activities in the form of the UK Urban Explorers Forum.

The link that I followed in was from an idle question about the tunnels under Imperial College, London. Plausibly some speculation about subterranean access to buildings in the area. In a different life I studied there and can attest that there is a range of tunnels running from what was Southside, under the V&A to Queens Tower and beyond. It was a handy shortcut (well a drier detour) to the bar and I can still vividly remember the Victorian brick staircase spiralling down beneath exhibition road, to Neverwhere.

The beginning of the week saw a bunch of us out on the boats, teaching media types (photographers and all) not to do anything stupid in the event of a high speed activity. We ended up out at the sea forts in the Thames estuary, the rusted remains of Red Sands towers, and what was once the lonely haunt of pirate radio stations.

So when time allows, I have some pictures to upload to the forums. Some currency to establish my place in the digital community and perhaps a hook to lure a few folk with the skills necessary to poke around disused industrial sites, to the idea that occupying more useful sites coal power stations and all) has more of a future.