Narratives of NVDA

OK a month into this blog, and whereas I’ve pontificated about digital activism a fair bit, and ideas as to how to value real world activism, I’ve not really mused much about NVDA (non violent direct action) as a subject close to my heart.

The question is how to describe such activities, without incriminating myself, as often as not I’m in the thick of it. So without sounding too pompous I’d like to introduce you to my new guest narrator George. Over to George.

So here’s a little video I found:



About a small group of volunteers who got up very early in the morning to go down to the Treasury to hang a banner, well within the SOCPA zone and opposite a small police station. Nothing quite like an easy target.

However with a bit of speed, the ladder team wrangled a 3 part beast up against the wall, as the climb team shot up, and the action was done and the blocking team left the scene, as the first two policemen watched on. After dissembling the ladder, while many more police arrived, the ladder team split up and faded into the night, with nary a word spoken. A very clean piece of work.

So hours later the climbers were arrested – top tip if you’re worried about such things, don’t climb, and one wonders why this was worth doing? They were later released without charge.

To the initiated this was a very precise direct comms (communication) event, taking a message to a decision maker – George Osborne, about promises he’d made and was likely not to keep.

As his staff arrived at work, one must expect them to have noticed the big banner on their office, alongside the dangling climbers. In parliament the Chancellor quips that it’s the first time he’s seen someone protest in favour of a bank, and clearly the message has got through.

So how does one measure the value of such an action? And the cost not just in terms of money and time, but also the risks involved – mainly to one’s criminal record, but to an extent to limbs if not life?

Clearly as a set piece direct comms, this had somewhat more impact than a strongly worded letter, a meeting with a senior civil servant, or even Osborne himself – if such a thing was possible. As an action it chips away at the Chancellors resolve, but is unlikely to change his position – whereas the threat of the loss of 10,000 votes in key marginal at the next election may well do.

But such comparisons are tortuous. To achieve change one try’s every tool and tactic available, and after the strongly worded letter, or even 10,000 such letters and the Chancellor still refuses to meet then and only then does one:

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.
Alfred North Whitehead

I'm certains George will be telling us more about such activities over the coming months.

Mass Mobilisations part I

Straying a little from my original remit, another fashion seems to be the subject of mass mobilisations. The argument goes that we have tried many another tactic to create change, and to an extent they haven’t achieved,say for example a zero carbon society. So the one thing we haven’t done is to get a lot of people involved.

I guess there’s a shadow of the civil rights movement here, with powerful leaders such as Martin Luther King, or the struggle for independence under Ghandi, or perhaps closer to home the big CND marches of the ‘80s, or the large Stop the War marches.

But in UK terms what is a mass? A march of 1 million + is huge, voter turnout is higher, a big email ask is smaller and I seem to be revisiting familiar ground here.

So say one was to consider the rise and fall of the Green party. In the 1989 European elections 2,292,696 people voted Green, but then in 2004 that was down to just over 1 million. In the 2005 Westminster elections 281,780 people voted Green and I can’t find any figures for 2010 so what does this mean?

Perhaps 1 million people on the streets, is a big mass, and 250,000 is a more achievable mob. Perhaps 1 million UK citizens clicking an email link is a respectable number and the 30,000 bench mark is, all in all, a bit pathetic.

So maybe there is a comment on click-tivism here. That we ask people to do too many different clicks at the expense of one big click on something important. Maybe instead of a weekly ask, a monthly ask would generate bigger numbers, maybe there is still work to be done list building to get to the point where you can ask for 1 million click throughs.

To be continued

Mercenary activism

Times are tight, the comprehensive spending review did no-one any favours and the NGO sector is shrinking as cuts hit the most generous segments of society, i.e. public sector workers.

As the spotlight descends of activism, we start to consider the challenges of getting feedback about what’s going on, measuring the impact of what happened and perhaps trying to value the contribution that activists and volunteers make to a campaign success.

So to some idle speculation on a Sunday morning, starting with some numbers in my head.

Baselines

• Organising a good public meeting with a MP, a postal invitation letter, some local advertising, a reasonable venue and the details costs perhaps £1000
• A decent photo op, with some good props that stays mainly within the law, with a professional camera person, costs maybe twice that, so perhaps £2000
• A photo op / direct comms / small action, again with professional media, perhaps with activists staying over somewhere, costs more, perhaps somewhere between £5K and £10K
• A medium action, with climbers, legal implications, a bigger pool of activists (maybe 30 ish), hired vehicles, support, sustenance and the like, maybe 25K to 30K
• And a big job, with 60-100 people, well you’re looking to £50K or more, and lots more when ships and boats get involved, so perhaps worth ignoring for now.

Impact

Various MPs have, over the years, told me (as a yardstick) that they value an email / campaign postcard as about 1 votes worth of interest in an issue. A personal letter/email where the individual has spent time, perhaps 10 votes, and a face to face visit from a constituent as worth perhaps 50 votes.

By extension I’ve worked on the assumption that a piece in the local paper is worth 100 votes, and perhaps speaking in from of an audience (at a public meeting) is worth at least the votes of the people present so another 100 votes.

Throw in a bit of smoke and mirrors, the excitement of planted questions, the opportunity to record the answers and a bit of local capacity building then maybe a public meeting is worth 300 to 350 votes worth of impact.

So if one assumes this is an effective way of reaching a decision maker, then that works out at about £3/vote, and by extension, once could assume, a campaign postcard is worth much the same.

Lead generation

In the current climate, fundraisers are desperately keen to get their hands on data for sympathetic people, ideally with a phone number attached.

Oxfam ran that excruciating ‘I’m In’ campaign a few years ago, which looked like a petition used by paid street fundraisers, but which (as I understand it) was pure data capture. Based on your postcode (and the income level of the area), you would then receive a phone call asking for money.

Good campaign postcards IMO incorporate data capture because it is worth knowing who your friends are. You can then, for instance, invite them to a public meeting, or to email a decision maker or to generally make themselves useful and active.

The fundraisers might value a good piece of data, with a phone number at £6, so if 2/3 of campaign postcards have data attached, and half that data includes a phone number, then an average campaign postcard is with perhaps another £2 to the organisation.

Summary

After a bit more maths, this implies a campaign postcard, with data capture, is worth about £5 to an organisation.

That a small team of volunteers campaigning on a Saturday afternoon will generate £500 worth of such postcards.

That a local group campaigning 10 times a year, will generate £5000 worth, and that a network of 60 groups will generate about £300K’s worth. I like these sums

And a speculative end point. During the campaign for a climate change law, there was lots of data analysis, and a suggestion that when a MP receives 100-150 pieces of correspondence they then make a decision on an issue, and would generally show support if there was no reason not to.

If £750 worth of street campaigning reaches a decision maker then how does one justify a direct comms event costing £5K? Perhaps in the national media? Or in the value of the decision maker (1 minister = 5 backbenchers), or in the value of such events to change a decision makers mind?

The 50 Cent Army, Blog Raiders and Facebook Puppets

After a wee piece of direct action before breakfast, I thought I’d continue with my more speculative musing as to how to deepen ones activist credentials online.

The premise is that more time and effort one puts into an action, online or offline, then the more effect it has in the real world, which is kind of the point.

At Friends of the Earth I heard of a strange phenomenon that evolved on their community forums. A small group of contributors, started discussing how they were fed up with the right wing blogs (and similar) that kept on publishing scathing inaccurate reports of environmental issues / campaigns.

They decided to do something about it, and organised into an online raiding party. Each week they would pick a target and team members would regularly hit the target, ideally alternating members posting daily, to wind up the authors and to present a differing view.

In a similar vein marketing companies, I’m sure, offer a pay for hire online service, where you can promote your product via internet postings by a specialist team. Big Oil has used staff resources to promote climate skeptic arguments, where the same tired old arguments clearly come from the same old song sheets.

Finally the Chinese state allegedly employers an army of 50 cent’ers, (perhaps 100,000 of them) to post pro-state comments anywhere where there is a discussion of interest.

In the old days we called them trolls, in the modern era they’re viral marketeers.

One could suppose (and I would never suggest that we did this), that you could recruit a team of real life activist, with appropriate web skills. You could pull them together for a training day, equip them with campaign arguments, and an online coordination structure.

One could then invite the team to scour the internet, and especially target media sites, looking for topical issues, where they could put a campaign message across, to counter the assumption that something was a done deal / a good thing (e.g. nuclear power).

The brief wouldn’t be to get drawn into long winded discussions, simply to post and leave. To stir things up, to act in the spirit of true trolldom, and to present a counter point to every argument, to damage those arguments and ensure that nothing could be considered as accepted wisdom, even on the most right wing of webblogs.

One might argue about the morality of training up internet trolls. However rather than paid professionals, if the individuals are volunteers, who are passionate about the issues, and who are simply enjoying a certain amount of leadership, then I think we are safely removed from Exxon paid climate sceptics or the agents of the Chinese state.

And finally a piece of speculation about the ease of constructing online identities. One could argue with oneself on such sites using different email identities (and IP addresses). In an age where social media seems to be the channel of choice for communicating hot news, how hard is it to set up a dozen email addresses, and a dozen associated facebook accounts? – facebook puppets would be the term?

If you need new friends, then it is trivial to sign into a facebook games site, and to adopt lots of game playing friends. With 500+ friends for each of your identities, you could have an audience of 6000+ people for whatever you chose to post. A dozen online activists with a dozen profiles could perhaps access a community of 50,000 through a pattern of shadows, of mirrors and viral activism that perhaps no-one has yet suspected.

The impacts of such activism is perhaps limited only by the time spent developing such identities. Until of course facebook catches on, or collapses under the weight of such artifice.

Digital Ladders of Engagement

So I’m onto more speculative grounds here, compared to the Seven Deadly Arts of offline campaigning, but I thought it at least interesting to brainstorm some of the options that I think are available to the digital campaigner.

The predominant action seems to be to send an email to a decision maker. Usually lot’s of emails, sometimes separated by constituency, sometimes just in a mad scramble, before they can set up their email filters to siphon them into a folder, where they can then weigh them. Or in many cases not weigh them.

Then there is the ask: to personalise that email, or at least to personalise the subject line to make it hard for the filter. On occasion I do this, but I reckon most of us, most of the time, don’t.

And then sometimes there’s a big old online petition, that you can add your name to, and at least has the advantage you can print the damn thing off, and give it to someone. Perhaps yet another visit to #10 Downing Street.

But also there are some interesting things I’ve seen out there:

1)      The functionality of they work for you, which allows you to send an email to your MP with some sort of gravitas / sense of responsibility

2)      The interesting idea behind the house of commons petition site – does the official nature of it make it more serious, or simply easier to bin

3)      The peculiar addiction that is Superbadger

4)      And then something I saw in passing, tied to the Newhaven incinerator campaign (now lost), which was a random campaign letter generating program.
You simply clicked to generate your letter, every letter was different, and made up of generic campaign text where the paragraphs worked in any order. Cool eh?

Of all of these Superbadger is the most interesting / perverse, as people generate more campaigning emails, not necessarily because they care, but because they want the points. Just what we need, more gubbins clogging up the internet.
It’s kind of fun though, and raise the question of what else you can do with a facebook application.

Finally all of these tools suffer, from what I reckon should be a maxim, that the impact of the action is entirely proportionate to the effort you put in. One click, is worth about er…. one click.

So back to the offline activist:

In the training day I’m running tomorrow, I’ll use one of my stock political anecdotes (originally a Frank Dobson), but that I’ve heard from many sources.

• An email or a campaign postcard is worth a vote in the next election
• A personal letter, devised with care and thought is worth 10 votes
• A personal visit, is worth perhaps 50 votes
• And a good piece in the local media, mentioning the MP by name, is worth more.

Since the anecdote started, I reckon the value of the generic email has dropped (it was some time ago) but the principles there. What you get out is what you get in.

So how can people do more online, to creatively use their computers, to magnify that impact? I came up with some ideas, which could form one of those ladders of engagement.

• Post something to your facebook page, tweet it to your friends, actively email something onto your contacts list, spam it on to your network.
• React faster to our asks, sign up to the campaign twitter feed, subscribe to the RSS feed, install a toolbar that includes rolling updates, read more, faster.
• Actively comment on the campaign blog (facebook page etc), or seek out a decision makers blog (facebook page, twitter account) and comment on that.
• Blog for us, setup a sympathetic blog, and use campaign news to generate most of the content. Similarly set up a facebook group, a You Tube channel, your own website, BEBO group or whatever else is in fashion.
• If you’re close to the organisation (i.e. we let you), write part of the content for the main site, especially if it has a devolved local group/network area.
• Seek out other sites, and post links back to our main site. If necessary ask the web editor, present an argument, deal with the details and help optimise the site / news story by pointing 1000 links at it.
• Join a rapid response team, coordinated online, that posts like crazy whenever something interesting happened. Get the story out there, fast
• Something more here (to follow) regarding greyer more distorted arts

And / or do more. Spend as much time doing activism online, as one might do offline, and then perhaps the energy one puts in will pay off. Well at least as much, as doing it in the real world.

Perhaps it’s simply a numbers game

I’ve sat through a fair few presentations and lectures about the awesome power of digital campaigning, from visitors from Argentina fighting for the forest law, to professional marketers from the Obama campaign.

Too many times have I had to listen to ridiculous numbers of people taking that small click, to wonder if perhaps the right number of people wield the mouse, one more time, then change will come?

So I took to considering some numbers....

The UK has a population of around 61 million, the electoral reform reckon there are 45 odd million people eligible to vote, and voter turnout runs at about 65% so there are maybe 30 million people out there willing to do a little something. Well at least vote for someone else to do something, which is a start.

Then at the other end of the spectrum, in the UK the activist movements of Climate Camp, Friends of the Earth, Amnesty, Greenpeace, CND and People & Planet, mixed with the volunteer networks of RSPB, Action Aid, Oxfam, Christian Aid and the like, together probably involve no more than 10-15,000 active people. Hardly a force for democratic change?

And yet The Wave last year mobilised perhaps 50,000 people, the big Stop the War March plausibly brought 1 million +  people together, and so those 10-15,000 activists do have the power to mobilise many more people. Clearly there is a wider ‘movement’ out there that is bigger than those organisational networks, but well connected to them. Maybe the churches fit in here somewhere?

But where do the online numbers come in?

The latest email action on the 38 degrees site has 30,000 odd signatures’, the Amnesty UK facebook page has a similar number of fans (quite how useful they are is another matter), the Greenpeace Airplot campaign attracted 91,000 sign ups and the email lists behind these numbers I reckon (as an informed guess) float around the 100-200,000 mark. With a click though rate of about 25% - that's what maybe 30-40,000 online active people per organisation, of a wider UK online active community of 200,000?

So where’s the big deal, these numbers are not incomparable to the numbers of people who mobilise offline, and yet this lighter, easier, less consequential form of activism seems all the rage. It’s the future but is it any different? or any good?

However I have figures to suggest that sometimes, when things go viral then the numbers get very big indeed. The Greenpeace Nestle campaign leaps to mind, attracting 1.5 million views to the viral advert generating 200,000 emails.

But a note of caution: There's a difficulty here, separating the numbers about what happens in the UK, from what happens globally. These numbers sound big for our tiny island, but there’s a big global online community out there, and increasing numbers of them are very internet savvy.

So on a more local level if an ingenious (and very successful) piece of digital campaigning in the UK achieves 2 million hits to ones Flickr site, and 25,000 participations how many active people are behind those numbers.

But still how many are ‘online active’ in the UK? Of more note, how many are the same people that are active offline, goofing off work, in a time/place where they cannot be out campaigning with their local Amnesty group, or marching against the war. Are we in fact talking about the same people?

Finally of the 61 million people in the UK, how many give a toss to do even the little something that is to click on a send button. If this is so few then is it really about numbers at all, but more of the depth and detail of the action one does.

If the later we should simply be doing more with the people who have already embraced activism, rather than dumbing down actions to get those list numbers up.

Seven Deadly Arts of Campaigning

Several years ago I wanted a mechanism to introduce a brainstorm to Friends of the Earth staff, to try and coax out some new ideas about how to influence MPs as part of the campaign to get a UK climate change law.

The premise was based on what was/is conventional wisdom, that the crux of any campaign is identifying the key decision maker, bringing as much pressure to bear on that decision maker, until they make the decision you need to advance your campaign goals.

The corollary is a more holistic approach where I believe you make as much noise around the issue, where you aim to use that noise to engage as many people as possible, to change the Zeitgeist of the campaign consciousness, that the change happens organically. I’m not unconvinced, but have yet to be convinced.

So to spark the brainstorm I constructed the five deadly arts of campaigning.

1. The generation of 100’s (ideally 1000’s) of communications to the decision maker. Campaign postcards (e.g. constituents to MPs), lots of emails (clicktivism), signatures on a petition, facebook notes on the wall, personalised letters, tweets and whatever the next generation of tools might be.
2. 1to1 high quality communications, the face to face lobby, presenting, arguing, negotiating with the decision maker to do the right thing. Often the territory of think tanks and corporate lobbyists but done better, and more honestly, by ‘ordinary’ and 'extraordinary' folk.
3. Via the media, organising a stunt aiming to get the decision makers picture in the paper tied to the issue or at least his/her name. Never underestimating the power of local media, and the letters page, when the decision makers neighbours might comment.
4. Using public events, filling a room full of people and asking the decision maker to talk to them about the issue. Old school political hustings, public meetings, film nights anything where a decision maker is forced to make a stand, and to state and defend a position.
5. The power of the system, using the structures that exist (e.g. Judicial Reviews, or via the local planning system), and the rules of the game (often set by the same decision maker) to force them to make a decision in line with those rules.

Since the brainstorm I’ve pondered a few more, which are as yet unformed and 7 deadly arts would sound more mythic than 5, so

6) Indirect lobbying, mobilising celebrities, scientists and advocates to deliver that 1to1 high quality communication / face to face lobby on your behalf. Turning an esoteric campaign ask into a conversation in the pub the decision maker drinks at, or a topic of debate at his/her local golf club. Presenting the issue to the local scholl, where the decision makers children might happen to listen.

7) Non Violent Direct Action. Now originally I had included the idea as a sub set of public events, and to extent that is still true, but is tenuous enough that I’ve stretched it to the 7^th art.

Then the philosophy of NVDA varies, and of the categories that Greenpeace ideology uses, i.e.

• Direct Communications – where the objective is to communicate with the decision maker, often to deliver the evidence of the environmental problem to their door e.g. the delivery of a dead dolphin
• Direct Actions – to stop or start something happening, e.g. shutting down a coal power station
• Photo Ops – to generate the image, that the media will then transform reaching not only the decision maker but also the Zeitgeist, often yet another banner drop
• Protests – as an expression of popular approval, involving the coalition of the willing, the expression of frustration and the empowerment of the many. Classically the big march through the London, which still have their uses.

Finally perhaps direct comms can be folded into the 2^nd art, that of high quality (resource intensive) communications. Photo ops seamlessly fit into the 3^rd art, protests as a subset of the 4^th (especially if you can convince the decision maker to come), leaving only the ‘purist’ form of NVDA as the 7^th deadly art of campaigning.

A Dodo Sets to Sea

On a sunny Sunday autumn day I seem to have stumbled upon the inspiration to launch a new blog. To replace my past performance of occasional and ephemeral writings that have led to no particular destination. Not to mention the various ramblings that have helped while away a winter’s day sparking strange quests for new ideas, and entertaining drinks.

This is likely to be much the same, although the original inspiration comes from a shadow of a fear of imminent redundancy. As such I may have much more time to consider, to procrastinate and to research esoteric words before posting.

My premise is simple that I, as an activist, believe that change happens in the real world, not in some parallel virtual dream-space. Not, I’d like to make clear, that I am some internet sceptic like some of my colleagues. I freely admit the system exists, is as fascinating as it is useful but that is a critical tool not a goal, and a pale comparison of the diversity of human societies.

To clarify the politics of the title, I consider myself an advocate of the progressive left, which I may argue more of, at some point. I consider myself a reactionary in the means of which one achieves change, in direct opposition to the reactionary politics that I consider needs changing. No matter how well they are hidden under the banner of a big society.

For several years I have helped craft and shape activist networks, perhaps inspiring many to become involved in social change. And of late various organisations have paid me well to do such work. I’m also an activist of the old school, I’ve climbed buildings, lobbied politicians, boarded ships, had countless conversations with the public, been arrested numerous times and have done whatever I can think of to make change happen.

What worries me and what may lead to my redundancy is the rise of clicktivism, the idea that 1000 emails are more effective than a couple of hundred campaign postcards, or better yet a well executed piece of direct action. E-activism is a shiny new toy, and another campaigning tool, but it is not a replacement for real people investing real sweat, tears and time in the change they want to see.

But I could be wrong……

I may be an activist of the olden days, a Dodo refusing to accept the inevitable change. And clearly if such is the case then I want to develop new skills and abilities to embrace whatever changes are upon us, to be once more a changemaker.

So I will continue to argue the toss, to explore old ideas, and to research the mechanisms of social change. But perhaps I need to leave my island, to set to sea, to learn new web skills, to polish my writing styles, and who knows, perhaps to prove I can do so by starting some sort of activism blog.