So I’ve already rambled about the old skool NVDA related launch of the Mattel campaign, and yet what was new was the revolving door between online and offline activism, which surpassed even the unconsidered integrated efforts of Airplot.
I hope to consider what made this work, but the biggest question is how it came together? I can’t take the credit although my new job title suggests I should, and if anything it came down to wiser heads than mine, a sense of desperate ambition and a clued up campaigner.
So what happened? At the end of the morning NVDA activities the volunteers regrouped, armed themselves with Barbie’s and scattered across London to hide and photo the Barbie’s in situ. Each Barbie was tagged (a unique ID and a QR code) and the details were uploaded to a website.
With 100 Chainsaw Barbie’s in place, and the map populated; the ask was rolled out to the national volunteer network who then planted more Barbie’s in there locales. As a test we also sent some targeted emails to our most active online users (3+ online actions, one of which has to have been in the last 3 months) and invited them to either a) send off for a Barbie to hide or b) Buy a 2nd hand Barbie, tag her and hide her – depending which version of the test email one received.
Finally with the offline elements in place, the big emails went out, backed up by blogs, social media etc, to the wider online supporter base- with an invite to go hunt down these delinquent Chainsaw Barbies. The 200 ish folk who reported back were then recruited into a Barbie Investigation Bureau – and fed with a series on online and offline asks to target Mattel.
Did this work?
The integration of online and offline asks was elegant. The interface to upload the details was clunky, but previously technically inept volunteers managed to make it work, challenging the idea that there are such folk – disinterested maybe, digitally uninspired probably, but not inept.
As a hit rate perhaps 25% of the Barbie’s were found, which given the effort to buy them online, to tag them, and hide them isn’t great from a numbers perspective, but the idea was stronger that the reality. Again dormant volunteers came out of the woodwork for this, perhaps because one could do this as an act of individual activism – although it’s more cooler done with friends and video.
Online the traffic peaked at 17K on the launch day, and was dead 2 weeks later, which again isn’t as strong as the idea. What worked well was the engagement of the 200ish folk in the aftermath. There was some cool user generate content, videos, photos, Facebook pages and the like, with my only regret being forbidden to put an ask out for folk to send ransom notes to Mattel in newspapers cutouts.
What really didn’t work so well was the way the campaign got bogged down in negociations in Mattel. Although ultimately successful (a good thing) from an engagement perspective it really sucked, as we had plans and people willing to try them and this bit was stifling.
So some final headlines
- Good campaigners think outside the box (Online or Offline) not just webbies and volunteer coordinators, and there’s a job here to inspire such folk, feed them energy and successes so others follow the shiny path.
- Campaign needs and engagement don’t always mix well, which either has to change, or to be worked around. What is the priority here? to engage more people, and to a deeper level, or to win short term campaign goals.
- If something is worth doing, or fun, then people will negotiate whatever technical hurdles need to be negotiated. Digitally unengaged, or disempowered have often chosen to be so and need inspiring not educating.
- Games, online and offline, although the meme of 2011, are fun and we should do more - OK I'm prejudiced, but...
- There is more energy and creativity out there, to do cool stuff, than in here, and we should both channel and enable more while being less worried about the precise look of the thing.
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