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.

Email ends in themselves

Decision makers, especially political ones, respond to public pressure. Sending a lot of emails to an MP has an effect, even if they moan about it. Visiting them in person has a much greater effect, but few have the confidence to arrange that meeting, oh and MPs moan about that too. Taking direct action to stop the decision maker making the wrong decision has an even greater effect, but tends to get you arrested, which means that even if you have that confidence, you can’t do it every week. There’s lots of other activism in between.

Next week folk will be debating mobilisation strategies, and perhaps supporter journeys, for the upcoming campaign, and my question is will that debate be focused on email activism as an end in itself. Is the purpose of the campaign to generate a huge amounts of emails to the target, and to use those email participants to recruit more people to email the target, and then to reiterate ad nauseum, and to repeat with different emails to different targets until the internet melts.

An entire industry has grown up around email advocacy, using the tools of the marketer and one wonders why. My prejudice is that it’s a reflection of the over professionalization of the campaigning caste. That somehow by adopting corporate tools, key performance indices, critical path analysis and endless tracking we will effect positive change.

The problem is that this leads us to only do the things that can be tracked. You can split test an emails subject line, to see what maximises the open rate. You can test how likely people are to respond on a Friday afternoon, vs. a Monday morning. You can plot the frequency of emails, to achieve a saturation effect, than is proportional to your unsubscribe rate, but what you can’t do, is to do so with passion, imagination and the insane ambition that we can achieve change.

My prejudice is that sending lots of emails, is simply an excuse to find people who care that can be inspired into doing something more than just sending emails. The thinking is not unique, there are lots of ladders of engagement out there, but we don’t seem to resource putting this into practice.

How does one value offline activism, or deeper online activism, against the clear numbers game of Avaaz and 38 degrees. What is the value of blockading the Department of Transport – the charges have just been dropped – or having 100 conversations with others in your local community?



Email actions lead ultimately to fundraising leads, but as a tool to effect change they become less effective with every one you send. As decision makers become overwhelmed with standard emails, how long before they say enough is too much. One has to assume that donors think the same.

And if we maximise our ROIs measured about the KPIs set by the same digital consultants the targets are using, then it simply becomes the money game that we will surely loose. We are after all vastly outnumbered by the corporates.

So as a tool email gives me the reach to find people to do offline activism, or new things yet

Along came the spider

Continuing my intermittent ramble about the potential for a network of environmental bloggers, and what’s already out there that does something similar – now we come to the politicals.

Lib Dem Voice, now as I understand it the Lib Dems have a more empowered grassroots, and a democratic decision making structure, which beggars belief when one considers how much of a pickle they’ve got themselves into. However Lib Dem Voice and LibDem blogs do a reasonable job of connecting together the disparate voices of the party. Interesting things include:

• Ask that each blogger is a Lib Dem member – we could do this, and it’d be interesting but probably too restrictive. Maybe we could offer a bonus badge / widget to such folk. This might be an idea in itself, as an offer to such folk, to use as they choose.
• There’s a more dominant mix of official blog posts, as features, than the blog roll which is kind of a big list. Given my current thinking as to how official blogs are separated from bloggers and from local folk, I think this would be an authoritarian step too far.
• There’s a link to LibDig which I don’t quite get. It looks like a more primitive form of micro-blogging. I should check out this Digg it thing. However there’s a slot here for video, which begs the question should there be a separate space / blog roll for videos and video diaries.

Still compared to Mumsnet there’s not much to learn here.

Labour have a Campaign Engine room, which I first thought looked like a bloggers machine, but instead it looks like a party political version of 38 degrees, inviting people to start campaigns and gather signatures on an e-petition. Well worth remembering the next time a Labour MP, complains about the worthlessness of such devices.

Labour central offers the promise of bringing all such blogs under one roof but fails to do so, and Bloggers4Labour simply doesn’t seem to work, which is kind of disappointing. How is one to pinch their ideas, if they’re broken?

Finally the Tories have conservative home, which looks a bit dull, a slightly better showing than Labour – it at least works but without the sense of community of LibDem Voice.

Just to make sure I had a quick look in at the Green Party blogs which is very dead indeed although there seem to be a fair few active blogs out there. I guess there’s a lesson here about being too reliant on the grassroots to keep such things up to date.

For now, that seems to confirm Mumsnet is where it’s at, so time to have a chat / setup a meeting and see what they have to say. And /or probably have a word with the Argentinians about the idea of a pilot in a 2nd language.

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.