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.

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.

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.