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.

On internet think tanks

Since I last posted, the internal arguments on clicktivism have raged (well smoldered) and since I am trying to motivate myself to go listen to more at 6 Billion Ways, I thought I'd compose some thoughts.

Next week in between our offline restructure, I've been invited to contribute to an online vision as to what our website could look like and do. A pyramid is taking shape in my head based on what we do do, and what we might do.

• A Profile tool - telling people who we are, or at least who we think we are, which is of course different to who they think we are
• A Communications platform - or soapbox for us to tell people the news, and/or what we think
• An Engagement tool - to encourage people to get involved. We offer the people the ability to send and email (clicktivism) or to comment on a blog but little more
• An Organising tool - facilitating the creating of events and campaigns online and offline, discussions as to what those events might be, what needs to happen to make them happen, and of course who's coming
• An Empowerment tool - allowing the contributors to shape the organisation, or the campaign, giving ownership to the people who support us. The idea of of crowd sourcing a campaign strategy appeals, the apolexy of our ED when I suggest it, can only be a bonus.

I can feel a dose of Maslow coming on