Integrating social media

Social networking, blogging, wikis, texting, podcasting, twitter and other recent innovations are quickly being adopted by campaigners looking to maximise the impact of their campaigns.

Developments in social media offers us more and more opportunities to reach and engage with wider audiences and get people involved in influencing decisions that affect them. They can also help to increase the speed of mobilisation, enabling instant two-way communications. But finding the resources in terms of time, money and skills to get to grips with this Social media image can seem quite daunting, so where exactly do you start?

Top tips from ecampaigners
In Focus guide intergrating social media
Crowdsourcing
Twitter
Using film
What's the future..

Top tips from ecampaigners

Patrick Olszowski, Senior Campaigns and Policy Officer at Mencap shared his experiences of ecampaigning on NCVO’s Certificate in Campaigning he was fantastic and very kindly offered us his 10 top tips on e-campaigning

What wins campaigns online is not technology but power, applied at the correct time, against the correct target, by the correct (and sometimes incorrect) people. Offline it is no different.
Campaigning is like judo - where possible try and use an opponent's own body weight against themselves - Greenpeace Green my Apple campaign is a good example (which used Apple's own branding on a spoof website to persuade Apple to stop using toxic chemicals in their computers).
At the heart of ecampaigning is story telling. If you have the swankiest website and poorest story, you will never change anything Ideas are dangerous and that is why these are always your main arsenal. So before you even start thinking about technology, think Message, Audience, Timescale, (Is this the correct) Tactic, (Is it) engaging, Recycle (use other ideas you already like), Analyse (evaluate and split test all your work).
If you don't buy your own Theory of change, then others won't either - you need a compelling narrative about how taking action now will lead to real world change.
You need to use ecampaigning in an intelligent way to both persuade bosses and to win campaigns - winning the internal battle can sometimes be the hardest thing.
Know what you are getting into - Greenpeace's excellent campaign on rainforest deforestation vs Nestle is an example of a campaign against a corporate which shows how poorly used ecampaigning can be a real damage to your brand.
Think about how you can use maps, pictures or audio to tell a story - not just text. Such as the examples Stand up for Tiny Lives or Mencap.
With a compelling ask and a tight deadline you can raise lots of money - along the lines of this Open Rights Group and 38 Degrees action which raised £25k in three days to fund adverts against the Digital Economy Act.
Great online campaigning can come from members of the public as well as professionals campaigners and can marry online and real world campaigning.
To move forward think of your story, analyse where power lies, persuade your internal stakeholders and then and only then ecampaign!

A big big thank you to Patrick.

Online vs Offline?

It's not a case of choosing between the two. The best campaigns will try to make the best use of all the tactics available to them. Usually that’s a mixture of both online and offline - Hannah Lownsbrough, Campaigns Director at 38 Degrees shares her advice for e-campaigning.

Social media tools provide a huge range of opportunities to enhance your campaigning and influencing work - from widening participation, creating conversations with people to crowdsourcing solutions or reaching decision makers.

In Focus guide Integrating social media

Our In Focus guide to integrating social media sets out some steps you can take to successfully incorporate social media into your strategy for change by exploring the stages of a campaign - from analysing the issue and gathering an evidence base, to developing and planning your strategy, delivering and monitoring progress to evaluation. It also explores ways in which amongst others RSS feeds, Google alerts, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube can be utilised in campaigns. Packed with examples from recent campaigns such as the Children's Food Campaign, Colalife and the British Heart Foundation.

Download the free pdf Integrating social media (288 KB)

Crowdsourcing and open data

Crowdsourcing is about outsourcing tasks to larger numbers of people, a crowd, through an open call to action, traditionally by an employee or contractor. (Adapted from Wikipedia definition)

Crowdsourcing information, ideas and solutions has grown in popularity with the rise of the internet and social media channels for its reach, speed, flexibility and levels of participation. It has been utilised by campaigners from collecting information on an issue - monitoring what cuts are being made to services, gauging opinions to find solutions, to documenting events as they unfold.

Open data is is any content, information or data that people are free to use, re-use and redistribute — without any legal, technological or social restriction. The opening up of government-held data is a central aspect of the Big Society agenda and is already shaping the way we interact with services and how civil society holds government to account. Open data is already reshaping service delivery and campaigning in the UK and beyond.

Find out more about open data
NCVO Annual workshop presentations
Publish government data

Example Woodland Trust: online mapping

Woodland Trust is the UK's leading woodland conservation organisation. For several years the Trust kept a record of woods under threat as no other organisation, not even the government, was doing this. Its initial idea was to build up a resource of publicly available information to reveal the extent of the threat to this irreplaceable resource. It realised, however, that without help from the public it would be impossible to keep track.

In 2008 Woodland Trust developed a prototype website with digital mapping tools that highlight areas under threat; this is the clearest way of conveying the situation visually. The digital mapping included the government's ancient woodland inventory – the record of known ancient woods across the UK, which was the first time this resource had been made available digitally.

The next step was to get the public more involved as Woodland Trust’s eyes and ears. Previously people had reported threats to precious woodlands via letters, phone calls, and occasionally emails. The first five years of the Woods Under Threat website helped the Trust build its information base. It started with around 100 cases and has grown to over 800. The map provides a template to capture the threat and prompt people to offer more information to increase the evidence base. The website has proved a cost-effective and efficient way of gathering information that can be dealt with in a more managed way.

The site allows the public to communicate quickly and easily, locating the woods under threat and specifying what is threatening them. Having this evidence has led to real policy change, helping to persuade government to protect ancient woodland better through the planning system. Such a commitment does not necessarily lead to practical action to protect ancient woods on the ground, so Woodland Trust also encourages and supports individuals and communities to campaign. The people engagement programme works to create a UK-wide network of volunteer Threat Detectors. Phase two for the project involves adding a tool to the website that calculates the loss and damage to help visualise the impacts of development on woodland.

With thanks to Ed Pomfret, then Head of Campaigns at Woodland Trust (2006–2009) for writing Fairsay Campaigning Insights and sharing with us, thanks also to additional material supplied by Alice Farr, WoodWatch Campaigner, Woodland Trust.

Example Kenyan 2007 elections Ushahidi

Ushahidi (Swahili for ‘testimony’ or ‘witness’) was set up after the political crisis in Kenya after the controversial 2007 elections. Co-founder Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan activist and lawyer, proposed the site when she realised that ordinary people with mobile phones could report what was happening in their communities faster and more accurately than the mainstream media.

Using Google Maps, a free mapping tool, Okolloh and colleagues set about updating their custom map with information about political violence, sent to them by 45,000 people using simple SMS text messaging and email. This combination of ‘crowdsourcing’ of information combined with geolocation software, and the ease with which ordinary Kenyans could participate via mobile phones, proved highly effective at collecting evidence and holding the government and various parties to account for their actions.

The software the group developed was later used to document anti-immigrant violence in South Africa, collect eyewitness accounts of the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2008–09, and is currently being used in Haiti to assist with the emergency work there. The group’s aim is to create a platform that anyone can use to collect and visualise information.

Example based on www.ushahidi.com

Twitter

Twitter has captured the imagination of its users and after Facebook is probably the biggest social media revolution in recent years. A tool that started life as a 140 character update of what you are up to has turned into one of the most useful ways to connext with people, share information and find support for your issue.

Example The Children’s Food Campaign, Coco Pops and Twitter

The Children's Food Campaign is part of Sustain, an alliance for better food and farming. A recent Children's Food Campaign action harnessed widespread anger among lots of parents about a poster by Kellogg’s (a partner in the government’s Change4Life health campaign) advertising Coco Pops, which asked children ‘Ever thought of Coco Pops after school?’

The poster featured the Coco Pops monkey in a school uniform. The Department of Health deems Coco Pops too unhealthy to be advertised on children’s TV and they are banned from schools.

Children's Food Campaign used Twitter to search for people talking about the issue by searching for relevant hashtags and contacted the users directly through Twitter with details about the campaign. This provided a receptive new audience to tap into for the campaign’s efforts to improve children’s food. As well as encouraging supporters to write directly to Kellogg’s, the Sustain website also ran an inventive competition for supporters to compose their own slogan for the poster.

Using film

Film can bring an issue alive capture the attention of your audience and inspire and motivate people to action.

Some examples to inspire

The Woodland Trust have been very successful in making imaginative and amusing videos for relatively low cost to raise awareness for their campaign to conserve and restore plantations on ancient woodland sites. Check out their Youtube page.

Amnesty Belgium Wake Up Humans! film is a brilliant example of how to bring an issue alive to people in the context of their everyday lives. Through a series of 'experiments' Amnesty Belgium tired to engage ordinary citizens to awake the defender of human rights in them. Text messages, internet, posters and direct mail are used to inform people that their rights were in danger. Watch the video on Amnesty Belgium's website.

Greenpeace’s film highlighting the consequences of the use of palm oil from Indonesian rainforests, very successfully mimics the feel of a KitKat advert till it reveals the very hard-hitting consequences for Orangutans. Watch the film on Greenpeace's website

Example Campaign to save Morden Park - making a film on zero budget

Local residents campaigned successfully against Merton Council's proposal to allow a private company to build a private football pitch complex, complete with car park and bar, over one of the largest green areas in the borough. To raise awareness of the issue they produced a short film that highlights the impact of that will be felt by the community.

Video logo Watch the film (on YouTube)

As a small local group the campaigners do not have vast resources but would definitely recommend using films as a campaign tactic. Below is advice from Jackie Schneider, Campaign to save Morden Park.

How it could help your campaign

It is easier to persuade someone of your case if they can see graphically what it involves
It makes it easier to spread the campaign
It helped to re-invigorated supporters. Many of them were so taken by the images in the film that they doubled their efforts in campaigning terms!

Overcoming any challenges

There were some issues such as the weather - the lack of daylight were challenging to overcome but we rounded up lots of our supporters to film at different times over the weekend so we ended up with enough footage.
We didn't really need to do any sophisticated editing and could utilise youtube to post the film and send the weblink to supporters and it was non speaking so we didn't have to worry about sound levels.

"Don't be scared by the technology. If we can do it anyone can!"

What next?

The Morden Park campaigners now aim to record a series of vox pop style interviews where we ask individuals what they would like to see happen to the field.

More information on the campaign

With thanks to Jackie Schneider, Campaign To Save Morden Park.

Holding your own screenings

The Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation is an independent funding organisation that provides grants to documentary film makers working to bring around social change. Over the past few years they have been thinking about social impact of the stories they are involved with and have recently launched a new initiative Good Screenings which allows anybody to buy a license to screen a feature documentary from their catalogue.

All documentaries are about social change and contain clear calls to actions and unlike other distributors they are actively promoting the use of these films for fundraising and campaigning. Films they have currently include Moving to Mars, The Age of Stupid, McLibel, the End of the Line.

Anyone can buy a license to screen their selection of films and the license is calculated according to who you are, where you screen and how many people you're screening to, and you get to the profits for yourself or your organisation, campaign or cause.

So do take a look at some of the best social action documentaries, which have clear calls to action here www.goodscreenings.org

What's the future?

We ran two joint events with NCVO's Foresight team in October 2011 exploring the possibilities social media brings for involving people in creating and shaping campaigns. The e-seminar covered two topics:

The role of co-creation in online campaigning

Amy Sample Ward, Global Community Development Manager for NetSquared explored

What co-creation means and why it’s important What’s changing online for you and your supporters Threats and opportunities for co-created campaigns

Watch Amy's short film exploring these issues
Have a look through Amy's presentation the role of co-creation in campaigning

Ecampaigning in a leaderless world

Liam Barrington-Bush, Concrete Solutions explored

• Why Twitter is serious campaigning tool
• Why traditional organisations need to think about new ways of working online
• How to 'plan' a ‘leaderless’ campaigning strategy

Have a look at Liam's short film

Resources

Guides

NCVO and the Media Trust have produced a free introductory guide on how to use new media specifically designed for the voluntary sector, with explanations, advice and examples. Download How to use new media guide from the Media Trust website.

ICT Foresight: Campaigning and consultation in the age of participatory media free report (PDF 580KB). This report explores how new technologies are changing the way organisations consult and represent their stakeholders. It explains technological, political and social trends outlining future risks and opportunities and highlighting innovative use of ICT. With examples from Make Poverty History, Netmums and Crisis.

Campaigning insights A collection of campaigning expertise from Fair Say to help you learn and improve, including E-campaigning resources pack 2008 and 2009 e-campaigning review

What does social media mean to you guide by the ICT hub

Multimedia - 10 tips to get you started

Social by Social's jargon busting guide

Tools

Louder.org.uk

Louder.org.uk can help you turn websurfing into activism. In just a few clicks you can have a targeted set of tools to run your campaign and turn your supporters into activists.

The free and easy to use site draws together a range of online activist tools, enabling you to build and run your own campaigns, communicate with and build your supporter network and keep track and learn from your supporter actions.