campaigning

Blending the use of social tools around the current focus and concerns of your work colleagues’ and activists is a must. So I think Nigel Dunn is onto something with his concept for a widget response network.

Nigel blogged after listening to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) Darfur and Chad Appeal over the weekend.

While the UK-based DEC does have a Rapid Response Network for Big Media, he believes (and I agree) that they could benefit enormously from providing a badge/widget that is available all the time.

If there’s an appeal happening then content connected with that is delivered, otherwise it’s empty. This would allow the ongoing development of a network that could be brought into play (more or less) instantly that a new appeal is launched.

He even anticipates widget strategy meetings…

Inevitably new technologies and ideas will spring up over time, which means that you will have different versions [of the badge/widget] operating at the same time. So a few years down the road you will have meetings to decide what content/functionality to deliver to everyone left on version 1 compared to the whizzy new version 2, etc.

These widgets could have a “donate” button embedded in them, but it’s the network effect of thousands of ’smart’ widgets of the sort I wrote about in March (see widgets of the world unite) that is really exciting. Lots of potential for demonstrating real social impact.

A widget response network in the way Nigel describes would also be a powerful tool for groups like the The Genocide Intervention Network, and Amnesty’s crisis response network.

Incidently, the Appeal for Darfur and Chad has raised around £3m since its launch last Thursday, and for the first time ever in a DEC appeal, more has been raised online than by phone, according to this article in Professional Fundraising.

Twitter for urgent actions

It seems relevant to link the ‘widget response network’ concept to my first thoughts on Twitter.

It was Andy Carvin who recently asked “might text messaging… serve any purpose in times of public emergencies?”. He explored the humanitarian relief potential of Twitter in his post Can Twitter Save Lives?

For another take, check out Twitter for human rights, from the always brilliant Dan MacQuillan.

Something else to go on the radar of your buzz director. (What, you still don’t have one?)

First post in a while for a number of reasons. Anyway, this stroked my ego.

The three images I uploaded to the “All photographers now” exhibit were showcased in the Musée de l’Elysée galleries in Lausanne, Switzerland recently.

How do I know (given that I’m in the UK)? Well, I received an email informing me that my images were exhibited. But that’s just the half of it: attached to the email were some installation views of my images in situ, showing them projected on the gallery wall - like the one pictured (and here’s the original photo on Flickr).

I wasn’t 100 percent sure what might have happened to my images once I’d uploaded them via this form.

My mate Nigel (who knows about these things), reckons the photos would go into a database that gallery downloads, gets stuck into some sort of slideshow and then just projected, as you would a presentation.

What made this different to, say, the Flickr Peep Show in Amsterdam a couple of years ago was that they have linked it all together - by taking a photo of my photo being shown… and email that back to me - although probably not that sophisticated, really. Maybe a webcam capture linked with my name and email address.

For a not-for-profit, maybe this is something a commercial partner might want to sponsor for a few grand (my emails from the Musée de l’Elysée suggested they had done a partnership with Hewlett-Packard).

My Flickr buddy Ed Fladung recently suggested that Yahoo! develop a micro-payment system for Flickrites who wish to sell their photos. Even better, a way of funnelling the payments to their favourite cause - although you (the not-for-profit) may want to vet the photos ‘donated’ in your name. Anyway, you get the picture!

This isn’t altogether new. I know of the Big White Box, which was set up by Brunel University student, David Bailey (must be another one), as part of his research into “how the collaborative power of the internet can be used to raise money for charity”. Profits are donated to a handful of UK charities, although I couldn’t get word from David on how much, etc.

And let’s not forget the brilliant DoggySnaps.com. I interviewed Tim Malbon about how the Dogs Trust will benefit from selling the rights to the cream of the crop posted there. As an aside, I actually met Tim for the first time at the Goodness 2.0 event the other evening (see Ian Delaney’s write up on the NMK site).

Greenpeace are at the top of the innovation tree with some pretty awesome participative campaigning. Take the GreenMyApple and Defending our Oceans campaigns, which give people a voice and a platform.

I followed the Greenpeace ship “Esperanza” as she voyaged the Southern Seas, via this stunning photostream on Flickr.

The whole DIY phenomenon has certainly been spurred on by Flickr, other photo-sharing communities, and the explosion of Creative Commons.

If you’re not doing this already, ask your supporters (and their networks) to submit some photos for the front cover of your annual report. You can even draw upon the freedom of the commons, and invite photo remixes.

Have you seen the ‘naked’ covers to some Penguin Classics in the bookstores? The publisher invited readers . There’s an online gallery, and some of the best ones can be viewed on Flickr, too. Great innovation.

There are so many other examples. For example, my mate Ed Mitchell will have one of his Vietnam photos on the next WWF calendar. One of my own photos of corn drying out on the roof of a church in rural Mexico (rather mundane you might think) recently accompanied a news article on citizen journalism website, NowPublic. And I could talk all day about the impact of the After Wilma group on Flickr.

The remarkable and omnipresent Beth Kanter has pulled together Ten Cool Examples of Nonprofits Using Flickr. These include a few of my own favourites and is a must-read.

I particularly like how the ONE Campaign explains to those without a Flickr account just what they need to do to add their face to the Faces of ONE Group.

In February, Flickr released a bundle of improvements for Group administrators, including the very cool ‘Invite a Photo’ feature:

You’re surfing through the Flickrverse and you find a photo that would be perfect for your group. This new feature will allow an administrator to invite that particular photo to their group without membership requirement. You’ll see a new link under the comment box that says ‘Invite this photo to…’

I hadn’t spotted this until this week.

Amazing to think that just two or three years ago, sourcing photos for a website was a real headache.

I was recently drawn to this interesting graphic posted to Flickr by NMK’s Ian Delaney. It illustrates the fragmentation of people’s media consumption over recent decades. So what should I find when rummaging about in the garage earlier this week, but this rather dog-eared yellow card, 148mm x 210mm. Old media indeed.

Ah, but it’s so much more than that.

Now my years at university grimly coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s third term as prime minister, when the streets were often filled with the sound of protest: “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Out! Out! Out!”…

Among other things, Thatcher made savage cuts to higher education funding and exactly twenty years ago, our department was threatened with closure.

We, students and faculty, fought back. We organised ourselves. As the winter break approached, we vowed not to lose touch, despite physically dispersing around the globe. What tools were available to us back then, twenty years ago? The Telephone. Simple as that. So the “Save DEV” telephone tree was born. It was this that I stumbled upon in the garage on Monday.

View a larger version of the telephone tree.

But I mention this, not for old times’ sake, but because I recall what it was like to run a campaign (as I subsequently did for Oxfam) without the tools that are now available to us - to blog, to tag, to video, and so on. Part of my motivation for starting this blog was this memory (”if only we’d had these tools back then…”).

But we still networked. Quite effectively, actually (we saved our department).

It’s just easier now to make connections, and join existing ‘conversations’ we would never have known about before.

Thinking about it, I guess the computer revolution really coincided with the Thatcher regime (I still like to call it that). In 1982, TIME magazine selected ‘The Computer’ as its “Man of the Year”. In 2006, it picked “You”. The Machine is now Us.

I guess that symbolises just how far we’ve come.

Or have we? I notice that one of my lecturer’s, John Cameron, is still there. Must get in touch. And with all the others. By email. Where are they now, I wonder? Can we reconnect the network… via the internet… which is, after all, the same old network of people.

I’ve been having a lot of widgety thoughts recently, so I thought I’d bundle up a few loose ends in the one (long) post.

First though, if you’re playing catch-up a bit, Heidi Cohen has written a good widgets primer on ClickZ.

Now… I happened to replace half a dozen conventional light bulbs at home on Sunday with compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). Over in the US, Yahoo! has launched a campaign in collaboration with Inconvenient Truth producer Lawrence Bender, Wal-Mart, and others, to raise awareness among Americans about the energy and environmental savings afforded by CFLs.

When you purchase a CFL bulb anywhere in the US it will be added to 18seconds.org! And, you guessed it… you can easily and quickly configure your own widget (or ‘badge’ in Yahoo-speak) and install it on your website, blog and / or social network page with a simple cut and paste. Brilliant!

If you’re interested in reading more about the campaign, Lawrence Bender has written a guest post on Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog.

Demonstrating impact

The first book I ever read on campaigning was Des Wilson’s A to Z of Public Advocacy, first published in 1984. I can’t lay my hands on my copy (in the garage?) but if I recall correctly, one of Des’s golden rules was encourage you to campaign for something, rather than against something, and the 18seconds widget does a great job of visualising - in raw numbers anyway - the accumulated impact of hundreds of thousands of small actions by distributed individuals to effect positive change.

I emphasise “positive” change, as leveraging Web 2.0 communication tools for good was something that was discussed in a lively ‘conversation’ hosted by Amnesty’s Dan McQuillan during the Uploading Innovation ‘unconference’ last week.

If you hadn’t guessed already… for me, widgets are one of the most exciting ingredients in the emerging Web 2.0 toolbox.

Wear your cause on your blog

Another new kid on the widget block is Carebadges, who aspire to be the yellow bracelet campaign of the web, and while I think the implementation can be improved a lot, I agree with co-founder Saar Gur who told me:

We think that as people express their identities on the web, there is a big gap where social causes ought to be. We want people to express the things that they care about beyond cultural items (music, movies, etc.).

Last year I actually registered the domain name - mycauses.org.uk - and wrote on this blog that I would willingly give it up to any organisation which promised to use it wisely (or hand it over to MySpace if they agreed to establish a “My Causes” tab on their social networking site!)

Anyway, I interrupted Saar…

We want to give people ‘badges’ to help them identify with a cause and have a positive social influence amongst their peers. We use our “impact meter” of impressions/awareness, donations/support to help recognise folks that use their popularity for good. The money [donations] will come later if we can give tools to those who want to create cool badges, email signatures, etc., and we focus on the social impact that each user has in recruiting new members…

I’m not totally convinced in this peer group tactic, in much the same way as I’m not sure how much saying “I’m In” means you’re really anything other than a number. You’re agreeing that Oxfam’s mission is a noble thing.

Widgets have the potential to show you how by taking this or that action, you are making a difference.

Communicating success

This could be the Holy Grail for widgets.

18seconds does this in a visually compelling way… it joins the dots… and it makes it look simple.

But wait a minute. ChipIn’s Carnet Williams says something very interesting in this interview with Britt Bravo (which to Britt’s great credit rather trumps my own interview with Carnet last month).

Carnet says…

What I think 2007 really should be part of is the evolution of the widget into a smart widget. We are going to see widgets that are going to be focused around transactions, such as a ChipIn widget around donations, focused around intelligent content, meaning that widgets will soon be able to identify the users, and where they’re located, so that they can serve our conditional and intelligent content.

I really think that widgets are going to evolve and you’re going to start seeing a whole new breed of widgets that are more intelligent, that are richer in the data, and that have a much more grounded rationale so they’ll move from becoming decorations to part of a business process for companies and individuals online.

Now the slightest hint of ’smart’ widgets is enough for me: if I could only get information I care about - e.g. what difference a project I supported is actually having, or the accumulated effect of campaigning actions, etc. via a widget… now, that would surely become a key driver of my future support for that cause.

The Network Effect

For a great insight into the power of the widget widget web, check out Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent article, Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 1: Widgets, badges, and gadgets.

Dion identifies the YouTube ‘badge’ (we’re still talking widgets) as demonstrating the value of ‘chunking’ up content and services into bite-sized reusable pieces.

Particularly because it has so many viral distribution pieces built into it, the YouTube badge is the canonical example of the power of opening up and letting the entire web distribute your content for you.

Not content just to ask you if you’d like to share a video with friends via e-mail (resulting in friends forwarding to friends, and to their friends and so on) but YouTube makes the code snippet for embedding it right on your own site or blog readily visible and available to the right of each video.

Not content just to have their content just on a single site, YouTube realized that it was by mobilizing millions of users to extend the YouTube platform to their own sites that they could achieve lasting and durable network effects. E-mail propagation is powerful but it’s almost certainly no match for having millions of persistent, discoverable YouTube badge installations all over the web.

Dion kindly gave me permission to reproduce the following graphic (originally published here) which illustrates the full potential of the network for extending the reach of your widget / message.

Here in the UK, Justgiving has added badges (these are just badges) to the toolset available to fundraisers (is it just me who thinks all widgets, gadgets, etc… look better with rounded corners?).

Their widgets have been doing pretty well, too. Since their release at the end of December, over 8,000 individual Justgiving widgets have been posted on the web and the highest performing widgets have registered over 500,000 page impressions.

Right now, there are 1,479 “active” Justgiving widgets, all doing their stuff, and this figure is expected to rise pretty steeply as we get nearer to the London Marathon.

Justgiving’s Simon Doggett told me that a Flash version of their widget is in testing, and should be released later this month (fundraisers have been asking for a widget that is optimised for those websites that currently block iframes, e.g. MySpace).

Well, that turned into rather a long post, so I had better think of a way to summarise how I believe widgets can prove a winner for not-for-profits:

• You move beyond the single website model and turn the entire web into a distribution system for your content / stories (Dion Hinchcliffe)
• Smart widgets will (hopefully soon) allow you to report back on how you are making a difference

Just back from Baristas (terrific vanilla latte) where George and the team proudly sport “Make Starbucks History” t-shirts (as captured by caffeine buddy Ed Mitchell).

This got me thinking…

First, I was reminded of something Heather Green wrote in the Business Week blog last week. Heather noted how activism “splintered” to pursue different interests during the 1980s and 1990s. But now, she continued…

Because of the Internet, the different activist groups and NGOs can still be dedicated to their specific cause, but can coordinate on broad goals or campaigns when they want.

So on one hand you’re seeing fragmentation, but on the other, you’re seeing effective coordination.

On a small scale, the Starbucks Challenge, takes the form of always asking for fairtrade coffee when in-store. On a much larger scale, the online activity behind Make Poverty History - one of the most widely supported and recognised campaigns in recent years - stands out as an example of how to effectively devolve the distribution of campaign messages to a supporter base… to build a movement.

There have been other interesting examples such as the Jubilee 2000 movement, which grew from small beginnings to become an effective international campaign. Not all coalitions are as effective; the Stop Climate Chaos campaign has (so far) failed to grab me… nor, more importantly, influence many headline writers. (Do movements need a figurehead? Discuss).

The issue of connecting dispersed supporters through new technologies was covered in more detail in the first of a series of ICT Foresight reports published by NCVO in October (and free to download from the NCVO website).

The inspirational Network-Centric Advocacy blog always has lots to say on such subjects. This caught my attention recently:

There is widespread recognition that positive change on a variety of big and small issues will need to be driven by loose networks of global and local activists connected together from global warming to the plight of trash pickers in the developing world…

…The raw components for transforming the way to “do” organizing are on the table and staring leaders in the face…

There is serious need to inspire a cadre of activists, strategists, campaigners and investors to shift real resources into this new model of activism. Our best thinkers need to move horsepower into thinking about networks, how to build them, how to assess them, training on leadership in a networked world, what can networks do and how to invest in them.

(Read the whole post; it’s worth your time.)

I organised campaigns in a previous life (Oxfam; 1988-91) and it hasn’t escaped me that I first think of global issues (at least before I became a Dad) before concerning myself with more achievable changes needed on my own doorstep. The age of connectivity is yet to make a serious mark on local politics and online activism. At least, not on my watch.

Local campaigns often start out with just one or two people determined to change things in their community, like the installation of a zebra-crossing.

We happen to need one at the north end of our village in North Somerset. To be honest, I’ve only recently become more aware of this since becoming a governor at my daughter’s infants’ school.

I thought that it would be relatively easy to find another local community which had already managed to get the authorities to install a crossing, perhaps as part of a safe routes to school campaign. Not so.

An obvious first place to look was the BBC’s Action Network, but there’s not an awful lot going on under the pedestrian crossings category. Maybe we need something like change.org, but for local issues. Looks like I may have to re-invent the wheel.

Finally (for now)… the always-readable Kathy Sierra posts her frustrations at how James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds” concept has been twisted and abused to mean virtually the opposite: The Dumbness of Crowds.