DigiActive.org

Michael Silberman: Creating an Online Strategy

Michael Silberman (original image: NetSquared)

Today I “attended” a webinar on online strategy hosted by the New Organizing Institute.  The presenter was Michael Silberman, a partner and co-founder of EchoDitto, a communications firm founded by the techies of the Howard Dean campaign.  Below are Michael’s steps to building an online strategy.  I’ve presented his ideas, which are aimed at American non-profits, and then given commentary on how the steps relate to grassroots activists in other countries.  I’ve also added examples from international digital activism.

1)  Choose your moment:  It’s best to link the launch of a campaign to the news cycle so it is relevant.  This can be particularly challenging for activists that work on longterm issues, like the environment, public health, and or women’s rights.  It is common for these kinds of campaigns to link their actions to planned holidays like Earth Day or International Women’s Day, but smart organizations will also be attuned to the news for unforeseen opportunities and be ready to push their environmental campaign when there is news of a toxic clean-up or their women’s rights campaign when a female celebrity is the victim of domestic violence.

An excellent example of connecting an advocacy goal to the news cycle is Syria LinkedIn fail.  Social network LinkedIn had blocked its users in Syria because of a broad interpretatation of US sanctions against that country.  In order to make the block relevant, activist Jillian York created a Twitter tag #linkedinfail, which simulated the incredibly embarrassing #amazonfail story only a few days ago.  Eager not to follow in Amazon’s path, a PR representative responded to Jillian quickly (and on Twitter) and Syrians regained most of their access to the site.

2) Create an “ask”:  An “ask” is a jargon term that campaigners use to refer to the request you will make to your supporters.  While it is tempting to post a list of several actions, in Michael’s experience the most successful asks make only one request. For example, the project Postcards for Iran makes one simple ask:  send a postcard (snail mail or digital) to an Iranian political prisoner.

Michael also stresses the importance of mixing crisis and opportunity messages to spur your supporters to action.  You need to first present the crisis your cause seeks to redress in a way that makes is seem important and moving.  Then you need to present a clear way for your supporters to take action and resolve the crisis by responding to the ask.  First you present to the crisis, then the opportunity.  Michael calls this “crisitunity” messaging.

Finally, Michaels stresses that your “theory of change” needs to be credible to supporters. A theory of change refers to the process by which your campaign’s actions will achieve their goal.   For example, when an Afghan court sentences a journalism student to 20 years for blasphemy in late 2008, the group Scholars for Peace in the Middle East created an e-petition for his freedom addressed to “The Governments of Afghanistan and Iran and the United Nations Council on Human Rights”.  However, it is unclear how this group would be able to present this petitions to these institutions.  Their theory of change, that writing a petition to a variety of inaccessible governments and institutions would free the student, was not credible.  Their goal was noble, but their execution was perhaps too ambitious.  If you ask your supporter to take an action, they need to believe that their action will be effective in achieving the stated goal.

3) Launch:  Whatever your plan, you eventually need to get something online.  Create a blog post, send an e-mail, shoot a video.  Planning is important, but eventually you need to launch.

I think if I were writing this strategy, I would have put more detail into this step.  Creating content is not straight-forward and guidance on audience and organizational assets would have been useful.  Still, Michael was making a 40 minutes presentation, so some detail had to be left aside.

4) Outreach and promotion:  Once you have content online, you will need to promote it.  There are three options for promotion:  paid media (advertising), earned media (free coverage from journalists and bloggers), and self-made media (disseminating your own message).  (The first two categories were mentioned by Michael but self-made media is my own.)

Paid media is the least accessible to grassroots activists because of its necessary cost but, thanks to the relative affordability of online advertising, I’ll give one quick example.  During the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005 in Tunis,  Tunisian activists bought Google ad words connected to the summit and linked them to web sites detailing human rights violations by the Tunisian government, a means of redirecting attention to highlight the government’s misdeed.

Earned media is becoming ever more accessible to activists.  This is because, with the rise of blogging, there are ever more media outlets.  You may not have access to a newspaper or radio journalist, but someone in your organization probably knows of a prominent blog that would cover your story.  When contacting a journalist or blogger with your story, write a short personal note to show you are not just spamming the person, and also include a press release with a summary of the main details of your campaign, your contact info, and an image.

Finally, self-made media, the most appealing.  There are so many forms of free self-made media accessible to NGOs now – Twitter, blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, to name a few – that it is difficult to choose which one makes the most sense (and sometimes none do).  The key is audience.  What kind of media are your supporters using?  What kind of media is your target (opponent) using?  In most campaigns, you want to be visible to both.  Also, be aware that these types of media have network effects.  Think about who your partners are and ask them to post your message on their own blog, send an e-mail to their supporters, or re-tweet your message. (For more tips on using social media for activism, check out Beth’s Blog).

5) Watch your metrics: Congratulations!  You’ve developed an online action, launched it, and promoted it.  Now you need to measure your effect, both quantitatively and qualitatively.  Unfortunately, many useful metrics like “open rate” (how many recipients actually opened your e-mail) and “conversion rate” (how many of your e-mail recipients actually took the requested action) are only available through paid bulk e-mail services.  Grassroots activists using free tools  will need to rely on web site metrics, for which excellent free tools like Google Analytics are available.  (Google’s application allows some e-mail tracking by recording hits to specified URLs.)

For qualitative data, look at replies to the mass e-mail you sent through a Google Group you’ve created, comments on a blog post, or responses to your tweet on Twitter. Fortunately social media is interactive, so it is not too difficult to get feedback on a campaign, especially if you ask for it.

6) Follow-up:  The final step is follow-up.  You’ve completed your action.  You know whether or not (or to what extent) it was a success.  Now it’s time to close the feedback loop by telling your supporters how your campaign went.  Michael notes that if you can refer to a press mention of your campaign or link to photos of supporters taking action, this makes the campaign seem more real and vibrant.  Click Diagnostics, a public health start-up which uses mobile phone cameras to provide rural health diagnoses, it particularly good at follow-up.  They often enter innovation contests, which they promote on their Facebook group.  Before the contest, they ask their Facebook supporters to vote for them and after the contest they tell their supporters how they did.

A final note from me: as important as it is, a clear strategy is often missing from the actions of digital activists, who often try one digital tactic and then don’t know what to do if that tactic fails.  In an effort to bring more strategic resources to activists, I will be writing about different strategic frameworks that can be of use in this field.  EchoDitto’s is the first, but there will be more to come.