DigiActive.org

Tool: Animoto converts photos into video

Tool: http://animoto.com

Tool Description: An online service that picks out your photos and music to combine them into a short (30 seconds for free) video. Animoto’s website says its engine analyzes users’ photos and music — and takes into account the music’s genre, rhythm and tempo — to generate a video. And, it says, no two videos are ever the same.

Activist Application: Could be great for activists who want to make a YouTube-style video about their cause but don’t have the skills or software for traditional video editing.  You can use images and music created by people in your cause or use free Creative Commons music and photos (with attribution!).  A great source for Creative Commons photos is Flickr’s Creative Commons collection and for music try Jamendo.

Downsides:  To create longer videos, you’ll have to pay. Animoto however says it supports not-for-profits and other humanitarian causes with free pro accounts.  I also had some difficulty in uploading the video to my YouTube account, and in downloading it, though it went easily to my Facebook page.

Ease of Use: Very user-friendly. Downloads pictures from some online sites too.

Animoto promises all “automatic” operations, completely customized, done in the speed of “just minutes”, no two
videos are ever the same, unlimited shorts for free (but you pay for longer-than-30-seconds), and a tool “created by TV and film producers”.

Hat-tip: Esra’a El Shafei of Mideast Youth

Image: Frederick Noronha

Tool: CiviCRM for better communication

When a small campaign becomes a permanent organization, there are often difficulties in scaling.  A small group can communicate with supporters through a Google Group, but what if you have multiple constituencies or you want to record information about your supporters that will help you communicate with them effectively? Wouldn’t you like to manage your “relationships” better? Or, be more efficient in sending out appeals and updates? Tap the right quarters when it comes to fund-raising? Know exactly who your potential supporters could be?

Michal Mach is a Polish programmer who co-founded CiviCRM. What’s the project about? Why is it particularly relevant and useful to non-profits?

“CiviCRM is a software for non-profit organisations to manage their contact-data. Information about people, organisations they work with, all kinds of addresses-related information, records of interactions with different people or organisations,” says Mach. It’s basically a CRM (customer relationship management) package for a non-profit.

According to Wikipedia, “CiviCRM is an open source (customer) relationship management (CRM) solution. CiviCRM calls itself an ‘constituent relationship management solution’. It is designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. CiviCRM may be deployed on Drupal and Joomla! content management systems. Both the Drupal and Joomla! professional associations use CiviCRM,”  says the Wikipedia.

It also notes that CiviCRM is also used by many other large NGOs such as Amnesty International, Creative Commons and the Wikimedia Foundation for their fundraising. And there have been also cases of very large record sets being used with one company claiming to have set up CiviCRM with a set of over 3 million constituents .

Resource: Social Source Commons

Description: What tools are non-profit groups using out there in the field? What works? What tools would you recommend to others?  To get answers to all these seemingly tough questions check out the Social Source Commons.

It describes itself as “a place to share lists of software tools that you already use, gain knowledge and support, and discover new tools.  It’s a place to meet people with similar needs and interests and answer the question: what tools do they use?”

URL: http://socialsourcecommons.org

How it works: The idea, in hindsight, seems disarmingly simple. You get enough people (from this sector) to sign-up, and say what software tools they use or find useful.  When I check ‘My Toolboxes’, I find some 46 tools listed by me. Says Social Source Commons: “Your Personal Toolbox is for listing tools you use and recommend to others. The contents of your Personal Toolbox are used in calculating tool popularity and recommendations for the SSC Community.” What’s more, I find out who’s using the same tools as me.

For instance, CiviCRM (the Free Software/Open Source constituent relationship management system) is used by me and 51 others! CivicSpace, the Free/Open Source content-management system platform for grassroots organizing and civic activity, gets used by 19 of us.

Site features: On the site, there’s a list for new tools that are useful for non-profits — DonorWorks, DonorVision, DonorTrax, DonorTools, GeoGebra and other names we’ve probably never heard of.  There’s also a list of the most active tools — Donation Solution,  Donarius, Donation Tracker, Development Logic, DirectToCRM, and Donation Director. You can search through tags, build contacts and more.

You even can create additional Toolboxes to share lists of tools by category or by theme.  Such as “Tools I Use When I’m Travelling” or “Free Tools Everyone Should Know About”.

Creator: This is one of the current projects of the San Francisco-based Aspiration, and is supported by the Soros-funded Open Society Institute Information Program.

Aspiration defines its mission as being “to connect nonprofit organizations with software solutions that help them better carry out their work.”  It says, “We want nonprofit organizations to be able to find and use  the best software available, so that they maximize their effectiveness and impact and, in turn, change the world.”

Tool: MagicJack links you up with North America

Tool Description: I recently surprised Mary by giving her a short call in the US, all the way from India, simply to tell her that I received her email. Unusual, eh? If you’re located in the Third World (a term I use deliberately and out of choice), most could barely afford calls half-way-round-the-planet!

Imagine a relatively affordable device which makes phone calls to both landlines and mobile phones in the US and Canada, at rates more or less affordable to activists the world over. magicJack [http://www.magicjack.com] is one such tool that can help you do just this.

Activist Application:  Many campaigns nowadays are international.  While text-based forms of communication like e-mail, social networks, IRC, and instant messaging are effective ways for activists to communicate internationally, sometimes we still need to talk to one another to coordinate effectively.   If you are working with activists in North America, magicJack is a low-cost option.

Ease of Use: Plug magicJack into your computer’s USB port. Then connect it to any land-line phone. Make calls like you normally would. All you need is a computer with a broadband connection.  It costs $40 for the first year, and $20 per year thereafter.  There are no charges per-call, which could give  magicJack some benefits over Skype-out, where you still pay a per-minute rate.  You get a US phone-number on which people could phone you back, and can access voice-mail too.

On the flip side, this Wikipedia page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicJack] has a section on criticism of the product and some users have said that it is unreliable.

Its’ a  useful tool to get into voice communication with another world out there in North America.

image credit: getusb.info

Campaign: Pink Panties to Fight Fundamentalism

Description: When a gang of politically well-connected Indian religious conservatives beat up women because they were in a
pub in the Indian city of Mangalore in end-January 2009, few expected the response to be so innovative and impactful.

Mixing Facebook and the bizarre, a group of young women (and some men backing them) launched the Consortium of Pub-going,
Loose and Forward Women. Not only was their name unusually self-deprecatory, but their action wholly unexpected. They
announced plans to send “pink underwear” in protest to the offices of the Rama Sene, one of the many sprouting groups
here that uses religiosity and the name of the Indian god Rama to justify its campaigns.

This caught on fast, and the Facebook group has currently grown to 56,160 members. The media loved the story, and literally hundreds of articles were written about it.

Its success came from the fact that the campaign was innovative, almost bizarre, and appealing to the youth too. The cause got wide coverage, embarrassing conservatives justifying restrictions on women or religious-infighting among different groups in this diverse country. For example, the ad from a billboard from a prominent Indian butter company (Amul), below, refers to the campaigners’ unusual act, drawing even more attention.

This has become one of India’s cause celebre in campaigning, though it has earned criticism from both Right (who see it as targeted against one important conservative party, in a key election year) and the Left (a section of which seems taken by surprise, or even inable to comprehend the kind of campaign involved).

Digital Tools Being Used: Facebook, blog

How These Tools are Being Used: Internet users can join a Facebook group. Real-world action involved actually posting pink ‘chaddis’ (underwear) to the fundamentalists. Off-line campaigns have continued, including Take Back The Night campaigns in States where conservative governments were in power, such as Karnataka. Groups are being formed in other parts of India too.

On Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=49641698651&ref=ts

Interesting analysis; Three Lessons Activists and Marketers Can Learn From India’s Valentine’s Day Pink Panty Campaign
http://tinyurl.com/d4znu4

Nisha Susan (group founder) explains: Valentine’ Warriors — The Pink Chaddi Campaign: why it began and how
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main41.asp?filename=Op280209valentine_warrior.asp

UPDATE: please also check out Gaurav Mishra’s excellent post on the many online responses to the Sri Rama Sene attacks, including several interesting videos:
http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/the-valentines-day-pink-chaddi-campaign-indian-pubgoing-women-vs-shri-ram-sena/

Tool: Newsrack.in

Tool Description: In an increasingly globalised environment, information has been recognised as the key to development. NGOs and activists have their own info-gathering needs, and have used a sissors-and-gum newspaper-based system. A new tool, Newsrack.in, automates the process and customises it in a way that can match precise needs.

This free service allows anyone to ‘track’ published news (using key-words) they’re interest in. Instead of searching through scores of newspapers, Newsrack.in keeps track of the news on one or more issues — electronically. You can also ’share’ the news that others keep track of. Crucial when it comes to info-activism, and keeping uptodate on the issue you’re working on. It was created by Indian techie Subramanya Sastry. The site has about 12,000 unique visitors a month tovthe site itself, and a majority of these visitors are from India. In addition, there are over 10,000 unique requests to the various RSS feeds that newsrack generates.

Activist Application: This tool can be useful to keep track of news specifically related to issues you work on (say, child-labour, poverty, water, sanitation). It can be customised and used in any part of the globe, after editing a few simple files.

Ease of Use: Moderate. You create an account, then create concept areas (defined by keywords) for the news areas you want to track. You can track more than one area and you can break your area into different categories.