I was recently asked to outline the essentials of e-campaigning (aka e-advocacy): what must you do at a minimum to make it work. So this is a perfect post to revive this blog. Before jumping into the top five essential things you must have for e-campaigning, I first need to clarify what I mean by 'essential' and my assumptions.
By essential I mean that if you do these things you will most likely get good results for the effort you put in and you can regularly repeat your successes
You could, of course, ignore these and go straight to using social networking sites and social media (blogs, photo sharing, video sharing, bookmark sharing) and you might actually achieve something (if you get lucky). But my experience is you'd have a hard time repeating your success since you have no way of directly re-mobilising your supporters from the first initiative you'll have to do all the same basic work over again and that is nor smart!
What these top essentials do is focus on building on past successes and ensuring success is repeatable.
There are, of course, some things that many e-campaigning professions (including myself) would like to add to this list like tracking and analysis. Why I don't include tracking and analysis (I do include it in the 'important' section) in the top four is that many organisations do 'good' campaigning without it. Of course, getting by without it probably also means they are wasting time and money on things that are not working very well and they likely are not improving their e-campaigning with every campaigning action. With talented people and a good budget they may not miss their lost opportunities. By doing it they could be performing significantly better with almost the same budget and effort.
I've tried to draw this line between 'essential' and 'important' to help keep the essentials to a minimum and focused. Mut anyone who wants to do higher impact e-campaigning should definitely not stop with the essentials: just start with them.
Email is your single most important tool. You need to collect supporter's email addresses and send email communications to them at least every two months and ideally more frequently. Email is the key tool because it:
If you have been wooed by media stores of Facebook, MySpace or other social networks, these tools are great way to go beyond the essentials (or to use for campaigning as an individual), but they are minor players when it comes to messaging and they too depend on email to make their sites a success.
Do you need proof? In 2008 there are 1.6 billion active email users, only 300 million people use social networking sites in total. There are minor issues with email such as spam, but those are manageable.
The exception to email being your single most important tool is if the supporter profile you are planning to engage does not use email. Since any social networking sites requires an email for registration, those users will still have an email address. Those using only a mobile phone for communication thus would be the most obvious exception - but also brings significant other constraints (if we are still following Assumption A).
Your website is the next important tool for e-campaigning. Not only is it the primary place for new supporters to have a first impression of your organisation and hopefully subscribe to your emails, but the content you publish and the campaigning actions you run will attract new people every day. At minimum, the website should have:
If you wish to go one step beyond the minimum, then having campaigning actions that people can complete on your website is very important as it not only makes it quick and easy for supporters to contribute to your campaigning, but it also contributes to the growth of your email subscribers. There are free services and tools for this, but free services often prevent you from accessing the data of who took the actions (and thus new people who subscribed)
Having the tools in place is actually relatively easy. However if you don't have the expertise to use those tools then it is likely your e-campaigning efforts will have poor results. This sounds obvious, but many organisations simply add e-campaigning as one more role of an existing staff member who may only have one of the many related of expertise needed. The minimum expertise needed is:
This is a minimum, not an ideal.
If you can only afford to hire one new person and already have campaigners and a web producer, then focus on getting someone with direct marketing expertise and some knowledge of the Internet - that is a good base for skills and knowledge needed for e-campaigning.
To get people with these skills and/or knowledge you can:
Having regular new campaigning actions is not just a good way to re-focus your campaigning on your targets, but it also helps retain existing and recruit new supporters. The more frequently you run new campaigning actions, the faster your supporter base will grow. It may also help to keep your targets aware of your efforts and help achieve the campaign objectives. However, just running new campaigning actions over simplifies what is necessary. They need to be genuine, timely, compelling and specific to work well.
Of course, doing the minimum is a great way to start, but is high risk since ti is operating without the benefit of insight into the effectiveness of the e-campaigning, the investment needed to achieve the best results, the direction to guide effort and investment and the feedback to ensure it is engaging supporters. To take e-campaigning beyond the essentials, there are several important activities that needs to be considered
Tracking tools are essential for learning what is working and what isn't so you can either refine what isn't working and/or switch to focus more on what is working. You can do e-campaigning without using tracking and analysis tools (as many organisations do), but you will be even more dependent on the expertise you have to know what works and increase the risk that you are wasting time and budget. Tracking an analysis mean three things:
Tracking and analysis guides you in optimising your activity and when you optimise your activity at multiple point in the campaigning actions you produce q strong multiplier that can lead to dramatic improvements in your effectiveness.
Setting-up, promoting and managing an e-campainging action takes time and effort. At a minimum this would probably be 5-10 days per e-campaigning action. Why? Here are some of the things it involves:
Pwew! If you know what you are doing, this will take 5-10 days effort. If you are new to it it could take double or triple that time (or what happens in practice is you just skip many steps).
Have some budget for e-campaigning would definitely help - especially if you wish to send people on training or get access to the tools necessary for good e-campaigning. Budget for promotion (not only advertising) is very important. Without promotion all the effort you put into your campaigning has limited effect. Promotion is even more important if you have spent money to create some content and need to ensure you get a good 'return' on it.
Having an e-campaigning strategy and plan should be essential. In reality organisation do e-campaigning for years without a strategy or plan. However I'll still put it as an essential since it can provide focus and goals that can help determine if the e-campaigning is generating the results required. Part of planning should also involve research into targets, supporters and the profile of people that needs tob e recruited.
Listing to supporters via a feedback channel like a contact email address they can use or polls and surveys is also an important activity that many organisations neglect. However having feedback can help improve your e-campaigning and ensure it engages supporters: an essential element of success.
Event having the essential and important aspects of e-campaigning in place leaves significant room for improvement. However the ideal requirements foe e-campaigning goes even beyond this. Perhaps that is a future topic for a blog post.
Anything you think I missed? Anything you disagree with? Anything you think should have more emphasis?
This post will be turned into an article in the eCampaigning Resource Pack that is being produced as part of the 2008 eCampaigning Forum initiative so any help improving it before printed publication would be useful!
]]>I have been working with campaigners to help them make full and effective use the Internet and New Media (aka e-campaigning) since 2001. In that time it has exposed many gaps in how campaigning is managed that limits not only e-campaigning, but general campaigning effectiveness. Here is what I think the gaps were in 2006 that need to be addressed in 2007.
This generally involves:
In too many cases this impact research is simply not done at all. Since campaigning is part art and part science, intuition is useful. But undertaking and implementing influence research (the science) helps campaigns achieve better results for the time and budget they spend on achieving their objectives.
Creative Actions: All to often, the usual suspects and usual methods are used for campaigning actions (offline and online): standard petitions and letters to targets. The result is bland actions which doesn't appeal to journalists or the public.
Where possible, creative actions need to:
The reasons these gaps exist ranges from overworked campaign staff, short lead times, low budgets, shifting priorities and many more. However the point of naming the gaps is so that the areas of improvement are identified. While the constraints will not go away away, some may find they can address one or two to give them the space to be even more effective at campaigning.
My work over the last two years on reviewing organisations' e-campaigning performance and developing their e-campaigning strategy with them has provided me with the opportunity to identify issues that all organisations withint to campaign via the Internet and new media seem to face.
If the e-campaigning seems to be ineffective, it may well be that it has more to do with the campaigning gaps than anything specific to the Internet or your technology.
These issues are not new. I raised them in the Make Poverty History New Media review in early 2006, and even then there were well established. The only change since then is even more organisations are trying to do eCampaigning and the Internet gone mainstream.
2006 was a busy year. Climate change was the issue of the year globally, but the continued deterioration of the situation in Iraq, the stagnation of the Israel-Palestine peace process and the Israel-Lebanon conflict were all catalysing events for some campaigners.
The Control Arms campaign had a key win in October when the UN voted in favour of a resolution to start work on a global Arms Trade Treaty. In the US the Save The Internet coalition prevented anti-'network neutrality' legislation from passing that could have resulted in Internet censorship. In Australia, GetUp had a number of wins on environmental protection, climate change shifts and refugee rights and is playing a key role uniting opponents to the current Liberal majority government - up for re-election in 2007.
The use of direct fundraising as a campaigning action was also on the rise in 2006, with GetUp, MoveOn, TrueMajority, The Democratic Party and many others appealing directly for funds for either general campaigning or for specific actions (e.g. GetUp's billboard fund, MoveOn's funding of political TV ads). In the UK, the dominant campaigning organisations are highly reluctant to ask for funds from campaigners, but judging from the success of these types of initiatives in the US and Australia, 2007 might be when people's minds change on this issue.
Politically, the US Elections were obviously a big thing not just for the US, but for US activities in many parts of the world. However since foreign policy is the responsibility of the Presidency, not everything will change. In the UK, Prime Minister Tony Blair was forced to give a rough timeline for retiring and this put more focus on the policies of Gordon Brown, who many assume will become the next Prime Minister.
More generally, 2006 was the year the Internet boom returned with YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, Digg and Delicious being just a few of the services that became widely popular during the year.
2006 saw climate change become the issue of the year. A combination of political events, media coverage, research findings, climate disasters and campaigning coalitions converged to keep this key issue in the headlines for the whole year. While the climate change movement seems stronger than ever, a global coalition doesn't seem to exist - unlike GCAP (the parent coalition of Make Poverty History and the One Campaign).
I'm sure I've missed significant campaigning related events here - so let me know what they are so the timeline can be improved.
If you work with the Internet and New Media, nothing here will be new. But for those of you who are active in campaigning but don't have much connection to the Internet and New Media, here are some of the popular new media related topics of the year.
I have been working for eight years to combine campaigning and the Internet. So in 2006 it was a pleasure to see and feel two milestones being achieved:
The adoption of campaigning by an increasing number of non-profit organisations has been occurring for a while. But in 2006 this seemed to accelerate. In the UK, this is primarily due to the success of Make Poverty History in 2005 and the global parent coalition of GCAP. And just as campaigning was boosted by Make Poverty History (or other GCAP coalitions) in 2005, in 2006 it was further impacted by the Climate Change movement (e.g. Stop Climate Chaos coalition in the UK).
I experienced this trend in two ways:
But there was also a continuation of the trend that started years ago: the establishment of new campaigning organisations.:
Anyone who dismisses these initiatives as 'Internet' is still Internet illiterate: they are not about the Internet at all, they are about engaging with people and encouraging people to engage with each other. The Internet merely makes it cheaper and easier to do that. MoveOn and GetUp also get tens of thousands of people on the street and taking real action - and have inspired a new generation of people to have hope for their country and world. Another organisation, Avaaz, is on the verge of taking this model global (see more in Part 5: 2007 What's Coming in 2007)
In 2006 the Internet became mainstream in many ways on which others have documented. In numbers, 70% of the US population (or 77% depending on your source) and 62% of the UK population now have access to the Internet. But since others have written about this, I'll focus on the signs of this in campaigning in 2006.
The 2006 US Election demonstrated how far the Internet had come. Both parties and almost all candidates used the Internet (in conjunciton with more traditional approaches) to fundraise, promote their message, undermine their opponents and mobilise their supporters. Blogging networks and video were important to this as were custom social networking tools (see MyGOP, The Democratic Party or MyDD). Furthermore the Democrats started using modeling (aka micro targeting or segmenting) as the Republicans have for year to tailor their messaging for specific audiences and is likely part of the behind the scenes reason why the Democrats made such significant gains.
2006 also saw non-profit campaigners experimenting with blogging, using social networking sites, posting campaign videos, podcasting, using wikis, making mashups, etc. All these activities were not necessarily new in 2006, but they did become more mainstream in 2006 in terms of media reporting and public usage.
In my own work I saw and heard non-profit directors and senior managers expressing that the Internet is an essential part of achieving their organisations' campaigning objectives. Several years ago, the Internet was an afterthought for these same people. This is an important breakthrough since part of the challenge for years has been finding people in these roles who see the larger potential for the using the Internet beyond just publishing, email updates and fundraising. However most senior managers still do not yet know how to use it effectively and what using it effectively requires.
However the Internet becoming 'mainstream' in the non-profit world does not mean that non-profits are yet effective at using the Internet for campaigning. What it does suggest is that directors and senior managers may now be clearer about what they expect it to deliver, they may start to demand a better return from their investment in using the Internet for campaigning, they may be willing to allocate more staff and budget and they may be willing to take more risks.