Ricken Patel, the Executive Director of Avaaz, and I presented today at the e-campaigning forum in Oxford. Here’s some notes on Rick’s excellent introduction to Avaaz’s Do and Don’t Do list of online activism, and their unique new perspective on global campaigning.(These are raw notes. Typed fast. Let a thousand typos bloom.)

Avaaz is, according to their FairSay introduction, an “international campaigning organisation making strategic use of the Internet to help achieve their campaigning objectives. Avaaz is the latest example of a participation-led campaigning model exemplified by MoveOn in the USA and GetUp in Australia that have started to transform US and Australian politics over the last few years. With Avaaz operating in the multiple languages and attracting members in multiple countries, including the UK, it is quickly becoming a major player in international politics.”

There’s a particular vocabulary which we use internally as guideposts to where we focus our activism:
Find a crisitunity (crisis plus opportunity) This is why this is urgent now. Need a moment. Response rates soar when you are dealing with something in the news now.Tipping point: the world is going to go one way or another, but if you take this action now, you effect whether it goes this way or that way.

Actionability: How convincing is it that my action is going to change something.

Winnability: If we go up this ladder, we’re going to get there.

DO: Make it really easy. Get people in the door. You have to be fast: Men decide whether or not to close an email within 2 seconds, women decide in 7. The easier you make it, the higher level of participations you get.
Ladder of participation: seeing and observing first, take them carefully up the ladder of participation. First impressions matter in online organising: open rates are higher in early stage. Go gently, give people easy asks before you give them hard ones.
Polling and consultation extremely useful tool: Avaaz wants to do a tracking poll every week, take a segment and ask, look for the 30-40% differences, not the 5-10% ones because changing a few words may switch those low difference results.
Dissolve the difference between the organiser and the organised. Through your language it should always be US, WE.
Doing cool stuff: Generates attention. Endless quest for the new, sometimes you get stuck in ruts, that will be killer to your growth and success.
Following the media spotlight: Public consciousness is very episodic. Need to be hitting the email boxes when the story is hitting the media.
Wolfowitz as boss in a Youtube video that went viral (same guy that did Hillary Clinton spot)

Staged a protest in Los Angeles, 35 People demonstrating, 34 Journalists, it was the timing.

People can get excited about offline stuff, Oxfam does great stuff. Treating politics as theatre, capturing people’s imagination. In the run up to 2004 we set up a site called Voter Call, said wouldn’t it be possible to pull off voters names and phone number from the rolls, say a million in low and middle income areas, have people call them and encourage them to vote. MAde 600,000 calls.
Darfour, lot of activism, not impacting things on the ground. Fundraised for Peacekeeping forces to have radios and teargas and stuff to protect women who are going to get firewood. No foundation wojuld fund that, but our community could.

Call to action: SMS, mobile. Hello Gracie ringtone. Philipinos are great at text organising, president fell in a coup d’ text. Somebody recorded a conversation about the president talking on a cell phone about throwing the election, and they broke it up into ringtones.

More Iraqis voted for the Star Academy (american idol) in Iraq than voted in the election. With their cell phones.

When you are part of an NGO there is a tendancy toward a corporate voice. There’s a basic principle: a communication to your members should be like a message to a friend. One of our most viral communications was an internal message report back. Guy was suppposed to hand over a petition, ended up actually delivering message to G8 ministers, the guy’s email was so compelling about how nervous he was and what he said and how exciting it was, we just put it out to our supporters.

Big Don’t: Everything we do is about member service: HOW DOES THIS SERVE OUR MEMBERS. Don’t think about how it servers your campaign or yourself. But sometimes your members just don’t get it. There’s a tension between always being led by our own campaigns rather than looking at your members. Invest in member services.

Who is leading who: we are grappling with how much you open up. I would love to have us wiki everything, but there are dangers in that. It’s not just the control issue. riken got alienated from move on when he went into the action forum to interact with other members and found people he didn’t relate to. There’s a danger in opening up entirely as 2.0 and giving your members space to express themselves. Communities have ups and downs, and big families are good examples of how you don’t always look forward to seeing everybody.

People want leadership. Our core demographic is not an activist. It’s amiddle aged mom in the global north and a student in the global south. They heard something that she wants to do something abougt, she gets an email and can do something aobut it in a few minutes. We treat our supporters like presidents.

Accontability is built into the DNA of this model.

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