Eric Squair’s blog

Hey Eastern Canadian online organizers,

We’re going to RootsCamp in DC in a little less than three weeks, we have space in our van, and I hope you can come along.

What’s RootsCamp?  It’s two days of powerful conversations with some of the smartest progressive folks doing online organizing today. If you are working to make change and want to do your online work in a smart and strategic way, this is for you. It’s a great chance to meet, learn from and teach other progressive organizers in an open, collaborative atmosphere.

And it’s free. Continue Reading »

I am a big fan of Web Analytics, and I feel like it is the cornerstone skill of any work you want to do online.  I find that people speak about their websites in an entirely different way when they are regularly monitoring their site performance. And I feel like you can’t help but improve your website once you actually  have a sense of how people are using it (and NOT using it)

That’s why I am offering a five-session hands-on course on Google Analytics I call “How to Make Smarter Decisions About Your Website“

I am organizing an event to introduce some amazing free tools from Google to Toronto area non profits.

Normally, I don’t like giving workshops focusing on specific tools. Often, it’s a case of recommending specific tactics before people have defined the larger goals of an organizations’ online efforts. Second Life, FourSquare or Twitter do not necessarily fit the particular needs of your organization.*

But Google is different.  You have no choice but to make decisions more strategically when using these tools for measuring and improving your online work. I don’t feel reluctant to recommend these specific tools to anyone who is publishing anything online – a website, email newsletter, blog or social media campaign.

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Over the years I have created dozens of email signup forms, to help organizations build their email lists of supporters.  Often people want to ask the subscriber to give every last detail of their personal information: full name, address, phone number, etc.

They also know that every piece of information you require in your sign up form reduces the number of people who will complete the form and subscribe.

So what’s the optimal information to ask for, in my opinion?

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We’ve been running the Blogging for People Who Should workshop for a year now, and have taught a lot of people the basics of spreading the word online about the work they do. Now we’re delivering the first online version of the workshop.

We are delivering a blogging workshop for a group working on water issues, with members across the country. We have developed short instructional videos and exercises to explain the main learnings of the course, and follow up with webinars to review and discuss the work.

It’s been a great process so far – it wraps up next week – and we hope to be delivering more of these online workshops in the future.

If you are interested in participating in the Blogging for People Who Should workshop but don’t live near Toronto, drop us a line and we’ll let you know when we run the first online workshop open to the general public. Continue Reading »

A few days ago I finished writing up a simple content plan for a modest campaign microsite. I thought it would be useful to share what I came up with, a bit of a template for the type of content to consider when you are trying to engage people in an issues campaign.

This particular campaign was for a Canadian medical issue, and there was an opportunity to influence the relevant decision makers in the near future. No two campaigns are alike, of course, so there is no single template that can cover all campaign site possibilities.  You might decide to include only some of this content, depending on the complexity of the issue, the audience of the campaign (broad or specialized), the target of the campaign (corporate, government, particular decision maker),  the ask (to stop some harm or provide some benefit)  and the information/enthusiasm ratio of the campaign at that moment.
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I had the pleasure of presenting at the My Charity Connects conference here in Toronto. Put on by Canada Helps, it brings together about 300 people who work in the not-for-profit sector to learn about communicating and collaborating effectively online. It’s held at MaRS, and this is my second time presenting.

Because I promised they would be here, my presenter slides with notes are here in PDF (1.6Mb).

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One of the unexpected joys of running the weeknight workshop series “Blogging for People Who Should” is getting to sample some fun cheeses. On my way to work on workshop days, I walk through Kensington Market and pick up some snacks for the session: fresh organic veggies, dips, olives, cookies, crackers and best of all, cheese.

If you don’t offer some kind of food at workshops that start right after the workday ends, people have to scramble to grab something quick (and invariably crappy) or go hungry. And it’s fun to try a few new cheeses each week.

I am a fan of Global Cheese, on Kensington Avenue, a big friendly place where the staff behind the counter constantly offer you sample slices to taste. Aside from being a good business tactic, it’s always a lot of fun to shop there. Continue Reading »

This weekend more than 30 people came together over two days to learn more about, work with and improve some free open source tools for running online campaigns in Canada.

There aren’t a lot of website tools for organizations in Canada looking to create effective online petitions, build their email lists or put supporters in touch with their Members of Parliament.  Make Poverty History Canada has helped develop open source software to do exactly these tasks, and wants to share it with other organizations for free.

So Make Poverty History sponsored a workshop for activists to learn more about the tools on Saturday at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto.  A Hackathon was organized for the Sunday, where open source software developers gathered to work with the code to improve it, learning and sharing with each other in the process.

Here’s a few key learnings from the weekend Continue Reading »

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There are a lot of interesting campaigns with online components happening here in Toronto at the municipal level, including this recent amazing victory for a more beautiful city. Campaigns like this could be even more effective if they had simple and effective ways for citizens to get in touch with their elected representatives (or their candidates during the upcoming election).

As it stands now, online campaigns either spend a lot of money to purchase advocacy software, or ask participants to use government websites to find and contact their elected representatives, with no way to record how many messages have been sent, or stay in touch with participants. There is a better way.

The Make Poverty History campaign, who I work with on several projects, has software that makes it easy for people to send a message or sign a petition to their Member of Parliament based on their postal code.  The software also allows people to opt to join an email list to keep up to date on a campaign – a useful way to build a list of supporters. You can see an example of an online action here.

The best part of this story? Make Poverty History wants to share this software with other activist groups across Canada. So they are sponsoring an event in Toronto on February 27th & 28th so you can learn more about it and contribute to it’s development.

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