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?
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. 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.
There are a lot of interesting campaigns with online components happening here in Toronto at the municipal level, including this recentamazingvictory 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.
I gave a talk about “Online Advocacy Campaigns – The Basics” this week as part of Net Tuesday, organized by Techsoup Canada. It was a revised version of the presentation I gave in the spring. The attendance was a little lower than expected – there was a serious snowstorm – but otherwise the session went well.
Federal by-elections were called some time ago in a few ridings, and the challenge I faced was to quickly help organize some on-the-ground activity in a city where the campaign did not have any on-the-ground presence. We are a small organization (staff of three) so I get out from behind the computer a fair amount to do this kind of traditional outreach work.Facebook is a great tool for engaging with supporters beyond sending messages and changing your profile status. It offers powerful tools for local activists to engage their friends, recruit new supporters and plan and promote events.The quick steps I followed to get this going were as follows:
An initial email to our 1400+ supporters in the riding, inviting them to get involved in the upcoming by-election. This attests to the value of having a well-segmented email list you can send to quickly.
Setting up a Facebook group for the local riding, explaining the campaign and the latest call to action, in this case making poverty an issue in this by-election.
Asking people who responded to set up a meeting time and place. We had an excellent response, mainly on the strength of a few ‘Super Volunteers’. They are experienced local activists, and could pull in many supporters from the area.
Holding the meeting and outlining how the campaign could support their activities, both online and on the ground. One local candidate showed up uninvited with the national leader of his party, fresh from the campaign launch across the street. At a later meeting, another national party leader showed up to meet and greet. While we are entirely non-partisan, it’s good to get noticed.
Setting up local activists with the online tools they need (blogs, facebook groups, flickr accounts) to keep organizing in the riding. One key thing I learned is that when setting up groups, making someone an ‘officer’ does not give them enough privileges to really be effective – for instance they cannot message everyone in the group. You need to make supervolunteers into ‘administrators’ for them to be effective. Simple lesson learned.
I will be posting more about using facebook to campaign, as it is such a powerful tool that people happed to already be using -
Last Wednesday the Canadian government finally issued an official apology for the injustice of the residential schools forced upon Canada’s Aboriginal people.
This apology was long overdue. The residential school system was meant to ‘assimilate’ Canadian aboriginal people into white culture. They were taken from their parents and left at the mercy of the churches who ran these programs. It’s one of the many injustices Canada has perpetrated against aboriginal people in this country – redressing these injustices is probably the most important social justice in Canada right now.
Last week I had the honour of presenting at the skill building retreat for Global Citizens for Change, a public engagement initiative of volunteer cooperation agencies in Canada.
Once again I went with the ‘walk before you run’ theme. My presentation was in four parts: the basics of online campaign communications, the basics of campaign websites, list engagement for campaigns and ‘everything else’ : how to evaluate other online opportunities (which admittedly was pretty short: how does it compare to email?).
The key learnings were:
1. Campaigning online is primarily a communications challenge, not a technological challenge.
2. The internet is made by and for people.
3. ‘Best list wins’: create, engage and grow your list before you…
4. Choose wisely from the low hanging fruit.
DrupalCamp Toronto was held last weekend at the University of Toronto, and it went really well. The Drupal Users Group of Toronto pulled it together for the third year in a row, and it keeps getting better each year.
I worked with Joe Murray and Mike Gifford to run a session entitled “Online Advocacy – What it is, what’s out there, what’s working, what needs work” which I will admit is a long title.
The idea for this session was to present the perspective of people working in online activism to Drupal developers. While I don’t believe that online activism is primarily a technological challenge, I do think that the tools can be much improved, especially for Canadian campaigns. Continue Reading »
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Federal by-elections were called some time ago in a few ridings, and the challenge I faced was to quickly help organize some on-the-ground activity in a city where the campaign did not have any on-the-ground presence. We are a small organization (staff of three) so I get out from behind the computer a fair amount to do this kind of traditional outreach work.Facebook is a great tool for engaging with supporters beyond sending messages and changing your profile status. It offers powerful tools for local activists to engage their friends, recruit new supporters and plan and promote events.The quick steps I followed to get this going were as follows:
DrupalCamp Toronto