Web Directions

Interview: online advocacy

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• July 6, 2008
• Leave a response

Regular Web Directions attendee Priscilla Brice-​​Weller is the Online Campaigner for advo­cacy organ­i­sa­tion, ANTaR (Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation). Priscilla also blogs about tech­nol­ogy and activism at Solidariti.

It being NAIDOC week, I thought this might be a good occa­sion to hear about the work Priscilla does at ANTaR, and how grass­roots organ­i­sa­tions the world over are using the web (in par­tic­u­lar social net­work­ing appli­ca­tions) to spread their word.

Did you start at ANTaR in your cur­rent role, or did you morph into it from a more tra­di­tional web role? I’m inter­ested to know how much aware­ness there is in the non-​​profit sec­tor of the poten­tial in online cam­paign­ing, in going well beyond sim­ply hav­ing a web site and maybe accept­ing dona­tions online.

I started at ANTaR in my cur­rent role. ANTaR’s approach to the web is pretty unique for a non­profit, in that the organ­i­sa­tion employs a full-​​time staff mem­ber (me!) to man­age online cam­paigns. Apart from the large activist organ­i­sa­tions like Greenpeace, or those that focus specif­i­cally on web cam­paigns like GetUp!, online cam­paign­ers are pretty rare in Australia. It’s more com­mon for some­body in a web man­ager or com­mu­nity cam­paigner role to do some online cam­paign­ing work as part of their role.

One of the pri­mary roles of a cam­paigner, regard­less of whether you cam­paign online or offline, is to raise aware­ness in the com­mu­nity about an issue. But awareness-​​raising isn’t enough: we also need to build rela­tion­ships with peo­ple and encour­age them to effect change where they can. Often this means we’re ask­ing peo­ple to put pres­sure where it is needed (e.g. by get­ting in touch with their local MP) in order to get some­thing to change for the better.

Generally, youth-​​run organ­i­sa­tions, and those that focus on the envi­ron­ment and/​or human rights seem to use the web more effec­tively for cam­paign­ing than other non­prof­its. There are excep­tions of course, such as Movember, and the Raise The Bar cam­paign in NSW.

My guess is that some organ­i­sa­tions don’t use the web for cam­paign­ing because they don’t have much time or money, and so they put all their resources into pro­vid­ing core ser­vices in the organisation’s area of exper­tise. On the other hand, there are some organ­i­sa­tions with plenty of resources, but con­ser­v­a­tive mar­ket­ing poli­cies mean that they hes­i­tate to get involved in online cam­paign­ing because it might dam­age the organisation’s brand, or because they can’t see how they will get an ade­quate return on their invest­ment. But as we all know, these prob­lems aren’t unique to the non-​​profit sector :)

Which social net­work­ing plat­forms do you focus your ener­gies on at ANTaR and how did you choose them?

Our main focus is on Facebook and MySpace at the moment, and we also use Flickr and YouTube a lit­tle. We use plat­forms that will enable us to reach a lot of peo­ple and build rela­tion­ships with them. Tools have to be fairly main­stream among our tar­get audi­ence before we go there, so unfor­tu­nately Twitter hasn’t made it onto the list yet but we’re keep­ing a close eye on it :)

Last year I came up with a for­mula to help an organ­i­sa­tion decide which online tools to use, based on how much time, money and knowl­edge is required. It’s meant to help an organ­i­sa­tion decide whether the amount of effort they put into using a par­tic­u­lar plat­form is worth the effect they’re likely to see, and the results are dif­fer­ent for every organ­i­sa­tion. You can see how it works in this blog post

How do you actu­ally work these platforms?

In the early days, I was scan­ning blogs through Technorati to find peo­ple who were writ­ing well-​​considered blog posts on MySpace about Indigenous issues, and then “friend­ing” them. After a while, peo­ple started find­ing us because they were stum­bling across our bul­letin posts or com­ments on other friends’ pages, so we didn’t need to use Technorati any more to reach out to new peo­ple. Now my focus is on build­ing rela­tion­ships with our cur­rent friends. I find that if you have an ongo­ing friend­ship with peo­ple who are sym­pa­thetic to your cause, they are more likely to offer help than if you approach some­body from out of the blue. I put this the­ory to the test on MySpace a cou­ple of months ago, and it worked because ANTaR won a MySpace Impact Award worth $10,000. We would not have won that award if our strat­egy had been different.

Facebook is com­pletely dif­fer­ent to MySpace. The ANTaR Facebook group is focussed on the Sea of Hands because I felt that peo­ple would be more likely to join a cam­paign than an organ­i­sa­tion on Facebook. That group has grown partly by telling every­one I know about the group, and then those peo­ple for­ward­ing it on to their friends. I also par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions on related Facebook groups such as the Close the Gap cam­paign group (clos­ing the life expectancy between Indigneous and non-​​Indigenous Australians), which leads some peo­ple to the Sea of Hands group too.

Check out ANTaR on MySpace and Facebook.

Any tips you’ve learned for work­ing more effi­ciently and get­ting the best returns for time spent?

Yeah — don’t visit Facebook or MySpace more than twice a day!

What sort of returns can a non-​​profit expect to see from employ­ing some­one like you to engage with online com­mu­ni­ties in this way? Where can they expect to have suc­cesses? How long will it take?

This is still a rea­son­ably new area, we’re work­ing it out as we go along, same as every­body else. There’s a few of us who blog about online cam­paign­ing meth­ods, return on invest­ment, that kind of thing, so we share what we learn on our blogs and there’s a group of non-​​profit web peo­ple in Sydney and Melbourne (called Social Tech) that meets up once a month to chat about this kind of stuff.

I guess organ­i­sa­tions can expect to have suc­cess if they are ded­i­cated to build­ing rela­tion­ships with peo­ple. People are more likely to give your organ­i­sa­tion favours, to get more involved, to donate, to want to find out more if they have a good rela­tion­ship with some­body in the organ­i­sa­tion. Relationship build­ing takes a long time, and it doesn’t always trans­late into mea­sur­able returns, but it really is absolutely nec­es­sary, oth­er­wise your efforts to get peo­ple involved are pretty random.

How long does it take? It’s a long-​​term thing! You should only cam­paign online because you’re pas­sion­ate about an issue and enjoy talk­ing to peo­ple about it … gen­er­ally, most peo­ple have a pretty good bull­shit meter so you have to be sin­cere. You also have to be patient … bring­ing about social change can and does take years, so don’t expect to see big results within the first six months (or maybe even the first six years)!

In your expe­ri­ence, what type of non-​​profit will a foray into online cam­paign­ing work best for?

Any non-​​profit that needs pub­lic sup­port for an issue should con­sider cam­paign­ing online. It works best for cam­paigns that have a clear mes­sage, know where their tar­get demo­graphic is hang­ing out online, and has the resources not only to do the online work, but fol­low up with sup­port­ers that want to get more involved.

How can you eval­u­ate the suc­cess of a project and when should you start doing it?

One of the most com­mon ways of eval­u­at­ing a cam­paign is count­ing the num­ber of peo­ple who have taken action. This is a pretty good indi­ca­tion of whether (a) the pub­lic is inter­ested in an issue and (b) enough pres­sure is being applied in the right places (i.e. on the per­son or group that has the power to change things).

Another way we can eval­u­ate a cam­paign is to see what effect we’ve had in chang­ing gov­ern­ment pol­icy. A good exam­ple of this is the Close The Gap cam­paign — made up of a coali­tion of organ­i­sa­tions includ­ing ANTaR — which resulted in pos­i­tive changes to gov­ern­ment pol­icy. There were sev­eral ele­ments that made up this cam­paign, the pri­mary pub­lic action was for peo­ple to sign a Close The Gap pledge on some of the coali­tion part­ners’ web­sites includ­ing ANTaR, Oxfam, GetUp and HREOC. ANTaR also asked sup­port­ers to email per­son­alised let­ters to their state and fed­eral politi­cians (through our online Sea of Hands) and we have had infor­mal feed­back from MPs and their staff that these emails con­tributed to the suc­cess­ful out­come of the cam­paign. If politi­cians feel they have the sup­port of the com­mu­nity, they will take action.

We also mon­i­tor our web­site ana­lyt­ics pretty closely, look­ing for trends and work­ing out why par­tic­u­lar cam­paigns, media releases or search terms are more pop­u­lar than others.

However there are some things that are very dif­fi­cult to mea­sure. If a per­son changes their atti­tude towards Indigenous Australians, how does ANTaR find out? And how do we know that it’s as a direct result of some­thing that we have told them online, or as a result of some­thing else?

We recently ran a cam­paign “Racism Makes Me Sick”, which focussed on the effects of racism on the health of Indigenous Australians. When the life expectancy for Indigenous Australians improves (cur­rently an Indigenous Australian will live for 17 years less than a non-​​Indigenous Australian), then we’ll know that our work has been a suc­cess. In fact, when there is a fair rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Indigenous Australians in par­lia­ment, and when 5% of atten­dees at Web Directions are Indigenous Australians, then we’ll know that our work has been a success.

One response to “Interview: online advocacy”:

1. • By:Online Communities « RobNeal | nonprofitTHiNK
   • July 23rd, 2008

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