online campaigning-handbook-public zone.pdf

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The Online Campaigning HandbookMobilising support in the 21st century

32 thisiszone.com/public-zone

The digital revolution continues apace. Mobile and web are changing so fast, the implications for an organisation’s brand, product or campaign are not always clear. Which social media should I use? Which conversations should I listen to? Should I create my own content or let others do the work for me? How can I control my message?

At Public Zone, we’re committed to helping our clients change the world for the better, and we believe digital has an important role to play in this. Of course, we don’t have all the answers, but we are always searching for them on behalf of the people we work for. That’s why we have written this booklet. We’ve based it on our own experiences and conversations with some expert campaigners. Inside you will find 11 insights that we think can contribute to the success of an online campaign, and some examples that we have found really inspiring.

We hope you find them useful.

The Public Zone team

Contents Introduction

Campaignable actions page 4

Deputise to the willing page 6

Case study: Airplot! page 8

Cherish your database page 10

Be nimble and reactive page 12

Develop real relationships page 14

Case study: Colalife page 16

Know your audience page 18

Make it easy page 20

Reward people page 22

Case study: Atheist bus page 24

Link your name with an issue page 26

Keep track of what you’re doing page 28

Be ready for your close-up page 30

Thank You page 34

This handbook was written in 2009 and is the first in the series. It was reprinted in 2012 using our new branding.


we want to end knife crime

send a letter to your local

police station

an amnesty on all knives

AIM

ACTION

GOAL

ActionAid’s aim is to eradicate child poverty worldwide – a big goal by anyone’s standards. ActionAid has successfully broken down this goal into actions that everyone can work towards. Well known for championing child sponsorship, the charity highlights this as one of the best ways to help, but also features ‘top five actions to do now’ and ‘priority projects’ that appeal to a variety of different audiences. ActionAid makes it very clear how you can help, what you have to do next and what you will receive by supporting its work.

actionaid.org.uk

ActionAid

Case study

Tip

Faced with the world’s problems, we all have moments of thinking, “But what can I do about it?” Answer that question for your potential supporters by giving them clear, appropriate tasks to carry out for you. Actions such as passing your message on, embedding a link or writing a letter make your supporters feel useful and give them a personal, emotional connection with your campaign.

Most campaigns start with an ambitious goal: to end bullying, reform education, reduce CO2 emissions or change public opinion about the NHS.

But how to reach that goal isn’t immediately obvious to the individuals you are trying to mobilise.

So you need to break your strategy into milestones – the ‘campaignable’, smaller actions that supporters can help you achieve. These actions need to be clear, motivating and relevant to local groups or specific audiences. Your typical internet user won’t honour you with their attention for long, so show people quickly how easy it is for them to contribute.

Multiple milestones and actions will lend your campaign a sense of urgency; you can keep up momentum by stimulating your supporters, reaching a milestone, congratulating them and moving on to the next.

Campaignable actions

Cathy Mahoney, Comic Relief

“No one backs something unachievable; people only want to join something they think will be successful. Breakdown the campaign into steps, make it clear how people can help by outlining realistic goals.”

Ask the people you’re trying to influence if you have chosen the right milestones

500,000 people to wear amnesty

t-shirts

1,000 letters to every

police station

please sell five t-shirts

to people you know

MILESTONE MILESTONE

ACTION

www.actionaid.org.uk/


Treat these people like friends. Keep in touch regularly, be honest with them about how things are going, and reward them (sometimes publicly) for their support. Encourage them as they create their own actions and bring people to the cause. Empower them to adopt the issue as their own and they may start to discuss your issue publicly, talk to the media, and comment online. This is how your campaign will gather strength and credibility – by nurturing those who already share your goals.

Treat your devoted supporters like the VIPs that they are, as they’re the key to unlocking a wider support base.

Many people are on a mission to build big support bases, focusing time and energy on signing up members, then sending them blanket messages with generic actions.

But often a far more effective strategy is to target a smaller supporter base that you can cultivate – supporters who will connect you to others, take action and invent actions themselves that appeal to their peers.

These dedicated, informed individuals are the foundation stones of your campaign, so you need to work out how to identify and attract this type of supporter. Make sure you understand what drives them to campaign for you and how you can reward them.

Deputise to the willing

Derek Wyatt, former MP

“Personal letters from just a handful of my constituents are far more valuable to me than hundreds of impersonal emails that all look the same.”

Freecycle is an environmental campaign with an ambitious goal: to build a worldwide gifting movement that reduces waste, saves precious resources and eases the burden on landfills. It encourages local activists to set up groups in their area, trusting them to work towards the organisation’s goals in a way that suits local needs and habits. At the last count there were 4,860 groups with 6,784,000 members.

freecycle.org

Freecycle

Case study

Tip

Empower your core base to amplify your message through established networks, for example, horsesmouth.co.uk or Facebook

www.freecycle.org


Airplot! appeals because it gives individuals a way to make their opinions felt, by coming together with other like-minded people. It doesn’t hurt that the link between the campaign action and its goal is so sparklingly clear. Buy land, save land. You get the idea in a couple of seconds.

Greenpeace UK used the considerable moral cachet of its brand to gain support for this radical intervention. It reached out not just to die-hards but to newcomers, by designing its communications with different levels of engagement in mind.

Airplot! has all the hallmarks of a fantastic grass-roots online campaign. It’s clever – supporters are encouraged to throw a spanner in the works by investing in a piece of land on the planned new Heathrow runway site – and simple – web users can sign up online and find all the information they need in one place. It looks like an inventive one-off, but in fact Airplot! was set up by Greenpeace UK.

This vast charity has stayed light on its feet and continued responding creatively and quickly to environmental threats.

Airplot!airplot.org.uk

Case study

www.airplot.org.uk/


Your database is a powerful campaigning tool, so you should treat it like one. Invest time and energy making sure your data is accurate, clean and duplicate-free. Work towards a point where you can segment your data into audiences groups, regions or level of engagement, to enable you to send out targeted campaign messages.

Remember that the size of your database is not an indication of how successful you are; a good campaign measures engagement, not membership.

In activism, your supporters are everything. They give you legitimacy, spread your message, carry out actions and even fund your campaign. Yet so many organisations are rubbish at keeping their database of supporters up to date. According to a recent Advocacy Online e-Campaigning Review, half of organisations have databases with 40% of supporters inactive, and only 9% have a strategy for re-activating those who are dormant. Surely it is easier to get back in touch with someone who has already been part of your campaign than find someone new who cares in the same way?

Cherish your database

Emma Harbour, Make Poverty History

“CRM databases and captured data are not indicators of success, they are an key ingredient to enable success.”

Christian Aid carried out a health check on its database and unearthed a number of issues. The first names of 100,000 people were missing, 30,000 contacts were duplicated and only a quarter of contacts had the right demographic data to make targeted communications possible. Christian Aid found a solution in a software package that got rid of existing duplicates and stopped them re-occuring. It also recognised it would have to manually check the new data once a week.

christianaid.org.uk

Christian Aid

Case study

Tip

If you need a CRM, try Salesforce (software for customer relationship management) – not-for-profits get up to 10 licences free

www.christianaid.org.uk/


The cheap, easy, fast communication offered by the web is your friend. But sometimes the culture within an organisation is not. Many organisations miss opportunities to react to events or mobilise supporters because the culture and processes for communicating are labour intensive, risk averse and expensive. Helping colleagues see the value in being transparent, reactive and less contrived in their communication will reap benefits for your campaign.

Paul Revere, the famous ‘midnight rider’ of the American Civil War, reacted swiftly to an impending British attack by riding from village to village to rouse the countryside to arms. His is the story of a reactive campaigner, and if he’d been alive today he could have left his horse in the stable and spread his message electronically to thousands of people in a matter of seconds.

Breaking news increasingly appears on sites like Twitter several minutes before conventional online news sources. There are more ways than ever to get your message out there quickly and responsively, yet organisations still spend days preparing direct mail and fancy HTML emails. Meanwhile, plain text emails, SMS and social media updates can be prepared in a matter of minutes, for little or no cost.

Be nimble and reactive

Scott Goldstein, Obama’s Director of Mobile

“Your phone is with you all the time. You’re texting with your girlfriend. You’re texting with your friends. Now you’re texting with Barack.”

The 2008 Obama campaign used text messages to update supporters with news minutes before it was announced publicly. 2.9 million people received the campaign’s text message announcing Joe Biden as Barack’s running mate. The campaign also relied on email delivering news faster than the media could distribute it. ‘I have just finished my first debate with John McCain’, ‘I wasn’t planning on sending you something tonight but if you saw what I saw’, and even ‘John McCain just accepted the Republican nomination.’

my.barackobama.com

MyBO

Case study

Tip

Keen on Twitter, but your colleagues are unsure? Prepare dummy examples of how your organisation could respond to events

www.barackobama.com


Unfortunately we’re only one-tenth of the way to our target and we need your help to reach it. Could you please email five friends and ask them to sign it too?”)

Over time, you can add more involved actions, asking them to encourage others to join in, share content or hold an event. Your supporters are your closest allies – treat them like that, and they’ll reward you.

There’s no great mystery to building a relationship with people online – treat them exactly the same way as you would offline. If you’re responsive and friendly with your supporters, their initial passive interest can be converted into real, valuable engagement.

The simplest (and often overlooked) way to start a relationship is to say thank you when someone completes an action for you, such as registering support for your cause. You can personalise this thank you with an action that relates to information they provide at sign up, such as a postcode or their area of interest (“We have a ‘Support Fairtrade’ group in Chelmsford – why not sign up to their Facebook group?”)

Relationships flounder without regular communication. It is vitally important to send a follow-up email after the initial contact with a new supporter. This email should report back honestly on the first action you sent them. (“Thanks again for signing our online petition.

Develop real relationships

Thomas Gensemer, Blue State Digital

“We used so much social media during the presidential campaign, but the initial relationship that allowed it to work was email, it was the text-heavy, narrative-based emails that kept people engaged. Our mantra has been, invest in your relationships online via email.”

Action for Children personalises its regular emails to subscribers, not just addressing subscribers by name, but (importantly) targeting content to the audience and specific actions that are likely to appeal to individuals, based on what it knows about them. Even the title of the email is personalised. This has resulted in a greater level of engagement, generated more donations and reduced the unsubscribe rate.

actionforchildren.org.uk

Action for Children

Case study

Tip

Make sure you follow up within a month of first hearing from a new supporter – according to an Advocacy Online e-campaigning review, only 31% of organisations do

50cm

106c

m

www.actionforchildren.org.uk


The idea became a campaign, ColaLife, but Simon made hardly any progress for 20 years. Finally, in 2008, he had another go, this time using the power of the internet. He talked about the idea on his blog, set up a Facebook group, and let his first few supporters take the idea to friends, family and the media.

The campaign grew wings and led to radio appearances, a dedicated website and, eventually, talks with Coca-Cola.

Ever travelled down a dusty, pot-holed road in the middle of nowhere, arrived in a remote village, and recovered from your journey with a bottle of Coke? Ever wondered: hang on a minute, how did this fizzy drink get here?

Us neither, but that’s because we don’t have Simon Berry’s brilliant mind. He was working on a British Aid programme in 1988 when he came up with a simple idea. Why not use Coca-Cola’s highly effective network to distribute not just soft drinks but also medicines? One compartment in every 10 crates could become the ‘life saving’ compartment, full of things like rehydration salts.

Colalifecolalife.org

Case study

www.colalife.org


Plan how you are going to move people along the journey from not caring to passionate support, and from ignorance to deep understanding. Analyse the actions of individuals and the information they give you to understand where they are on the journey. What content and actions can you tailor for each stage of their journey?

We’re all different in how much we know and care about an issue. Be realistic from the outset about where each supporter is in terms of their level of commitment and understanding – this will help you tailor your messages.

Some people may only have a passing interest in your cause, but will be open to explanations about why it’s important. Some will feel passionate, but need your help to understand the wider context of the issue. Others will already care deeply and know a lot, but may need persuading that your specific campaign is a good solution.

Know your audience

Fiona Dawe OBE

“Knowing your audience and where you can be effective is key. When people ask why thesite.org is not on the front page of the Times, I ask why we would want to be – what’s the point? Our audience is young people.”

Global Cool has been very successful in making an environmental campaign cool. Targeting the ‘festival’ generation, it has driven its campaign entirely through youth celebrity endorsements attracting thousands of supporters and fans. The campaign has a personality that feels very familiar to its audience; actions include ‘Eco geek to eco chic’, ‘Do it in public’ and ‘Get Swishing’, which could be headlines in Heat or Glamour magazines.

globalcool.org

Global Cool

Case study

Tip

Not everyone shares your deep knowledge of the issue – avoid jargon, or explain it

www.globalcool.org


People do not switch between media easily, so if you want people to do something online, communicate the call to action via the web. It’s easy for them to respond, because they’re already there.

Give people the warm glow of having been able to help without going too much out of their way, and they will have a positive memory of it next time you ask them to do something. Remember, this is a relationship you are building through good experiences.

The easier you make it for someone to do something, the more likely they are to do it. Technology is very good at making things easier – through Kiva you can lend money to a stationery retailer in Mexico, through My Barack Obama you can find local volunteers and through Amnesty you can send emails to human rights abusers. Effective campaigns make actions simple.

People are pressed for time and the internet is a constant source of distraction. So enable supporters to understand and act fast.

If you want people to write to their MP, give them a letter template, advice on what to say and a searchable MP database. Better still, ask them to send a personalised email from your website, so they don’t have to bother with printing it out and posting it themselves.

Make it easy ABC123Fix My Street, run by

mySociety allows people to report local problems such as fly tipping, graffiti or broken street lighting by asking for a brief description, entering a postcode, pinpointing the exact location on a map and uploading any useful photos. Once a problem is reported, mySociety contacts the relevant council and campaigns on behalf of its followers to get it fixed. On average, it receives 800 – 900 reports per week and last month managed to fix 985 of them.

fixmystreet.com

Fix My Street

Case study

Tip

Clarity is key – make forms as short as possible and give easy-to-follow instructions

www.fixmystreet.com


Rewarding is often related to sharing. Help your supporters let others know about their involvement in your campaign, whether that’s by putting a link on Facebook or adding your campaign slogan to their email signature. Your supporters enjoy being able to associate themselves with a good cause. Meanwhile, the campaign gains by the boost in web traffic and the potential for new recruits.

People like their support to be recognised. They want to be reassured that their help makes a difference.

There are simple things you can do to keep things ticking over, like thanking your supporters and updating them on your progress. But there are countless other ways to reward supporters. Live8 handed out tickets to a big concert; 350.org put activists’ photos on the web, and Wikipedia has built a hugely successful movement by allowing the best contributors to become community leaders.

Reward doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. London’s 2012 bid campaign provided instant gratification by flashing the names of those that supported the bid across the homepage of the website. It was simple, effective and contributed to the campaign’s huge success – more than two million people signed up.

Reward people

Daniel Ritterband, Greater London Authority

“Recognition and the opportunity to be listened to is one of the best incentives you can offer your supporters; it’s a common misconception that incentives have to cost money”

Tearfund has developed a Facebook application that incentivises people to spread the message about global poverty and ‘badger’ key decision makers. Called SuperBadger, it enables you to send pre-written emails direct from your Facebook profile. The more people you ‘badger’, the more ‘sett’ points you gain, increasing your rank and moving you closer to Super Badger status.

SuperBadger

Case study

Tip

Thank supporters publicly on Twitter and Facebook, as well as your website


Atheists, grateful for the opportunity to publicly defend their beliefs, gave the campaign so much momentum that it dramatically exceeded its original target of £5,500 and ended up raising £150,000. The extra money funded bus campaigns across the UK, adverts on the London Underground and two animated screens in central London.

The Atheist Bus Campaign began as a joke, or at least a tongue-in-cheek moment. Comedy writer Ariane Sherine, a regular Guardian blogger, wrote an article about Christian ad campaigns that promised hellfire and eternal damnation for non-believers. She imagined a series of counter-ads, reassuring atheists that everything was OK.

Her army of regular readers picked it up and ran with it. Political blogger Jon Worth loved the idea so much that he set up a pledgebank page asking people to support the campaign by donating £5 towards the cost of an advert on a bus. 877 people signed up, word spread and within days The British Humanist Association (BHA) offered support, and celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins publicly endorsed the campaign. The BHA set up a Just Giving page for donations, and the money kept rolling in.

Atheist Busatheistbus.org.uk

phot

o: B

ritis

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uman

ist A

ssoc

iatio

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Case study

www.atheistbus.org.uk


If you invest in search engine optimisation, creating good content and distributing it around the web to other sites, you can make it easier for people to find you online and increase the conversion rate of offline to online supporters.

Linking your name to a particular issue might involve focusing on one idea at the expense of others, but it’s worth it for the increase in public support it brings.

Child abuse? NSPCC. Animal cruelty? PETA. Human rights abuse? Amnesty. The most famous and successful campaigning organisations have made their name synonymous with a specific issue. They might do all sorts of other things, but they encourage the public to have a clear, definite idea of what they’re about.

Get people thinking about you alongside your key issue and you’ll find that it’s your press officer who journalists call when there’s a big news story in your area of interest. Better still, you’ll start to attract people through search engines – they might not be able to remember your name from a fleeting glimpse at an ad, but they remember what your campaign is about.

You may also get the attention of people who don’t even know you exist – people who care about an issue and are searching for a campaign that focuses on it.

Link your name with an issue

Noelle McElhatton, Marketing Direct

“Obama and McCain made good use of search... yet none of the three major UK political parties appear to have a paid or SEO search strategy. Type ‘credit crunch’ or ‘knife crime’ into a search engine in the UK and the first page listings are dominated by media”

The NSPCC is a great example of smart thinking around search engine optimisation – google ‘child cruelty’ and it comes top.

NSPCC

Case study

Tip

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes – what would you type into Google if you were them?

Child cruelty

GoogleStop child abuse - support the children’s charity - the NSPCCSupport the NSPCC children’s charity and help wipe out child abuse. FULL STOP. Thousands of people are helping us to end child abuse and cruelty to www.nspcc.org.uk

Catalogue of cruelty | Society | Society GuardianHer mother, Maria Brown, was jailed for 18 months for child cruelty. The girl’s social worker, Norma McDevitt, visited the family 27 times in the 10 weeks ...www.guardian.co.uk/.../jan/.../childrensservices.childprotection

BBC NEWS | UK | England | London | ‘Witch’ child cruelty trio guilty

‘Jekyll and Hyde’ father jailed for child cruelty » Communities ...

3 Jun 2005 ... Three people are found guilty of cruelty charges for ill-treating a girl they believed was using witchcraft...

1 Dec 2009 ... A “Jekyll and Hyde” father who was found guilty of a string of

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/.../4607435.stm

SearchChild cruelty


Social media means that you can now track, in real time, exactly who is saying what about your campaign online. Use this to understand what your audiences are interested in and allow these insights to influence your communications. Scanning blogs, message boards and social networking sites (daily during peaks in your campaigning activity) takes time, so factor it in when you are planning.

Monitoring and evaluation means planning your milestones from the beginning, continually tracking your impact, analysing information and feeding it back in to your campaign. The web is an amazing source of insight – use it to your advantage.

Effective monitoring and evaluation can make the difference between an average and an amazing campaign. Monitor and evaluate as you go along and you’ll keep finding new opportunities to optimise your campaigning.

The trick is to design your evaluation before you start, paying close attention to how you are going to collect data. Too often, charities leave evaluation to the end, only to discover they can only form a patchy picture of their campaign due to an absence of data.

Ask your contacts at other organisations if you can see their campaign data and learn from their experiences. Everyone in the not-for-profit (indeed, any) sector can benefit from learning from each other’s successes and mistakes.

Keep track of what you’re doing

In the last few years, several independent organisations and networks have emerged that encourage the sharing of campaigning case studies, evaluation statistics and benchmarking reports. Fairsay and Engaging Networks are leading the way. By supporting networks such as the e-campaigning forum, they are ensuring charities can share knowledge from which others can learn.

fairsay.com engagingnetworks.net

Share your knowledge

Case study

Tip

Share your campaign evaluation data – you’ll reap rewards in return

2%

March April May

5%

15%

www.fairsay.com

www.engagingnetworks.net


If you build your campaign on committed local supporters, communicating with them regularly and allowing them to build their own networks, you can react when the chance comes. Following the guidance in this handbook doesn’t guarantee that your magical moment will come along when you want it to, but it does mean that you’ll be prepared for it.

Building a movement on the web can be unpredictable – a news story might break, a video might strike a chord, a celebrity might publicly declare their support… If this happens, your traffic levels might suddenly go through the roof, and all eyes will be on your campaign. This is your fleeting opportunity to capitalise on the attention.

It sounds like a miraculous moment. But many organisations let opportunities like this pass them by, and those who use them to create an explosion of support don’t do it by accident. Behind them lie campaigners who are set up to be quick and reactive, exploiting opportunities as soon as they appear.

Be ready for your close-up

“Timing is everything. Some of our clients punch far above their weight by exploiting opportunities presented by the news cycle.”

Comedy writer Graham Linehan was angered by US right-wing attacks on the NHS. But instead of just complaining about it to his friends, or working it into a comedy routine, he took his anger to Twitter. His tweets about his experiences of the health service, tagged ‘we love the NHS’, snowballed into a full-blown Twitter phenomenon, with thousands of messages zinging back and forth. Linehan’s campaign gave voice to tens of thousands of people who wanted to express their support for the NHS, but didn’t know how. The enthusiastic public response, facilitated by Twitter, turned the campaign into a phenomenon both online and off.

good.ly/tckhu

#welovethenhs

Case study

Jonathan Simmons, Public Zone

www.good.ly/tckhu


Notes


Public Zone would like to thank the many people who contributed their time and campaigning wisdom to this report, including Emma Harbour, Daniel Ritterband, Derek Wyatt, Fraser Hardie, Cathy Mahoney, Nicola Cadbury, Fiona Dawe OBE, Dave Russell and Sue Fidler. With special thanks to our very own campaigning expert, Joanna Shaw.

Thank You


t: 020 7267 4774e: [email protected]

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