Seth Godin kicks off with a great take on what the elections meant for marketing professionals. He definitely believes that online is the place to be for campaigning.

Kivi was quick off the mark with what nonprofit organisations can learn marketing wise from the election. She focuses on the ability of the Obama to fundraise from a whole spectrum of people, small amounts building to one huge total. She also links through to the Getting Attention blog which has a good piece about what the election taught us about email marketing.

The Charity Place has a piece about what nonprofits can learn from the Obama campaign, and it’s more of the same. Engagement, make friends first and then ask for money – not the other way round. I think that’s an important one, build a connection and then ask for the money.

This time I am taking a look at what the housing and homelessness charity, Shelter, is doing on its website in a campaigning sense.

Let’s break down the homepage and see how much is going on related to campaigning:

shelter homepage

First off we’ve got a huge great campaign in the centre of the page. If you’re Captain Hook it’s a nightmare, all those ticking clocks. It’s a great use of the web to campaign, inviting the user to do something right now about an issue. You’ve got a choice to make as well about which clock to click. There’s also a ‘What you can do’ tab underneath the Shelter logo.

Let’s see what happens when we click one of the ticking clocks, a nice flash interface tells me to wait after clicking the repossessions clock. I’m still waiting…oh, there we go. I’m through to a page in the ‘Now is the Time’ campaign. I’m invited to sign a petition and very cunningly it shows me the exact time that I ‘stopped the clock’ on the homepage. Down the right hand side I’ve got a list of other people who have recently signed the petition.

shelter petition screen

I’ve signed the petition and feel much better for having stopped loads of reposessions. At the bottom of the petition it gives me the option to ‘become a campaigner’ with Shelter and receive regular updates about the campaign. This is really important as too often people sign a petition and then never hear anything about it’s progress. This makes people wonder – what is the point? And apathy is the hardest thing to overcome when running a campaign.

The ‘What you can do’ page is great. There’s plenty to get stuck in to and there’s also some video. Now previously we saw how Action Aid had used video to promote their social network for fundraisers and activists – Shelter are using it in a broadcast method with a short film called ‘Trapped’. I like the flash interface for it, with information along the top that you can switch to at anytime while viewing the film. Only downside is that I can’t embed the video onto my own blog and show people what a fantastic piece of work it is – perhaps getting it onto YouTube would be a good idea and then allowing viewers to embed it into their own website, or send an invitation to a friend to watch it?

The rest of the ‘What you can do’ section is pretty standard but important, petitions, email the PM, write to local newspapers – you get the idea.

Overall the Shelter website has a very strong focus on campaigning, a great use of interactive campaigning features such as the flash used to push people to sign a petition for the ‘Now is the Time’ campaign. The short film was presented very well, but needed to have more interactivity to make people feel like they should do something after watching it.

I’ve recently finished No Logo by Naomi Klein. It’s described as ‘The Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement’ by The Guardian. In it Klein exposes the child labour violations of corporations, such as Nike, and makes you realise how quickly corporations have taken over the public space. She also spent a lot of the book focussing on the activism of consumers in the face of the ever expanding corporate sphere. It was inspiring to read the stories of those in the mid/to late 90s who fought back against the branding of their lives.

Klein ended the book on a rather sombre note. Yes a new global movement seemed to be forming, and after the Seattle riots following the World Trade Organisation summit then there really was a change in the air – but the attacks on September 11 2001 changed so much. That one event seemed to change the way that activism was taking place and changed the public perception towards the protestors – “You’re either with us, or against us” is the rhetoric that George W Bush spilled out. Johann Hari in the New Statesman asks ‘Whatever happened to No Logo?’.

I was especially interested in how Klein referenced the internet in her book. It seemed that this explosion of activism against large corporations happened around the same time that internet take-up really took off (mid-late 90s). She states: “it is the Internet that has rapidly become the tool of choice for spreading information about multinationals around the globe.” Which made me think, Klein wrote this before the rise of big internet corporations, such as Google and Facebook. How easy would it be for activists to use these social media in their campaigns? Facebook relies on advertisers to keep itself going, if consumers were to revolt against a branded network space – what would happen?

But, also, with the explosion of broadband has their been an explosion in activism using the web? What examples are there of people using the web to network as citizens and turn that into a campaign? How are third sector organisations using the ‘online’ generation to affect change? I started my series on ‘How third sector organisations are using the web for campaigning’ and reading No Logo has inspired me to finish it. How are these social media, that by their very nature are there to connect people, being used to connect and affect change?

So, to kick things off I’m looking at Action Aid. As their website header proudly states they’ve been fighting poverty for 35 years – but how is the web playing a role in fighting poverty?

The key to any successful campaign is PEOPLE, people and MORE people. People feel, have rights and have time/effort/energy. Many hands make light work and all that. Well, on the frontpage of Action Aid’s site – perhaps not as prominently as it could be – is ‘MyActionAid‘. This is hosted on a separate URL so can be promoted offline. This is a social network for activists.

Social networks and media should be great for charity. They allow the creation of social networks around specific topics, and for Action Aid they’ve taken this to a higher level by hosting and creating their own network. I can’t get access to it, as I’m not a member, but this rather funky (E4 style video clip) shows me the power of it:

Good stuff and great use of video, plus it helps if you’ve got a relative celebrity to do your voiceovers (yeah that bloke off the E4 ads who puts loads of sarcasm into everything). However it’s only had 266 views on Youtube.

The homepage of MyActionAid could be a bit better, they highlight upcoming events but it could do with showcasing more of the fundraising events that are upcoming. Overall though, a cracking social network for activists.

The campaigns section is titled ‘What you can do‘ – good stuff, if I saw the section ‘Campaigns’ I’d be bored stiff. This is engaging and a call to arms, it says ‘We are ActionAid, come join us’. Not ‘We are ActionAid, we campaign on this’. Again, it’s about engagement and people. I managed to end up clicking a big circle called ‘Take action now’ but when I did I was a bit disappointed to find a news story about a Labour minister giving his heart. The form to actually take action about this was below the scroll line, so I might not have bothered to look. If there’s a form, put it high up or at least have a big link to it.

There’s good use of a blog for the campaign on targeting poverty, charity blogs can sometimes be a bit weak but the brilliant PR stunt of applying to demolish St Paul’s cathedral in protest at mining projects in India makes for great material for a blog, especially as it gives the charity a chance to expand and add detail.

So to sum up:

• Great social network for activists, but frontpage could have more of a buzz about it and feature more of what the activists are doing to campaign, raise money etc
• Good use of blogging to support campaigns, helped by some creative PR
• Hiding away forms that encourage engagement below scroll lines is not good
• Good use of video to promote the social network, was good to watch and helped by star voiceover