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.

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