Updates and Such
I have been a bit distracted from blog writing recently since starting my new job. But I wanted to post an article I recently published on Idealware. It is called ‘Affordable New Tools and Strategies for Online Activism.”
Here is an excerpt:
Limited budgets don’t have to substantially limit your online advocacy possibilities. Alan Rosenblatt describes the new generation of online tools that help organizations of any size cope with the increasingly complicated internet world.
The world of online advocacy is becoming more complicated. People are using a wider variety of online communications channels - not just email, but also instant messaging, online social networks, and SMS text messages via cell phones. Anyone can create and post media content online, and activists are more likely to see and respond to posts by their friends as opposed to organizations. Activists don’t want to just take action - they want to feel part of a community that creates change.
Despite these changes, the strategic goals of an advocacy organization remain the same: inform the people, activate the people, and organize the people into communities dedicated to achieving your policy goals. While online tools to help with these efforts have long existed, the divergence of communication channels has eroded the effectiveness of many of these more traditional tools. Thus, we need new online advocacy tools that deliver messages across channels, leverage social media to promote a key message, encourage action, and build community.
Fortunately, the first generation of these new tools is already here. These tools are still evolving, but they offer some powerful functionalities and opportunities for creating creative campaigns to recruit and mobilize activists on a very limited budget. This article talks through some of the new tools (as well as a few old ones) that might be useful to you, and some tactics for using them.
To read the rest, click here.