Can online campaigning work?
10:00 am - November 9th 2007
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This is a question I’ve heard too often, especially in the UK, where our political culture tends too often toward atomised cynicism (over the last few decades at any rate). But I’m paying less attention to the skeptics: I think their days are numbered. You might as well ask: “what’s the point of email?”
The simple answer is that you can grow a movement the size of the Chartists in a matter of months online, and gradually help those people come together for action in the real world and face-to-face as well as online. That’s what we’re doing with Avaaz, just to take an example close to my own heart.
Here’s the ABC of it: Avaaz is a global civic advocacy network with well over 1.5 million members (global, not British, Sunny! I’m the only British organiser, though we have tens of thousands of members in the UK). We campaign on urgent global issues like climate change, poverty, democracy, justice and the crises in the Middle East, in twelve languages at once. Our aim: to help ensure that the views and values of the world’s people better shape global decision-making. Nothing too challenging, then.
Does it work? We’ve only been going 10 months, so it’s too early to judge that much. But take Burma: In about 3 weeks, we raised a petition of three-quarters of a million people standing in solidarity with the Burmese protesters. We helped organise a global day of demonstrations. We delivered that petition to UN Security Council member Gordon Brown with a posse of monks and Burmese. We called out China to choose the right path in a challenging full-page ad in the Financial Times worldwide, with piles of copies delivered to their Foreign Ministry in Beijing.
Within days, we sent over 32,000 messages from our European members to their foreign ministers before a key EU vote, and over 2000 messages from our Singaporean members to their Foreign Minister, which I understand blew some minds there. Then we raised over $315,000 in small member donations to help Burmese civil society groups break the news blackout – a big chunk of that has already reached its destination. While the media abandoned the Burmese struggle the moment the pictures stopped flowing, we’ve made a long-term commitment to our fellow human beings there.
Over the last few years in the US, our friends at MoveOn.org have raised over $100 million for progressive causes and candidates and organised hundreds of thousands of community vigils, meet-ups and demos. Within 48 hours after Katrina, their members personally housed over 30,000 refugees.
What’s the point of a petition? If they were still around, I’d say ask the Chartists – they made a signature drive the backbone of their campaign, building out through networks of friendship, family and community. This stuff is really the basics of campaigning, as I found while writing Contentious Citizens for the Young Foundation and Carnegie. It’s amazing how we ever left it behind, and the internet allows us to revitalise it. Simple as that.
I’m going to be posting here occasionally – sometimes to flag up an Avaaz campaign or something else cool going on in the world, sometimes to engage in a more personal capacity in the British debate. I think the idea of an open conspiracy is refreshing. After all, in a real progressive conspiracy, everyone’s invited…
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Tinker, tailor, soldier...? Nope. Paul co-founded the global debate network www.openDemocracy.net in 2000, and more recently helped set up www.Avaaz.org, where he now directs people-powered campaigns on a range of issues - conflicts, climate, global justice and democracy. In between, he has worked around the UK, Europe and the Middle East, with think-tanks from the Young Foundation and Oxford Research Group to the Club de Madrid. He's advised governments and civil society groups, conducted private diplomacy, run an election support campaign (Vote4Peace in 2005) plus a participatory democracy programme around England's cities and counties, and has written/edited a bunch of books and reports (most recently Contentious Citizens). None of it seemed to do half as much good as campaigning.
· Other posts by Paul Hilder
Story Filed Under: Blog ,Campaigns ,Foreign affairs
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Reader comments
For all you free thinkers here that believe word is power, don’t you think it’s your duty to say a few words about the Lyrical Terrorist Samina Malik? You use words, she used words.
Your complaints are logged under debate, hers under terrorism. What next? Rap stars arrested for talking about gun crime? Opera singers for promoting revenge duels? Nirplal Dhaliwal for numbing braincells?
As people that using words as your preferred weapon, I’ll be interested to read the impact of your words at a time when expressing your thoughts in an artistic fashion can get you banged up behind bars
In Britain
MoveOn.org is where its at.
Sunny: So what would a UKmoveOn.org look like? Would it donate to political parties? Would it buy TV adverts? Would it create youtube ads and work to spread them?
I’d be curious to see a post on this kind of thing.
Although a member of Avaaz, I’m somewhat ambivalent about it’s success. The achievements listed, while notable, definitely fall into the sphere of outputs rather than outcomes. The successful lobbying of politicians is about much more than high numbers of participants.
Generally, while online campaigning makes it the work of seconds for interested citizens to put their name on a petition or even write to their representatives it also makes it much easier for representatives to ignore the voices.
Politicians take note of the views expressed in so far as they indicate strong views amongst the electorate which may affect behaviour come election time. The less effort it takes for a citizen to make their views known, the less weight that politicians need to give to those views. It used to be a rule of thumb (albeit, a dubious one) that for every person who attended a demonstration, ten more who stayed at home might have their votes swayed by the same issue. I doubt the ratio is even 2:1 for an online petition or email-writing campaign.
Online campaigning is useful not for its direct lobbying power, but because of its power to politicise and educate citizens who can then campaign in other ways.
Stephen, you and I agree that successful lobbying is about much more than numbers of people mobilised. So do our members – we’ve asked them, and most say they think that the value and efficacy of a campaign lies crucially in how it is delivered to decision-makers and the world.
That’s why Avaaz take delivery so seriously — from handovers to political leaders, to media efforts, print ads and billboards; and perhaps most importantly, in behind-the-scenes conversations with policymakers a rung or two down. (Quite a lot of this is below the radar. We just had an interesting exchange with the Chinese government, which flowed from our FT advertisement. And we understand that Singapore’s Foreign Minister was quite struck by the number of emails he was getting from his own citizens a couple of weeks ago.)
One of the strengths of our organising model is the two-way connection it can forge between mass support and face-to-face lobbying — which is still one of the most impactful avenues with government — but without large-scale mobilisation, is easy to ignore. We can also start to help make the media weather on issues, though no-one does that on their own.
Another strength is that as you grow, online-to-offline organising by members themselves becomes possible — organising coordinated delegations to Parliamentarians, holding local community vigils or meet-ups etc. Avaaz have only done a bit of this so far, organising 5000 global house-parties alongside Live Earth, but we’re approaching a new threshold of possibilities for this kind of action. And again, the value of connecting a few hundred or tens of thousands on the streets to millions around the world can be very significant.
Finally, I think one of the most impactful things Avaaz have done so far, but which will take a few months to filter through, is the practical and financial support our members have contributed to Burmese groups to help break the blackout. For security reasons, we can’t talk too much about what’s happening there. But I think it will help…
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