Can online campaigning work?

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…