Eli talked about the wisdom of the crowds and how large groups can often be smarter, more thoughtful, and more creative than individuals in the decision-making process. For MoveOn, this fact is an essential element of the organizational philosophy, and therefore the strategy. He talked about how MoveOn emphasizes a strategy of using online activity to mobilize offline activity like raising money, voting, or calling members of Congress. Eli said that, although he is passionate about these issues, his job as Executive Director of MoveOn was not to push his own opinions or ideas about strategy, but to listen to MoveOn’s members and take his cues from them about the important issues, and then about creating innovative and effective campaigns.

He also talked about testing strategies to determine empirically which were the most effective. The Obama campaign was also known for this, and it’s a clear area where nonprofits can and should take advantage of relatively inexpensive tools to make a big difference in their outreach. As Eli noted, “expert opinion” is often no more than a hunch. Good data is more useful than hunches.

The power of MoveOn’s approach is obvious: it is one of the most successful advocacy organizations in pushing issues to the center of the political debate. Its power is its members, and with more than five million members, it has done extraordinarily well at harnessing the power of its members and their passion, enthusiasm, and commitment.  Eli made an argument at the study group that this is a template that can work for many different organizations, and I think he’s got a good point. He also noted that there is a significant part of the process of advocacy where MoveOn has not yet figured out how to tap into the wisdom of its members, and that technology offers all sorts of interesting opportunities to do so in new ways.

Eli also made the point that activism is not zero-sum: people don’t have a limit on how engaged they are with the political process (and even if they do, that limit is very far away). I was so glad to hear him say this, because I think it’s easy for us as activists to think that if people put their energy toward climate change issues, they’ll have none left over for health care reform. This ties directly into the point I made about thinking about how to engage people and their creative thinking and passion for their issues.

The Difference Between Urgent and Important
The conversation got me thinking about some of the challenges even for nonprofits that really understand how to integrate members completely into the organization’s work. Eli spoke about the responsibility of advocacy organizations to find or make space in the political atmosphere for their issues. I agree with him, and this is particularly challenging work when dealing with issues that aren’t naturally an attention draw even for committed activists. The international community has recently fully recognized that rape is often used as a weapon of war in violent conflict around the world. This constellation of issues, which includes medical care for survivors, child soldiers, infant mortality, and related problems, is a hard one to make actionable for the American people. International aid in the US is an incredibly complex system.  Funding is often buried in a much larger appropriations bill and split up into multiple streams, and it’s a challenge to show activists that all of those little streams add up to a powerful river that can have a real and positive impact on the lives of people around the world if it is designed well. And then even if the language is good, implementation can be a completely different story.

So even if gender violence is an issue of importance to many activists, nonprofit organizations have struggled to make it concrete in a way that provides opportunities for their members to engage with the issue. This is clearly one of those areas where we don’t have it figured out yet, and it is critical that we start thinking about it. Nonprofit organizations have a responsibility to ensure that urgency isn’t the only criterion for attention.

Marriage Equality and The Limits of Activism
The conversation with Eli also made me think about this past Tuesday’s defeat of marriage equality in Maine. Gay marriage has been defeated every single time it has been sent to the voters; all of the progress made on this issue has been made in legislatures and with judges and governors. Jesse Ventura (of all people) reportedly said “You can’t put a civil rights issue on the ballot and let the people decide. You have to have elected officials to who have courage to make the right decision. If you left it up to the people, we’d have slavery, depending on how you worded it.”

What does this mean for advocacy organizations working to move the majority of the country toward better, smarter, more compassionate government when the majority isn’t there yet? MoveOn often emphasizes elections, but that emphasis doesn’t make sense for issues that we know (at least for now) are box office losers. Do the same strategies for engagement still apply, or do we need to think differently about these kinds of issues?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

(Because the conversation was formally off the record, Eli Pariser gave his permission to publish this blog post.)

A few interesting points from the 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study for nonprofits attempting to be strategic in their online advocacy and fundraising:

In fundraising, small gifts account for the vast (and I mean vast) majority of gifts by number of gift, but not by revenue raised. In fact, the top 3% of all gifts – those of $250 or more – made up 41% of revenue. This means smart nonprofits are encouraging small gifts, and finding ways to maximize the dollar amount of “small gifts,” but also putting significant energy into cultivating large donors. People who give once are much more likely to give again.

In advocacy, the most active 7% of all email subscribers account for close to a third of all online activity. Nonprofits should be thinking about how they can get people into that category, and how they can continue to have a conversation with them once they’re there. This brings us back around to one of the concepts in Groundswell, about how the companies that truly engage with and energize their customers are often able to derive substantial benefit from that interaction. Groundswell gives the example of  Lego, where adult users who are especially active in the community are given formal roles by the company and fill the critical role of liaison between company and consumer, bringing great ideas for new products from customers to Lego and evangelizing for Lego in their networks. Nonprofits have to start thinking beyond the ways they can get people to participate in specific, curtailed campaigns to the opportunities for taking advantage of the creative thinking and passion in their communities of supporters.

In both advocacy and fundraising, it’s clear that the best resources for nonprofits are the members of that elite group of super-active supporters, but nonprofits are only tapping that resource in predetermined, well-understood ways.

Our readings about Obama for America have included some really interesting details about the ways that the campaign cultivated and made smart use of the talents and skills of its volunteers to shift some of the burden from the campaign to the volunteers. I think that nonprofit organizations can learn a lot from the OFA example. When volunteers are the face of an organization, it provides authenticity and gives organizations a reliable source of information about target populations and reactions to the organization’s outreach efforts.

The main point of the reviews of both OFA’s strategy and the trends in online nonprofit campaigns, though, is that organizations can be significantly more strategic with how they structure their campaigns and reach out to supporters. There’s a lot to be done first on that front to move online nonprofit organizing toward best practices that will significantly increase the impact of their messages.

I just made today’s 232,25th health reform call to Congress. Help us get to 200,000: http://bit.ly/1t6LPH #hc09 #CallCongress #OFA

The message gets people personally involved in feeling like they have helped to meet the goal personally and by encouraging friends to take action. It also takes full advantage of hash tags to push the topic into trending topics.

In class this week and next, we’re reading Groundswell, a book about business in an online world of social technologies. The book is a practical approach to taking advantage of the groundswell of people involved in online communities and spaces to shape a brand, improve customer service and public relations, and spread the word about a product or business. The framework has the potential to be immensely useful not just to businesses, but also to NGOs and government agencies.

The groundswell includes five types of people, say the authors: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, and spectators. One of the reasons the Obama campaign and now Organizing for America (OFA) have done so well is that they have targeted many different segments of the online population with appropriate messages for different types of people who are participating in the worldwide online conversation. The #CallCongress message was delivered through email, for the spectators who don’t regularly produce or critique content online but are members of listservs and discussion groups, and Twitter, for the joiners and creators who use it as an online network and platform for self-publishing.

The #CallCongress effort was so successful because it is a trusted, well-regarded brand, at least by the vast majority of those who follow Obama’s Twitter or receive OFA emails, that tapped into the groundswell: the roiling, tumultuous online collection of conversations and communities that was already tweeting, blogging, and reading about health care reform, and gave them a simple, concrete set of actions with which they could have an effect on the effort for health care reform.

The #CallCongress campaign is not the only area in which the executive branch is participating in the online space in completely new and interesting ways. In the State Department, Jared Cohen is the point person for social media and youth issues. He helped convince Twitter to delay maintenance in order to support the democratic process during the Iranian elections. In an interview with NPR, it is clear that Cohen recognizes the groundswell: he says that those who say that not many people around the world have access to these technologies are missing the significant upward trend in access:

So take a country like Pakistan, for instance: In 2001, Pakistan had 750,000 mobile phone subscriptions. By 2008, just seven years later, it had 78 million, which is an astronomical jump. In Afghanistan, today there’s 23 percent of the population with access to mobile phones; they say by 2011 it’s going to be close to 72 percent. So it’s not about how many people have access today, it’s about how many people have access tomorrow and a year from now. And so we have a unique opportunity to engage in that space while access is continuing to spread.

He recognizes that it is important for the State Department, and the US government more broadly, to understand the truth of its brand for people around the world and to engage in conversation and become a trusted voice in the online conversation. He adds:

We can recognize that nobody can control these technologies — bad people will continue to use them, but that’s all the more reason to engage in these spaces. And the other option is to…shy away from it. If you do that, it’s not going to stop them from using it. In fact, all it’s going to do is give them more of an opening without any effort to counter their narratives.

Like the State Department and Organizing for America, NGOs and governments need to start to figure out how to strategically position themselves in the important online communities and to help shape the ongoing conversations about their issues and their brands.

O’Reilly talks about the importance of user-generated content (I’m linking here to Wikipedia, the best example of UGC), although he doesn’t use that phrase, as a key part of anything that’s Web 2.0. Something may be considered a Web 2.0 application or approach if it gets better when more people use it, as an inherent part of the design, and the sites described above certainly fit this model.

Another element of O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 is that the site or software is in “perpetual beta”: that it is always unfinished and subject to frequent revisions and updates. MoveOn has integrated this concept into its strategy in an interesting way: it regularly invites its members to vote on the policies it should advocate and the prioritization of its programs. This strategy also provides a rich user experience and demonstrates an attitude of trust in one’s users or members, both of which O’Reilly describes as other pieces of the Web 2.0 puzzle.

MoveOn has had phenomenal success with this strategy, and has had an impact on the public discussion of domestic and foreign policy far beyond that of much older, more experienced nonprofits. It’s possible that MoveOn’s opposition to the Iraq war fundamentally altered the political conversations about the presidential election and was a significant factor in a perfect convergence of factors that allowed Obama to win the election.

History is no longer a sufficient strategy or excuse in the advocacy world, as MoveOn, ONE, and others rewrite the rules of the game, just as Google and Linux did in their respective communities.

The good thing about this internet upheaval is that it means that organizations can make a difference even without a long track record and established successes in advocacy and policy, but to do that, they must think creatively about how to use the web both to find and cultivate existing interest in a policy issue and to shape that interest into a powerful movement. They must trust their users and provide a rich experience for them to interact online. And they must create regular and meaningful opportunities for input into the direction of the movement and the organization.

Why are journalists and not bloggers assumed to be ethical by the FTC? – Media Matters

How Mobile Phones Contribute To Female Progress In Developing Nations – Jezebel

Is Supporting Women And Girls Just Another Fad? – Jezebel
The challenge and opportunity of investing in women and girls has definitely hit its stride of late, and I hope it continues to receive the  attention it deserves.

Patient capital, markets that work and ending the endless emergency of poverty – Seth Godin

I am particularly focused on non-local advocacy organizations here: organizations for which a large part of the mission is to improve laws and policies, and for which the supporter base is relatively disperse. The opportunity, then, is to reach those people who are going to contact their elected representatives every time you ask them to do so.  Even a small group of very dedicated people can show staffers that citizens are paying attention to these issues, and can add pressure to sponsor a bill or take action on an issue. NGOs are public servants for a particular cause, not companies selling products. They are only as good as the service they provide.

Don’t blog because it’s good for the organization: blog because it’s good for the cause.

Many before have written and spoken about this with more authority than I. Lately, I have been promoting Seth Godin’s excellent thoughts on the subject as captured on his blog in this post and others; his blog is often highly informative and useful for multiple sectors. Another recent example is Jeff Jarvis’s recent post about “Googley philanthropy,” which he says should be “transparent, networked, collaborative.”

Here’s my take: the web (and blogging in particular) offers a tremendous opportunity to motivate a small group of people who would otherwise be extraordinarily hard to reach – because of limits of time and physical space – and to make them feel personally engaged and empowered to do something about the problem a nonprofit is set up to tackle. But the only way to engage people as a small, relatively unknown organization is to make them feel like they have a personal connection to the organization. Press releases never do that.

Smart, talented people in small organizations should have blogging in their job description, and not extended, well-researched pieces, but short pieces about the work the organization is doing, why they’re excited about it, and how people can get involved. Someone who is organizing a conference can talk about the fantastic speakers with whom they’re collaborating. Someone who is researching for a policy report can talk about the importance of the topic and the potential conclusions. This should be an expected, regular part of the organization’s work, and not because it in itself will bring donations or grants, but because it allows you to become a voice in the community of people who care about your issues. Those people will seek you out.

More than that, though, provide a place for those people to talk to you and to each other. Because platforms for your message are no longer scarce, but attention is, so cultivate it, and then use it wisely. Don’t take for granted the wisdom in the informal community.

When you empower people, value them, and enable them to engage with the organization in a concrete way – by hosting a local event, meeting with their elected representatives, or serving as evangelists for your message – they will work with you to make things happen.

The first part is why blogging matters for us as individuals. Rosenberg argues that the web, and specifically blogging, is a tool for personal satisfaction on the individual level. My previous  blog about my experience studying abroad in Bolivia was definitely an instance of personal satisfaction from blogging, but it’s not just the satisfaction of putting thoughts to keyboard: it’s connecting with people.

My point here is to debunk the idea that communication online is not legitimate, “real” communication. Rosenberg’s thesis in the early part of the book is that the point of the web, and particularly the culture of the web that later developed into blogging, is about “opening a channel between yourself and the world,” as he quotes Jesse James Garrett as saying. Basically, blogging matters because it gives us another way to communicate with the other people on the web, who are, after all, real human beings too.

Lots of people like to talk about how the web shuts down “real” communication by pushing all human interaction online, but there’s nothing fake about finding someone who shares a passion or a problem and starting a conversation with them. As creators of niche blogs have often found, you can sometimes find a more genuine, passionate, informed, and supportive community on the web than you might be able to find in “real life” because of its constraints of time and space.

So the reason blogs offer an opportunity for personal satisfaction is that they enable communities and conversations. I am particularly interested right now in the role of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations in these communities and conversations, and the role of the conversations in achieving the ongoing goals of the organizations. Part II is more on that.