The Top Four Essentials

1. Email communications: your most important and powerful tool
2. Your website: first impressions, enabling people to do things and attracting new supporters
3. Expertise: develop it or hire it - but don't ignore it
4. Campaigning actions: you need things for people to do

Beyond the Essentials

5. Tracking and Analysis: knowing what works (and doesn't work) and why so you can spend your time and money wisely
6. Time: having the time, effort and focus to deliver a campaigning action
7. Budget: having budget to spend on creative content, promotion and/or external help
8. Plan: deciding how you plan to contribute to the campaigning objectives using e-campaigning
9. Feedback channels: listening to supporters and learning how to engage them

The Detailed Version

I was recently asked to outline the essentials of e-campaigning (aka e-advocacy): what must you do at a minimum to make it work. So this is a perfect post to revive this blog. Before jumping into the top five essential things you must have for e-campaigning, I first need to clarify what I mean by 'essential' and my assumptions.

What is 'Essential'?

By essential I mean that if you do these things you will most likely get good results for the effort you put in and you can regularly repeat your successes

You could, of course, ignore these and go straight to using social networking sites and social media (blogs, photo sharing, video sharing, bookmark sharing) and you might actually achieve something (if you get lucky). But my experience is you'd have a hard time repeating your success since you have no way of directly re-mobilising your supporters from the first initiative you'll have to do all the same basic work over again and that is nor smart!

What these top essentials do is focus on building on past successes and ensuring success is repeatable.

There are, of course, some things that many e-campaigning professions (including myself) would like to add to this list like tracking and analysis. Why I don't include tracking and analysis (I do include it in the 'important' section) in the top four is that many organisations do 'good' campaigning without it. Of course, getting by without it probably also means they are wasting time and money on things that are not working very well and they likely are not improving their e-campaigning with every campaigning action. With talented people and a good budget they may not miss their lost opportunities. By doing it they could be performing significantly better with almost the same budget and effort.

I've tried to draw this line between 'essential' and 'important' to help keep the essentials to a minimum and focused. Mut anyone who wants to do higher impact e-campaigning should definitely not stop with the essentials: just start with them.

Assumptions

1. Part of your campaign strategy (you do have one - right?) is to recruit and mobilise a key stakeholder group. In most cases this is simply 'the public' but if you have done a power analysis* of your targets then it is likely to be more specific. eCampaigning can be for other purposes than public recruitment and mobilisation, but 98% chance is you want to do e-campaigning to recruit and mobilise people.
2. You wish to do campaigning for an organisation (vs. as an individual). The essentials of e-campaigning for an individual would be different since it is likely to be a short term campaign with no continuity planned beyond the outcome of the campaign. An organisation would normally want continuity and which each campaign action may be short term, the overall campaign may go on for years or decades.
3. You or someone else in the organisation (not a volunteer) has responsibility for at least overseeing the e-campaigning and ensuring sufficient time and/or budgets are allocated to implement these essentials.

The Top Four

1. Email Communications

Email is your single most important tool. You need to collect supporter's email addresses and send email communications to them at least every two months and ideally more frequently. Email is the key tool because it:

1. Enables you to build a direct relationship with supporters and have high control over the communication communicate
2. Is the most effective tool to mobilise your supporters quickly
3. Is the widest standard for person-to-person messaging there is on the Internet

If you have been wooed by media stores of Facebook, MySpace or other social networks, these tools are great way to go beyond the essentials (or to use for campaigning as an individual), but they are minor players when it comes to messaging and they too depend on email to make their sites a success.

Do you need proof? In 2008 there are 1.6 billion active email users, only 300 million people use social networking sites in total. There are minor issues with email such as spam, but those are manageable.

The exception to email being your single most important tool is if the supporter profile you are planning to engage does not use email. Since any social networking sites requires an email for registration, those users will still have an email address. Those using only a mobile phone for communication thus would be the most obvious exception - but also brings significant other constraints (if we are still following Assumption A).

2. Website

Your website is the next important tool for e-campaigning. Not only is it the primary place for new supporters to have a first impression of your organisation and hopefully subscribe to your emails, but the content you publish and the campaigning actions you run will attract new people every day. At minimum, the website should have:

1. The ability for people to subscribe to your email communications
2. Information about your campaigns, regular updates of their progress and what your supporters can do

If you wish to go one step beyond the minimum, then having campaigning actions that people can complete on your website is very important as it not only makes it quick and easy for supporters to contribute to your campaigning, but it also contributes to the growth of your email subscribers. There are free services and tools for this, but free services often prevent you from accessing the data of who took the actions (and thus new people who subscribed)

3. Expertise

Having the tools in place is actually relatively easy. However if you don't have the expertise to use those tools then it is likely your e-campaigning efforts will have poor results. This sounds obvious, but many organisations simply add e-campaigning as one more role of an existing staff member who may only have one of the many related of expertise needed. The minimum expertise needed is:

1. Email marketing: what is effective and what isn't
2. Web usability: how to make priority actions/content as obvious and easy as possible
3. Campaigning: how to mobilise people and influence targets

This is a minimum, not an ideal.

If you can only afford to hire one new person and already have campaigners and a web  producer, then focus on getting someone with direct marketing expertise and some knowledge of the Internet - that is a good base for skills and knowledge needed for e-campaigning.

To get people with these skills and/or knowledge you can:

1. Let them learn from scratch on the job (the most expensive approach due to lost opportunities over the 1-2 years their learning could take)
2. Send them on training (disclosure: FairSay has launched an e-campaigning training series)
3. Hire an external consultant and have a staff member shadow this person (expensive but lower risk)
4. Hire someone with the skills and experience (these people are very hard to lure away from current jobs)
5. Do extensive research online to identify and acquire the theoretical knowledge before starting
4. Campaigning Actions

Having regular new campaigning actions is not just a good way to re-focus your campaigning on your targets, but it also helps retain existing and recruit new supporters. The more frequently you run new campaigning actions, the faster your supporter base will grow. It may also help to keep your targets aware of your efforts and help achieve the campaign objectives. However, just running new campaigning actions over simplifies what is necessary. They need to be genuine, timely, compelling and specific to work well.

Going Beyond the Essentials

Of course, doing the minimum is a great way to start, but is high risk since ti is operating without the benefit of insight into the effectiveness of the e-campaigning, the investment needed to achieve the best results, the direction to guide effort and investment and the feedback to ensure it is engaging supporters. To take e-campaigning beyond the essentials, there are several important activities that needs to be considered

5. Tracking and Analysis

Tracking tools are essential for learning what is working and what isn't so you can either refine what isn't working and/or switch to focus more on what is working. You can do e-campaigning without using tracking and analysis tools (as many organisations do), but you will be even more dependent on the expertise you have to know what works and increase the risk that you are wasting time and budget. Tracking an analysis mean three things:

1. Completion tracking: being able to know what drove each supporter to take a particular action (including basic subscriptions) so you can know what is really working well. Most systems don't have this capability but hopefully over the coming years this will change (Note: FairSay developed the free eCampaigning Tool for Plone that has completion tracking built in)
2. Email tracking: how are emails performing vs. past emails and what supporters are opening, clicking on links or have invalid email addresses. Most bulk emailing systems have this capability but you may need to configure it and you'll definitely need the expertise to know what it means.
3. Web tracking: how visitors are behaving on your website. If you don't have completion tracking, web tracking when used with source tracking can be an acceptable substitute. Goggle Analytics is the best free service but it requires basic technical skills to implement and some expertise to configure, tag links and understand the results.

Tracking and analysis guides you in optimising your activity and when you optimise your activity at multiple point in the campaigning actions you produce q strong multiplier that can lead to dramatic improvements in your effectiveness.

6. Time

Setting-up, promoting and managing an e-campainging action takes time and effort. At a minimum this would probably be 5-10 days per e-campaigning action. Why? Here are some of the things it involves:

• Distilling the policy ask into a headline and a few sentence campaigning ask
• Getting your campaigning ask approved (or skip this step if you are a follow of the idea that it is easier to apologise than ask for permission)
• Writing the launch email to your supporters. If you want an image you need to find one you have to find a suitable one you have the rights to use (not easy). If you need a design then triple this time
• Configuring the online action for people to take and testing it to ensure it works. This involves the design of the page, the fields people are asked to fill in, the content for the page to be short and compelling, supporting content and what you cross-promote on the thank-you page and in thank-you email.
• Getting organisational signoff the email and online action and revising things until you do (again, skip this step if you are a follow of the idea that it is easier to apologise than ask for permission)
• Ensuring that there is a feedback channel for supporters and potential supporters
• Setting up the email so it goes to the right supporters with the right content
• Launching the email to supporters and monitoring the inital results to ensure there are no technical problems
• Promoting it in as many places online as you have time for
• Writing, setting-up and sending update emails to supporters if the action is running for longer than a few weeks
• Delivering the campaign action results to the target (if there is one) - even if they received it via email. This helps you increase your campaigning impact
• Reviewing the campaigning action (including analysed the tracked results) and learning how to improve next time

Pwew! If you know what you are doing, this will take 5-10 days effort. If you are new to it it could take double or triple that time (or what happens in practice is you just skip many steps).

7. Budget

Have some budget for e-campaigning would definitely help - especially if you wish to send people on training or get access to the tools necessary for good e-campaigning. Budget for promotion (not only advertising) is very important. Without promotion all the effort you put into your campaigning has limited effect. Promotion is even more important if you have spent money to create some content and need to ensure you get a good 'return' on it.

8. Plan

Having an e-campaigning strategy and plan should be essential. In reality organisation do e-campaigning for years without a strategy or plan. However I'll still put it as an essential since it can provide focus and goals that can help determine if the e-campaigning is generating the results required. Part of planning should also involve research into targets, supporters and the profile of people that needs tob e recruited.

9. Feedback channels

Listing to supporters via a feedback channel like a contact email address they can use or polls and surveys is also an important activity that many organisations neglect. However having feedback can help improve your e-campaigning and ensure it engages supporters: an essential element of success.

Essential, Important or Ideal?

Event having the essential and important aspects of e-campaigning in place leaves significant room for improvement. However the ideal requirements foe e-campaigning goes even beyond this. Perhaps that is a future topic for a blog post.

Feedback Please

Anything you think I missed? Anything you disagree with? Anything you think should have more emphasis?

This post will be turned into an article in the eCampaigning Resource Pack that is being produced as part of the 2008 eCampaigning Forum initiative so any help improving it before printed publication would be useful!

Comprehensive eCampaigning Training Series

I'm usually very hesitant about making grand claims about my work, so I am fairly confident that FairSay new eCampaigning training series is a first-of-its kind anywhere. This is because:

1. It provides learning opportunities for everyone from the absolute beginner to the most experienced e-campaigner - and campaigning senior managers too.
2. It provides in depth, hands-on skills and knowledge of the essential e-campaigning principles and practices
3. Its modular approach for the advanced courses allows experienced practitioners to deepen their skills and knowledge only in the areas that are relevant to them
4. The expert exchanges allow even the most experienced practitioners to learn from peers at a similar level to continue to improve

eCampaigning Practitioners Shortage

The shortage of experienced practitioners is one of the key problems I identified in my review of the key gaps in 2006, and the situation has only got worse. Today, more organisations want to be campaigning on-line and yet that available pool of experienced practitioners has barely grown. Those that do exist have acquired their skills and knowledge of 2-3 years and yet much of it could have been learned in a few days of well focused training.

Training can't replace on-the-job experience, but it definitely can accelerate it and help avoid the most common and costly mistakes. So training offers a way to accelerate the growth of skilled practitioners and knowledgeable managers as thus help more organisations have effective e-campaigning.

eCampaigning Training Alternatives

There are other choices besides FairSay:

• BOND (UK) offered a one-day eCampaigning Training in June 2008 and will hold another in December 2009. It received good feedback and provided an overview for eCampaigning.
• Advocacy Online launched an e-campaigning training this summer (2008)
• The New Organizing Institute (US) offers regular training in e-campaigning, and it is excellent (I observed one via a webcast last year). It seems more focused on providing a range of basic skills and knowledge to large groups via speakers with some hands-on work. This is what most organisations will need to start, but not to rapidly improve.
• Parli-training (UK) claim to offer an e-campaigning course, but I had never heard of them until now nor anyone who had taken the course. Like the BOND course, a one day training can only be a basic overview. Perhaps their focus is political party campaigning vs. NGO campaigning.

I'm sure a few other options must exist too - so please share them if you know of them. The point of the above examples is that everyone seems to be only focusing on the basics with no options for those with experience to continue to improve. FairSay will also offer the basics, but with a leaning path and levels to serve practitioners and managers as they gain experience.

So, hopefully that justifies my claim that it is the most comprehensive e-campaigning training series. Of course, offering the series is only one part of the solution. It only becomes reality if people want more than just the basics.

Released Under Creative Commons License

The other aspect of the training is that I am releasing it all under a creative commons share-alike license. This is because I want to encourage spreading of e-campaigning skills and knowledge. I also am interested in actively collaborating with others, including the organisations listed above, to improve the trainings. However the having content for FairSay's training isn't the same as doing a course. FairSay's training series is only 35% of a course wile 50% is hands-on learning and 15% is participant sharing.

What do you think?

So on that point, I'd like to ask what you think of the training series and what you'd like to see added or improved?

Key Campaigning Gaps in 2006

I have been working with campaigners to help them make full and effective use the Internet and New Media (aka e-campaigning) since 2001. In that time it has exposed many gaps in how campaigning is managed that limits not only e-campaigning, but general campaigning effectiveness. Here is what I think the gaps were in 2006 that need to be addressed in 2007.

Campaigning Gaps

1. Strategy: Surprisingly, many organisations seem to lack a campaigning strategy at all. They have their campaigning objectives, but little beyond that guiding them in their ongoing activity. Some have documents they call a strategy, but on inspection they are closer to a list of aspirations and aren't that useful in guiding or reviewing campaigning.
2. Influence Research: While most organisations do an excellent job researching the issues and what to do about them, the next step for campaigning is to research how the campaigning objectives can be achieved.

   This generally involves:

   • A power analysis: where and how are decision made and who makes or influences them.
   • Identifying strategies and tactics to apply the pressure needed at the right place and time.
   • Identifying specific targets and researching what their position is on the issue and what strategies and tactics are most likely to influence them (and help them influence others).
   • Setting goals that relate directly to the strategies, tactics and targets

   In too many cases this impact research is simply not done at all. Since campaigning is part art and part science, intuition is useful. But undertaking and implementing influence research (the science) helps campaigns achieve better results for the time and budget they spend on achieving their objectives.

3. Creative Actions: All to often, the usual suspects and usual methods are used for campaigning actions (offline and online): standard petitions and letters to targets. The result is bland actions which doesn't appeal to journalists or the public.

   Where possible, creative actions need to:

   • Make it clear during planning if the action priority is mass participation, media coverage or campaigning impact. All three are important but what is most important for this action as part of the overall strategy?
   • Pick targets that serve the priority identified. A public figure, company or brand that is widely loathed or divisive is good for getting people to take actions, but if they won't listen then impact is low. A less 'public' target might be more easily influenced.
   • Use innovative, but simple, ideas that capture the imagination of the public, journalists and your target. Either be more creative with petitions or letters or go well beyond them with competitions, phone-ins or other ways for people to participate - not just support.
   • Tell a story. Be specific and personal. Using a specific situation to demonstrate the larger issue is far more effective than bland general issues. Mixing that with a personal story - a real person with a name - further increases its effectiveness.
   • Deliver the results in an unusual way. More like GetUp's purchase of billboard space.
4. Participation is surprisingly rare, in many campaigns. Yes, people can support the campaign, but can they influence it in any way? Organisations like MoveOn and GetUp are succeeding because they operate on the basis of participation. Many people only want to support campaigns, but many others want to so much more and will work with those who provide that opportunity.
5. Segmenting is a powerful way to:
   1. Get and keep people involved in a way that is relevant to them and
   2. Predict who is most likely to be a potential campaigner for an issue so they can be approached.
   This is already used for fundraising, but doesn't seem to be used much for campaigning. The exception is US political campaigning where advanced segmenting (aka modeling) is an necessity for winning elections.
6. Coordinated actions using a range of approaches simultaneously are also rare. Media, Internet, demonstrations and other tactics should be planned and used in combination - not independently as currently happens far too much.
7. Learning isn't happening: Every time a new campaign is launched, or a new coalition formed, it seems everyone forgets the lessons from the last time.  Both within organisations and within the sector, silly mistakes are being made again and again that prevent the campaign being as successful as it can.  Seems the sector needs to learn how to learn.
   

The reasons these gaps exist ranges from overworked campaign staff, short lead times, low budgets, shifting priorities and many more. However the point of naming the gaps is so that the areas of improvement are identified. While the constraints will not go away away, some may find they can address one or two to give them the space to be even more effective at campaigning.

eCampaigning Gaps

My work over the last two years on reviewing organisations' e-campaigning performance and developing their e-campaigning strategy with them has provided me with the opportunity to identify issues that all organisations withint to campaign via the Internet and new media seem to face.

1. Skill and Knowledge Gap
   • The most significant gap in making full and effective use of the Internet and new media for campaigning is the skill and knowledge gap
   • There are too few people with a full grasp of e-campaigning and the skills to achieve it. While this number is growing, acquiring these knowledge and skills through experience can take years
   • Those that do acquire them are then in such demand they can move to better opportunities in other organisations and thus significantly set-back an organisations e-campaigning activities.
2. Persuasive analysis and reporting: practitioners are not doing analysis and reporting that persuades senior management and trustees of the importance and potential of e-campaigning activities. As a result, the necessary extra people, budget and authority is not allocated - perpetuating the cycle of under-investment and under-achievement. This is partly due to:
   • Inadequate reporting tools
   • Un-integrated advocacy tools which make unified reporting difficult
   • The lack of widely accepted best practice performance levels
   • Confusion over key performance indicators, how to calculate them and what they mean
   • Lack of time, skills and/or knowledge to integrate, analyse and report on results.
3. Promotion to acquire new participants: tends to be poorly planned, with most energy going into a campaign launch rather than promotion.  Even when it is considered, it is rare that a promotion strategy is formulated or budget is allocated. While promoting actions through existing participants and prominently placed on one's web site is essential, more forethought on promotion and support acquisition can help ensure a campaign has well informed goals and a plan to achieve them.
   
4. Knock-on impact of the general campaigning gaps raised above:
   • Without a clear and specific strategy, e-campaigning practitioners must make a range of decisions without the benefit of guidance from a unified approach.
   • Without influence research, e-actions are often ineffective
   • Without creative e-actions, the action fails to attract new or existing participants
   • If people can't participate online, the most valuable volunteers will go elsewhere and your campaigning will have less impact. The issue of participation is campaigning organisations' single biggest mental obstacle to moving from the first major phase of the web (aka Web 1.0) to the emerging phase of the Internet (aka Web 2.0)
   • Without segmentation, the email communication is less relevant to everyone
   • If the Internet activity coordination occurs in isolation to other campaigning approaches, then the impact of e-actions is diminished
   • Without the ability to learn from past campaigns and not repeat the same mistakes, e-actions are less effective than they could be and thus the campain underperforms. 
     

   If the e-campaigning seems to be ineffective, it may well be that it has more to do with the campaigning gaps than anything specific to the Internet or your technology.

5. Organisational Issues: A range of organisational issues present major barriers to making full and effective use of the Internet and other new media even when people have the necessary skills, knowledge and experience. These include:
• eCampaigning practitioners are involved late to the campaign planning process
• The lead time is too short for implementing a campaign on the Internet and with other new media
• The budget allocation is insufficient for delivering the part of the campaign using the Internet and new media
• There are not enough people with the right skills to do a 'best practice' e-campaigning
• IT staff are a bottleneck (when they exist) to implementing new tools since campaigning has to compete with other IT organisational needs and getting IT staff time requires longer lead-in times than campaigning allows
• The perception that eCampaigning operates independently of other forms of campaigning like media, local groups, face-to-face advocacy and direct mail actions.

These issues are not new. I raised them in the Make Poverty History New Media review in early 2006, and even then there were well established. The only change since then is even more organisations are trying to do eCampaigning and the Internet gone mainstream.

6. Beyond the Net: Most planning for campaigning online seems to assume that the whole process has to be online, a fatal assumption.  Targets are more influenced by  offline activities and supporters want to get physically involved locally.  Digital mediums (Internet Mobile phone, etc.) are a great way to reach out and for key groups (public, journalists, policy makers, researchers) to reach the campaign - but not for ever element of a campaign.
   
7. Supporter Care: It is quite common that support for people who email in is forgotten about in the official plans and thus either doesn't happen or is picked up by a web editor or other person without the time and strategy in place to provide proper support.
8. Technology: If all the above gaps were resolved, there would still be some gaps with the technology. The biggest issues are that most e-campaigning technology:
   • Best practices are difficult or impossible to implement (unless you build your own technology, and that is expensive and time consuming)
   • Integration with key systems (email, supporter databases, tracking) is almost non-existent (unless you build your own technology, and that is expensive and time consuming)
   • Tracking and Reporting is terrible (partly due to the integration issue), providing little of the real information you need to make organisational decisions
   The right technology can also help resolve some of the other gaps by reducing the effort and technical skills and knowledge needed to set-up and manage campaign actions online.

How is This Helpful?

• I am missing anything
• I am wrong about something
• I am over simplifying or over complicating anything
• I am right and this is helpful

2006-7 Review Contents

• Section A: 2006 Campaigning Highlights
• Part 1: Significant Trends in 2006 (04 Jan 2007)
• Part 2: Significant Events in 2006 (10 Jan 2007)
• Part 3: Key Campaigning Gaps in 2006 (17 Jan 2007)

2006 Campaigning Highlights

Significant Trends

I have been working for eight years to combine campaigning and the Internet. So in 2006 it was a pleasure to see and feel two milestones being achieved:

1. Increasing number of non-profits recognise campaigning as an essential part of achieving their purpose and are establishing campaigning activities.
2. The Internet became mainstream and is now recognised as a powerful way to engage with others (rather than as a 'destabilising' technology)

The Campaigning Space Becomes More Crowded

The adoption of campaigning by an increasing number of non-profit organisations has been occurring for a while. But in 2006 this seemed to accelerate. In the UK, this is primarily due to the success of Make Poverty History in 2005 and the global parent coalition of GCAP. And just as campaigning was boosted by Make Poverty History (or other GCAP coalitions) in 2005, in 2006 it was further impacted by the Climate Change movement (e.g. Stop Climate Chaos coalition in the UK).

I experienced this trend in two ways:

1. Established campaigning organisations started to feel it was harder to acquire and retain supporters (the bulk of what clients ask me with help on)
2. Organisations new to campaigning were both hiring staff for new campaigning roles and were asking for help in areas of developing their strategy and plans and implementing these.

But there was also a continuation of the trend that started years ago: the establishment of new campaigning organisations.:

• MoveOn (one of the oldest of this group) continued to grow, fueled by the 2006 US Election and their ability to continually improve by constantly split-testing, analysing and surveying to inform the effectiveness of innovations and their ability to listen to and involve their participant base.
• This model was successfully replicated in Australia with GetUp (see their 2006 review) which only launched in Aug 2005. Now GetUp has more supporters than all the political parties combined and (I think) any other single Australian NGO (unions might be an exception).

Anyone who dismisses these initiatives as 'Internet' is still Internet illiterate: they are not about the Internet at all, they are about engaging with people and encouraging people to engage with each other. The Internet merely makes it cheaper and easier to do that. MoveOn and GetUp also get tens of thousands of people on the street and taking real action - and have inspired a new generation of people to have hope for their country and world. Another organisation, Avaaz, is on the verge of taking this model global (see more in Part 5: 2007 What's Coming in 2007)

The Internet Becomes Mainstream

In 2006 the Internet became mainstream in many ways on which others have documented. In numbers, 70% of the US population (or 77% depending on your source) and 62% of the UK population now have access to the Internet. But since others have written about this, I'll focus on the signs of this in campaigning in 2006.

The 2006 US Election demonstrated how far the Internet had come. Both parties and almost all candidates used the Internet (in conjunciton with more traditional approaches) to fundraise, promote their message, undermine their opponents and mobilise their supporters. Blogging networks and video were important to this as were custom social networking tools (see MyGOP, The Democratic Party or MyDD). Furthermore the Democrats started using modeling (aka micro targeting or segmenting) as the Republicans have for year to tailor their messaging for specific audiences and is likely part of the behind the scenes reason why the Democrats made such significant gains.

2006 also saw non-profit campaigners experimenting with blogging, using social networking sites, posting campaign videos, podcasting, using wikis, making mashups, etc. All these activities were not necessarily new in 2006, but they did become more mainstream in 2006 in terms of media reporting and public usage.

In my own work I saw and heard non-profit directors and senior managers expressing that the Internet is an essential part of achieving their organisations' campaigning objectives. Several years ago, the Internet was an afterthought for these same people. This is an important breakthrough since part of the challenge for years has been finding people in these roles who see the larger potential for the using the Internet beyond just publishing, email updates and fundraising. However most senior managers still do not yet know how to use it effectively and what using it effectively requires.

However the Internet becoming 'mainstream' in the non-profit world does not mean that non-profits are yet effective at using the Internet for campaigning. What it does suggest is that directors and senior managers may now be clearer about what they expect it to deliver, they may start to demand a better return from their investment in using the Internet for campaigning, they may be willing to allocate more staff and budget and they may be willing to take more risks.

2006-7 Review Contents

• Section A: 2006 Campaigning Highlights
• Part 1: Significant Trends in 2006 (04 Jan 2007)
• Part 2: Significant Events in 2006 (10 Jan 2007)
• Part 3: Key Campaigning Gaps in 2006 (17 Jan 2007)

Significant Events in 2006

2006 was a busy year. Climate change was the issue of the year globally, but the continued deterioration of the situation in Iraq, the stagnation of the Israel-Palestine peace process and the Israel-Lebanon conflict were all catalysing events for some campaigners.

The Control Arms campaign had a key win in October when the UN voted in favour of a resolution to start work on a global Arms Trade Treaty. In the US the Save The Internet coalition prevented anti-'network neutrality' legislation from passing that could have resulted in Internet censorship. In Australia, GetUp had a number of wins on environmental protection, climate change shifts and refugee rights and is playing a key role uniting opponents to the current Liberal majority government - up for re-election in 2007.

The use of direct fundraising as a campaigning action was also on the rise in 2006, with GetUp, MoveOn, TrueMajority, The Democratic Party and many others appealing directly for funds for either general campaigning or for specific actions (e.g. GetUp's billboard fund, MoveOn's funding of political TV ads). In the UK, the dominant campaigning organisations are highly reluctant to ask for funds from campaigners, but judging from the success of these types of initiatives in the US and Australia, 2007 might be when people's minds change on this issue.

Politically, the US Elections were obviously a big thing not just for the US, but for US activities in many parts of the world. However since foreign policy is the responsibility of the Presidency, not everything will change. In the UK, Prime Minister Tony Blair was forced to give a rough timeline for retiring and this put more focus on the policies of Gordon Brown, who many assume will become the next Prime Minister.

More generally, 2006 was the year the Internet boom returned with YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, Digg and Delicious being just a few of the services that became widely popular during the year.

Campaigning Events

2006 saw climate change become the issue of the year. A combination of political events, media coverage, research findings, climate disasters and campaigning coalitions converged to keep this key issue in the headlines for the whole year. While the climate change movement seems stronger than ever, a global coalition doesn't seem to exist - unlike GCAP (the parent coalition of Make Poverty History and the One Campaign).

Timeline: Campaigning Related Events

I'm sure I've missed significant campaigning related events here - so let me know what they are so the timeline can be improved.

New Media Events

If you work with the Internet and New Media, nothing here will be new. But for those of you who are active in campaigning but don't have much connection to the Internet and New Media, here are some of the popular new media related topics of the year.

• The widely anticipated book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson was published and is one of the new hot criteria for establishing an Internet venture.
• Hot terms of the year were Web 2.0, social networking, mashups (mixing different content together into a new service) and netroots (grassroots supporters connected online) and probably a few I've missed. The key thing is that they represent a more person-to-person use of the Internet than the previous dominant paradigm of organisation-to-person (Web 1.0) - also know as the 'broadcast model'.
• Hot Internet services of the year: YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, Digg, Delicious, Facebook and that is just scratching the surface. Read more about 2006 Web Technology Trends.

2006-7 Review Contents

• Section A: 2006 Campaigning Highlights
• Part 1: Significant Trends in 2006 (04 Jan 2007)
• Part 2: Significant Events in 2006 (10 Jan 2007)
• Part 3: Key Campaigning Gaps in 2006 (17 Jan 2007)

That top image is a video that explains why Christian Aid want you to to provide your email address and how they will treat it.  What is great is that normally this information is buried in a privacy policy or in a statement that no-one reads.  But here it is in a very friendly and succinct format that communicates the key points without cluttering the page.

This is the type of simple but brilliant idea I love. I'd love to know how it performs vs. a signup form without the video. My hunch is that it would perform better in getting people to complete the signup page (vs. abandon it).

I also looked at the Mencap site recently and noticed they'd integrated video in each of the key sections that was not only relevant to the section, but make the work Mencap do more tangible and emotive.

It will be interesting to know if video increases visitor's understanding of the issues and if more of them become supporters or if these are just another way for design agencies to impress managers (who sign-off the project) but have no real positive impact on an organisation's education, recruitment and mobilisation work.

I suspect it will help, but by how much and at what cost. Anyone have an evidence on this to share?

Background

Despite working with the web since 1994, I've never done a redesign, although I have set up four sites from scratch. This is because I'm not really interested in setting up websites, and more interested in how to use them to get people to do things.

When FairSay started in 2004, I put together a simple 5-page website and really only replaced the logo of the Plone CMS (content management system) I use. It grew as needed - but not in any planned way. The result was lots of buried content and a design that was "so 2004".

As a provider of eCampaigning services, I felt it was necessary to have a website that reflected current design norms and had content that better reflected FairSay's purpose and was a resource for e-campaigning practitioners.

Objectives

1. A website that looks and feels leading-edge and professional
2. A website that is better at communicating what FairSay does, what others are doing and provides insight for e-campaigning practitioners and managers
3. Non-web communications that are consistent with the web site look and feel
4. To challenge myself to learn the state of web and email technology and design in 2008
5. A design I could re-use for multiple FairSay initiatives.

Scope

While the focus was on the FairSay website, it was sensible to consider making the logo more professional looking at the same time and relatively little extra work to have a report and presentation template made by the same designers.

The Logo

For $99 in 2004, I commissioned a logo to be made. However I wasn't happy with the "instant swoosh" style of logo I was presented with, so I cobbled together a mock-up of something that actually fit my brief and the designer simply cleaned it up. It wasn't perfect but it would good enough.

A proposed logo	Logo 2004-8	Logo 2008-?

So in 2008 the designers said I should redign the logo first before re-designing the site so it could be integrated properly. I gave them the original logo brief, the existing logo and ask them to make it look more professional. I also referred them to the Web 2.0 howto design guide which I thought communicated the essence of current design quite well.

After being presented with a range of options, requesting various tweaks and asking a few friends for their opinion, i settled on the one above.

The Website

Once the logo was done and the colours set, the website design needed to compliment it. Just adding the logo to the default design of the Plone CMS wasn't good enough any more as it clashed and looked rather dated.

In 2007, I has asked a friend to produce a design (for a fee) and while the design had been good, I had to implement it in Plone and that isn't my area of expertise. When contracting a new designer, a key consideration was someone who could implement the design in Plone. The new designer wouldn't work with someone else's design since it had some elements that were difficult or impossible to implement well.

I again provided them with the brief for the un-implemented redign I commissioned in 2006 and referred them to the Web 2.0 howto design guide site as it has some excellent points. I also identified a number of site in a similar sector as FairSay and what elements I liked/didn't like. I also wanted it to stand out from the others so I gave the designers the freedom to come up with something different but fit-for-purpose.

After being presented with a view variants and again providing feedback and asking for the opinion of friends, I settled on one and had it fine-tuned it for different types of content.

Click image for large view
2004-8 site	2007 (not used)	2008+ site

What I really liked about it (and help to shape) is:

• It used bold colours to clearly distinguish between different area of the page
• The font is larger and thus it forces me to fit less on a page and makes me prioritise. This makes it easier to read and more user friendly.
• The design is aligned with the logo colours and concepts
• I can use the black section at the top to communicate what the key things a person should do / know when they get to specific pages
• I can re-use this top black area on other sub-sites wherever it is needed and use normal pages for other content.

Website Architecture and Content

Of course, as I was to discover, the website design is the relatively easy part (especially when someone else does it!). Now I needed to decide what content should be on the site and how it should be organised.

I first wrote down the ideal, but realised I'd never get it all done in 2008, so I prioritised to my acceptable minimum. What I settled on was:

• What we do: FairSay services in detail, not just the listing that has been there for the last four years
• Events: the eCampaigning Forum is the obvious one, but I also plan to organise more and list others' campaigning related events
• Tools: there is the eCampaigning Tool for Plone FairSay (Petri and I) developed which few people know about and the articles and video from the 2008 eCampaigning Forum
• Networks: the eCampaigning Forum email list / community and others that people can get involved in
• Blog: the poor unloved space where I should be pouring out my expertise, insights and thoughts
• Other: stand stuff like contact, about, etc.

Now I just need to write the content - and that took the longest! Most of the content either had to be created from scratch or re-written to be more compelling....but I got there after several weeks of plodding away and editing.

The Email Newsletter

Confession: people have been able to sign-up for email updates for a year. Yet I've only sent one emailing due to not prioritising thinking of what to communicate and being embarrassed to send a plain-text email. I regularly advise clients against so few and infrequent email communications, so I should really practice what I preach. Of course, my communications are less critical than those of my clients - so I don't feel too bad about it.

However now I have a snazzy new email newsletter design that does apply the advice I give to clients - even the advice they ignore. The key aspects of the email newsletter are:

• The introduction is personal and viewable via the preview pane of email clients - unlike that of almost all email newsletters I have seen (I hate having the logo as the first thing I see as it makes the preview pain for scanning useless)
• There is a table of the contents at the top right and this is also viewable via most email preview panes.
• The logo is present but not in-your-face
• Email mandatories (e.g. sender details, unsubscribe link) is prominent at the right side of the email.
• It looks almost the same with or without images enabled
• It was tested and works in all significant email tools (software and web mail)

two pay-as-you-go mass emailing services that also seem to have great email testing tools.

The biggest challenge was instructing a designer who is used to doing web pages that use all the latest standards and best practices to forget them all when designing for email. This is because there is little standardisation of email clients and thus much of what works for web pages doesn't work at all for email.

I chose an email newsletter even though they are less effective than single-ask emails. The reason is that I will not be sending urgent action emailings and sending FairSay updates one article at a time may seem a bit extravagant to time-poor recipients. Maybe that is a question to ask subscribers!

Content, like for the website, also is an issue. So this blog post is one item that will go in the newsletter as will a post about a current project and the launch of FairSay's e-campaigning training series.

Report Design

FairSay's client work usually results in the production of a report. So I thought it would be nice to have a report design that was more than just the logo. I first searched around for who did 'formatted' reports and then identified what elements of the reports I liked.

The the designer produced a design proposal. Again, after some feedback and new proposals, it was finalised and I then had to implement the design in MS Word. I couldn't get everything exactly the same (eg colour to the margins), but I did get most of it the same.

Click image for large view
Title Page	Table of Contents	Content

You'll notice that compared to the website, it uses the same red, but a lighter green. It also features a range 'pull-out' styles I can use in a report for emphasising or supplementing a point.

Presentation Design

I regularly do presentations for a range of reasons

• At the end of most client work, I do a face-to-face presentation of the key findings and recommendations.
• The FairSay e-campaigning training series requires presentations
• Presentations at sector events such as the NCVO Campaign Effectiveness programme's campaigning certificate, the NCVO annual conference, Media Trust, and various other sector events.

Thus, like for the report, website and emails, I found presentations I thought had good elements and directed the designer of these. The results are a simple yet distinctive design that is and consistent with FairSay's new look and feel.

Click to view larger image
Title Slide	Content Slide

As usual, the design is nothing without great content so I need to ensure the content quality is high.

Post Site Launch

Before launching the site, I installed an 'alias' tool that allows me to map the old URL of a page to a new URL. Post launch I then needed to find all the URLs people were linking to and ensure there were aliases so they would still get to the same page. to do this I:

• Used Google Webmaster Tools to find bad links, popular pages, what links Google has stored and submit the new sitemap to Google
• Changed any links I had made on third party sites if necessary

So now all old links should work just as well as the new ones - except if I don't want the page on the site of course :-)

Wish List

For launch, not everything I wanted (vs. needed) to have in place was feasible, so what I plan to do next is:

• Project summaries for each client project FairSay has done
• More resources for practitioners (tools, networks, events)
• Each email newsletter edition available on-site
• Blog posts with the latest practices, insights, opportunities, etc.
• Automated portlets (the side and top boxes) instead of my manual ones
• Social media links and links to FairSay's social network profiles
  

Key learning

Part of the reason for writing this post is to share what is involved in a redesign so that others can learn from it as well. So the key learning poing are:

1. Have a design team that can implement the website design in your CMS
2. If you know generally want, find good guides and examples for the designer - it helps them help you
3. Email: if you can't find someone who also has a specific expertise in email design, then you will need to factor in time to do this yourself.
4. Email: Assume parts of all email designs will fail in email clients until proven otherwise.
5. Consider commissioning other design changes like logos, print templates, presentation templates, etc at the time of the re-design so that they are all consistent
6. If you need to create new content, assume it will take several times more effort than implementing the design (assuming you followed point 1)
7. Reduce your content requirements to the minimum acceptable for launch and then add the other content over time after launch

Anything you want to know about the re-design?

You've got this far in another long post, but is there anything you'd like to know about the process that I can add?

It is an initiative of GCAP which is the umbrella coalition of Make Poverty History UK, One Campaign US and many others around the world.