Blogging and Campaigning
In 2006, blogging became more mainstream and influenced the media and the course of politics in a number of countries. Organisations also started using them as part of their mix of advocacy with mixed success.
This topic could be (depends on you) a sharing of successful and unsuccessful approaches to blogging, including in-house bloggers, blogger engagement, supporter blogs and any other approaches organisations have taken. It could also explore the impact of blogs and what benefits and down-sides they provide for a campaign.
Are you interested in participating in this group? Then add your name, comments and/or further edit the page with your thoughts, experience and questions to ensure it stays on the agenda.
Interested Participants
Format: name, organisation and why this topic?
Ben Beaumont, Oxfam (Generation Why)
Andrew Spencer, WWF-UK, Looking into using Blogs for the first time.
Jamie Woolley, Greenpeace UK - we've just made our blog the backbone of our site so we're looking for ideas and best practices to increase readership and interaction.
Participant Input
Add directly here or via the comments box below.
Purpose of organizational blogs --Kathy, Fri, 16 Mar 2007 13:12:47 -0500 reply
I think a lot of us launch organizational blogs without outlining their clear purpose. I've seen blogs work very well as a way to engage "grasstops"--professionals, experts, beat reporters, volunteer leaders, agency staff, legislative staff. But such a blog frequently can't hew to the organizational message--it often has to veer into dangerous terrain to engage the people who want a lot more than "message." I would love to hear from other online strategists about the purpose that organizational blogs can effectively serve, and how to balance the need of a large organization to hew to its message (often carefully crafted with respect to internal disputes, the needs of allied groups etc) with the need of grasstops activists and professionals to freely discuss breaking issues, news, theories and generally wander into uncharted territory.
Purpose of blogs? --myriam, Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:24:45 -0500 reply
I question the use of blogs per se. I agree on the buzz they can create, but it is unclear yet what step by step strategy can make a blog successful. And what is a successful blog? The number of participants? or the content it generates? Can it (and has it often enough) marry the two? And what is the benchmark? Yet, am intersted to hear more about them due to the impact of some of those on issues such as Irak etc... Fianlyl there is also the issue within the whole Citizen journalists of reliability of information and the trend towards agreement of behaviour standard on the net generally, on blogs in particular. So I'd suggest it'd be approached both from Kathy's perspective and the perspective of efficacy and ethics.
Purpose of blogs --Patrick Olszowski, Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:21:37 -0500 reply
I am Patrick (PR Manager at healthcare charity, Action Medical Research). We have been using blogs for two projects - one with great success, and one with very, very limited success. The first was started not by us, but by the father of a pair of premature boys, as they were in hospital. They were identified via Technorati, by our web manager, and were asked to get involved with our major Fundraising appeal - Touching Tiny Lives. This appeal, as well as raising money to fund research into preventing premature birth, was also calling on Government to put more money into tackling this problem.
The human angle helped to generate major national broadcast coverage (they were billed as the world's youngest charity campaigners) and were followed up a year later, when they delivered our online petition to No.10 - one of the final face to face deliveries, before the egregious affront that is the "you must petition via the No.10 website"!!
The other has been, for the same campaign, to promote a fundraising event - and here I totally agree with Kathy, it is so difficult to a) distinguish between what is corporate message and genuinely unfettered comment (I would argue that moderation now means most charity/NGO blogs are not genuinely unfettered) and b) to market these blogs to wider interest.
In essence think it comes back to having 1) organisational willingness to relinquish some control over content (hard), 2) a compelling story or something genuinely unique (also hard) and 3) a resourced marketing plan.
I would be very interested to hear peoples' thoughts on all the above
blogs and promotion --ecornellana, Wed, 02 May 2007 05:12:18 -0500 reply
We tested some blogs from people who are in the field or in a summit at Intermón. I agree we created them without a clear strategy and without promotion, so, the success wasn't big. We are interested in showing a message/what we are doing and it seems people are not very interested in that kind of message, but maybe the problem is the way we write that message? How can a blog be effective? How can a blog be engaging? How can we balance the background - technical information and the anecdotal information? Who are we writing to? Are we segmentating our readers? Sometimes I feel we decide to create a blog without a clear purpose, we only want to be there, but there's no strategy at all. So, I would like to learn more about blog purposes and clear guidelines when we want to start building one.
Sonia Fèvre will join this --duane, Wed, 02 May 2007 11:31:08 -0500 reply
... --emmasavery, Wed, 02 May 2007 11:59:14 -0500 reply
Emma Savery - Birmimgham University Guild of Students, want to more about the use of blogging
Purpose of organizational blogs --AndrewDavies, Thu, 03 May 2007 03:59:43 -0500 reply
Kathy raises a good point. For some organizations (including Greenpeace at times) unreviewed public statements can even compromise security (put your people or partner groups working in the field at risk). The model we usually follow is a trusted blogger who agrees to work withing certain (often fairly loose boundaries). I would be interested to hear how other groups are approaching this challenge.
Pascale Zintzen would like to join this session --Pascale Zintzen, Fri, 04 May 2007 06:37:34 -0500 reply
MSF has just launched a international blog page, and lots of interrogations remain, both about the content, limitation, effectivity, purpose, as well as the practical organisation to maintain blogs up to date.
Beyond outreach, how can the biosphere help campaigns --Brian, Mon, 07 May 2007 19:23:56 -0500 reply
How can we transform campaigners into trusted bloggers? --thomas Noirfalisse, Tue, 08 May 2007 07:34:51 -0500 reply
Within Oxfam International, one of the main issue we are facing is how should we help / train them to write for the web and how do we treat this type of content. It is all about the difference betw. blogs entries and very formal communication channels (with their associated complex workflows, sign-off processes, etc.). Sub-question > when shouldn't we blog ? and why ?
Bex Sumner (Greenpeace UK) would like to join this session --bex_sumner, Tue, 08 May 2007 07:55:40 -0500 reply
