Creative Actions

Event Notes

Creative Web Actions: Lessons/tips & tricks

Before you do an action, ask yourself

• What do you want to achieve?
• What tools will help you achieve it?

How traditional Web Actions (e.g. letter/email writing to a President) can be improved:

• Writing simple letters to the target with a strong message
• Ask activists to use their own language covering a few key points (particularly when the target is likely to actually read the messages)
• Send a message to the target not asking them to do something, but informing/warning the target that you will take a certain further action on the issue
• Use informal language, making a personal connections between campaigner and activist (especially in Web Actions pushed out/emailed to activists): Greenpeace Int finds that Web Actions that have the photo of the campaigner are taken more often than those that don't (WA's with a personal touch are nicely tied in with a campaigner's blog)
• Make good use of the "thank you" page (ask activist to sign up to future action alerts)

Is there such a thing as a failed Web Action?

• If the Web Actions hasn't achieved the goal, build a follow-up action to capitalise on the "failure' (e.g. you received 10,000 letters on this issue which you ignored, now we are asking you to�)
• Even those Web Actions that haven't been popular have helped to raise awareness, and keep the pool of activists "warm'

Tools

• If you want numbers, make it as easy as possible for the activist to take the action
• If you want a specific audience, choose the appropriate tool for them
• Viral games: it's difficult to make a good one (needs to be simple, fun, short & easy to play) & & at the end: sign petition, sign-up to email list, etc
• Use entertainment to get people to take action (e.g. www.cluetrain.org)
• Blogs (they need to be monitored)
• Use competitions to get creative ideas from the public (e.g. web developers to send in their ideas for a viral games, etc)
• Use incentives: collect points which can be redeemed (ideally freebie shouldn't get in the way of the cause! But then, maybe it's worth getting 1000 new contacts for a digital camera)

Promotion

• Hook Web Action to dates important to the public
• Email your pool of activists every new Web Action to drive traffic to your website
• Use "chasers" ( chaser emails) to ask people to take the action if they haven't already done so.
• Use "echos" (taster emails) to tell people what's coming soon.
• Ideally promote an action using different channels (email, sms, website, etc)
• Combo of online & offline media: ideally TV, radio, press ads (can be costly!) - e.g. Christian Aid Week always carries a TV ad
• Use famous writers, film directors to do some work for us for free
• Fundraise specifically for ads that have a 1-day turn-around (i.e. raise money to create an ad in 1 day, so that funders/donors can see where their money goes right away) - see moveon.org ads
• Advertise on Google using text ads (not sure what this means?) - e.g. Moveon used this for the Hurrican Katrina campaign
• Be controversial
• Effective emails: send out videos & podcasts to draw pple back to website, avoid calling something "newsletter' (maybe divide into "action alerts", "newsflashes", "digests")

Testing creative Web Action

• Use focus groups (send emails to different groups with different subject lines) - these can be other members of staff, etc
• Get feedback from eCampaigning Forum peers

Ideas

• Check the Internet Advertising Bureau website for "best web action" of the month [www.iab.uk.net]?
• Don't shy away from looking at corporate campaigns to get ideas
• Greenpeace virtual march: using photos of individuals sent in (by mobile phone, etc), these photos were taken and projected on a wall opposite the ??? conference (on whaling??) = online action and offline presentation of action
• Greenpeace idea of Eurovision song contest: write your own lyrics to the UK entry on a particular issue (for example)
• Overlay Google maps to see how an area has changes (e.g. after industrial accident, Tsunami, earthquake, etc)
• Google maps to find a weird location (e.g. showing soil erosion, etc)
• Design competition via Flickr
• If using marketing companies, hold them accountable for results
• Photopetition (effective when presenting this, e.g. in form of image mosaic)
• Multi-layered CDs? (1st layer - music, 2nd layer political content) for karaoke bars in Burma

Good News/Updates

Because campaigners usually email updates/good news to pool of activists, they often don't send such emails as many see it as a "waste" of email which could have promoted a new Web Action.

Websites to look at

• Storewars
• Boreme.com (campaigns?)
• Punchbaby (virals)
• Zefrank (flash animation)
• Wefail.com (chicken slaughtering flash animations, �15k)
• Mysterious chicken & google stats (ask Paul)
• Erik does an emotion
• gcast.com (viral stuff?)
• ifilms (viral stuff?)
• hitwise (tacks millions of users, but expensive)

Interested Participants

comments:

... -- Fri, 13 Jan 2006 10:57:30 -0600 reply
Richard English - interested in attending