Without a Yard

Herein lies the sequel to the last post on humour & activism…some interesting case studies & words of encouragement have been ping’ed back.

Honourable mentions & fond reminiscing over LOLs of yore went to many American-election-related clips (Sarah Silverman’s Great Schlep, Barely Political’s Obama Girl meme) & last winter’s brutal Prop 8 melee in California, whose only silver lining/legacy is this over-the-top-star-studded-musical a melodic religious fundamentalist parody.

Celebrity aside, the juice that kept these URLs circulating was the humourous content – what many marketers/communicators love to call ‘sticky’ messaging – transmitted thanks to a wry undertone, quirky theme or flat-out parody.

The need to be *truly* funny was driven home by this week’s Sunlight Foundation blog post about how ineffective standard mass emails are for political/advocacy campaigns.

We’ve become increasingly immune to receiving messages guiltily prodding us into action, making donations or heightening our awareness through this inbox-filling-platform.  Just think – how many emails with witty titles do you delete sight-unseen on the daily?

One of the great things about pumping out newsletter-style emails to your preaching-to-the-converted-list is the metrics that you can mine for unique hits, forwards, open-rates, etc.

Sadly, according to the folks at Sunlight, open rates ain’t what they used to be.  Jake Brewer echoed many consultant/client concerns musing:

“I have a confession to make, though. I really don’t like email that much. I see 30% open rate and think “70% delete rate.” I see 8% click through, and think… “oh jeez.”

Strongly encourage you to check out his entire post as he eerily accurately dissects what has now become the cookie-cutter template for all advocacy/NGO emails:

SUBJ: Something catchy/funny/intriguing/pun to get you to open the email

That prompted an ‘oh jeez’ of my own…guilty as charged.  Often.  Moving beyond cheeky wordplay, what other funny elements can campaign communicators whip out to stand out?

One recent example, which used cheeky language IRL & online, stands out because it focused on the mobile platform’s hottest PYT, Foursquare.

Earthjustice’s San Francisco campaign is now in metro stations to assist their legal efforts to prosecute the oil companies behind the spill. BART stations around SF are displaying this advertisement, prompting transit users to check into a location called “Earthjustice Ad“, which results in an Earthjustice donor chipping in $10.

Many reasons to love this campaign, let’s try to list most of’em here:

• No onus on participants to donate

• BUT campaign message lingers in user’s Foursquare stream…& Earthjustice hopes users’ll scratch curious itches by visiting the NGO’s site…& hopefully/eventually donating themselves…

• By checking into the location, user’s friends’ streams are notified (the kids are calling this ‘viral’ these days)

• More bang-for-buck on ad-buy

• Metrics, metrics, metrics

• Novelty & time-killing aspect of foursquare is a perfect fit for transit downtimes (types the mayor of three streetcar lines…)

Now Earthjustice isn’t about to bonus its staff with a foursquare-funded Faberge egghunt anytime soon.

A quick visit to the registered location page itself yields some underwhelming results:

But, hey, it’s early days & in the grand scheme of things it’s $3,100 that I’d bet Earthjustice wouldn’t receive otherwise from these transit users’ involvement.  (There’s also a ‘Various Locations‘ version, too, with similar uptake).

It’d be great to hear what your predictions are for the next wave of cheeky/funny/quirky advocacy work going & how big of a role will mobile/location-based apps play…

Wisdom handed down from the blog oracle advises against writing when upset, which is probably the same futile logic that propelled legislation against road rage, but in the world of ‘current affairs’ online – delaying a post 18 hours seems prudent enough, this barely qualifies as current anymore, even.

Of course I couldn’t really keep my online mouth shut this long – after receiving emails about the tragic death of a Toronto cyclist and the sad circumstances of the accident, I started posting thoughts and reflections on Twitter.

For non-Torontonians unaware of the online rubbernecking, review the national newspapers or television stations to find a breathless breakdown in hour-by-hour bullet points of assumed/alleged actions.  Don’t forget to watch videos from the various eye witnesses, the arrest scene itself, and the sadly-reminiscent-of-an-AG-press-conference car-towing.

Until officials fully review security tapes and statements from witnesses, there is no point speculating  culpability.  What was most stunning, and poorly articulated in my blurbs under 140 characters, was last night’s stark contrast to the fortunes of Ted Kennedy.

Today’s politicians live in a virtual fishbowl, many, like Bryant, tried to embrace it – speaking directly to constituents or stakeholders through YouTube channels, attempting to connect with new online audiences, and presenting a personal ‘self’ in media interviews.  Unfortunately, the hyper connected/accessible/affordable means to capture and publish media online tears down as well as it builds up.  The enthusiasm and momentum embracing a ‘viral video’ is equally powerful when packaging and distributing mass amounts of information, teasing it out under the guise of objective news and judging a case before a court date is booked.

Today’s newscycle illustrates that the impressively productive career following Kennedy’s tragic fatal mistake cannot be reproduced by allegedly erring politicians today.  Even the tone of Kennedy’s statement released after the investigation – less an ‘apology’ than a fierce rebuttal – seems completely opposite to the bleary eyed press conferences staffed by scrubbed-clean family members, or the vaseline-lensed ‘exclusive’ interviews to ‘set things straight’ after a scandal.

The Toronto Twitter community, at least the fraction in which I choose to participate, has a very large cyclist crew.  Reviewing their comments, I was immensely impressed with the respectful and sombre tone as they reflected on the sad news and awaited substantiated facts.

Most encouraging of these commentators was Mark Kuznicki, spearheader of ChangeCamp, TransitCamp organizer and now a force behind BikeCampTO.  Follow @bikeunion for more information & hopefully road-sharing/transit/infrastructure becomes an ongoing conversation with all Torontonians, unprovoked by a tragedy.

Been reviewing relatively recent Toronto plan-undoings that involve citizens rallying around a piece of property & pushing back – online, natch.  What drew me to the first was plain’ol’personal interest & proximity – the No Big Box in Leslieville campaign.  Take a boo at their webpage - it’s nothing special.  But it worked.

The second was brought to my attention by a clued-in-colleague with a nose for all things green’n'municipal – the Strachan bridge offered up by Metrolinx.   This advocacy group’s site is even less stunning – how the heck do you navigate this thing?  Who came up with that rambling acronym? (stands for “STOP METROLINX Super-Bridge on Strachan Ave”, FYI) Where do those hot models live?  But it worked.

Finally, a photo-journo extraordinaire reported Home Depot’s foiled plans, which made us realize that local hardware handymen can’t do it nor can they help.   Although Home Depot cited economic concerns were behind their retrenchment, there was little to no local lurv & my *super thorough* online investigation includes year+ of grumblings & mumblings…

So wha’happen?

As much as I’d love to blame the developers for not wielding flashy splashy sites to dazzle & inform residents, it’s easier than that.

There’s nothing high tech, high falutin’ or high octane about the anti-project sites & their successful offshoots – Facebook groups & online petitions.

It’s the basic call-to-arms simplicity that saved the day in the two most recent examples.

Check your options on the No Big Box site:

• Sign & Circulate a FAQ sheet or Petition (downloadable in PDF & Excel, respectively)
• Display a No Big Box in Leslieville Poster in the window of your home or business (downloadable in 2 sizes, B&W or colour, in PDF)
• Attend an OMB meeting (dates updated on homepage/only page & OMB’s website offered in case user can’t attend a ‘real life’ meeting)

Same with the Strachan’ites:

• Regular updates from municipal & provincial politicos
• Email blast cross-posted on homepage
• Drive to petition, Facebook Group, Photo Gallery of plans

Although it’s far less straightforward than the Leslieville gang, it acted as a vital hub for anyone searching for information about the bridge & immediately offered actionable tasks to affect change.

From feedback posted by the publicspaceratti after new non-bridgey-plans were announced, the community appears pretty happy with Metrolinx’s compromise.

So what can we learn from these two successful online grassroots campaigns & one scared-off developer?

You can quickly frame the discussion & perception of a project by mounting a simple online campaign HQ that offers basic information, easy-to-understand & actionable tasks, & multiple off-shoots (petitions, Twitter, Facebook groups, e-mail signups, links to authorities) for your supporters to review, repurpose & redistribute.

Developers, investors, corporations & local politicians can learn a great deal from the momentum built on these sites, the frequent maintenance, updates, engagement, as well as the clarity with which they describe a problem/plan & offer immediate levers to send feedback.

Establishing in-real-life consultations – as well as concurrent online fora – is only the first step – executing these events & maintaining the web properties has to be conducted transparently, while prioritizing frequent updates, accessibility & ease-of-use.

Easy.

Howdy.  I know I said I’d blog more about transparency issues – but you can see right through me – I’m swamped.  This entry’s a two-fer & being cross-posted over here at the ChangeCamp blog, too.

Whoddathunkit? ChangeCamp blogger expectedly expressing love of transparency and, plot twist of all plot twists, turns out to be a lobbyist. Yeah, I just dropped the real taboo L-word.

So I’m @withoutayard, meegs to my friends & a registered lobbyist in the province of Ontario. And you may ask yourself-well…how did she get here?

Living in Austin during the last not-quite-as-amazing American federal election, led me to blogging & playing with online communications tools to affect change, raise awareness & spread awesome.  Returning to Canuckistan, I served a tour at the Pink Palace, but never quite mastered the mysterious machinations of political parties.  Unlike @dchartier, I couldn’t cut it in the civil service, even though sound recording policy at Heritage Canada was pretty darn close to a perfect policy-wonkette fit during a brief federal foray.

Combine the forces (read: career failures & bad-fits) & it sort of makes sense, right?  Witnessing the Dean machine go off the rails as a viral video trainwreck, seeing Meetup’s potential beyond UT Japanese exchange & making campaign donations as easy as Amazon blew my mind in ’04 (& broke my heart the night of November 2^nd).  True patriot love of responsible government, parliamentary democracy & social justice/equity brought me home & hoping to see these transformative tools used in a Timmy’s.

I doubt I’ll ever get to geek out in a war room or a party HQ.  Partisan politics brings out the agnostic in me.  The thought of hundreds of thousands of dollars spent during a campaign on balloons, signs, buttons & miscellaneous paraphernalia drives me absolutely bonkers.  Working within the system, keeping abreast of legislative issues, regulatory nerdery & jealously eyeing the open source enthusiasm, technological progress & federal government’s paradigm shift to the South is a great fit for now.

Blogging about the last provincial & federal elections, especially the creative campaigns on provincial electoral reform & federal vote-swapping was encouraging.  A taste.   But not enough.

Enter ChangeCamp. Citizen-initiated, non-hierarchical, collaborative & generally all things old-school civics.  We have the tools, skills & thanks to some shindig yesterday in DC, the enthusiasm & momentum.  So let’s do some heavy lifting & make our standards for transparency and engagement the new status quo.  Liberate APIs, wiki-fy policy docs, de-PDF the whole shebang.  Easy.

What a winter wonderland of political punditry & nerd momentum ramping up across the city.

Not only have I been extra lucky to have returned to TO ready to tackle not one – but two – fab-u events on the subject of citizen engagement in the political process, but south of the border the upcoming Inauguration Day has hearts aflutter for all things civics.

On the micro-level, from a favourite source stateside, I”ll pass on a link to a Sunlight Foundation’s blog post about 2 bills on the books for the new Congress to tackle regarding transparency – The Presidential Library Donation Reform Act & The Presidential Records Act (Bush’s current Executive Order is keeping prez records top secret indefinitely…).  Fingers crossed that this new BaraClimate ushers in an era of openness to public records. Let’s keep an eye on these for practical & symbolic reasons – they’re introduced in  Congress’ 1st week back, they deal with Bush’s undoings/records literally & figureatively & they’ve got a connection to the actual tangible content that will make up American history – digital & IRL.

On the other hand, TechPresident reported that Republicans are using the ‘transparency’ buzzwords to push the Dems to release the proposed $700B stimulus package online for public vetting.  So what is the transparency tradeoff for the Feds?  We are all used to grand idealistic schemes winning hearts’n'votes during a campaign, but once the actual tactics need to be deployed…things aren’t as black’n'white as many hoped. (For some pretty prescriptive practical priorities Brits at MySociety.org have a Top 5 for ‘Next Government’ to implement digital solutions & The Atlantic cites open API – #2 on MS’s list – as the silver bullet to opening up government to the citizenry.)

Going through nutso levels of security & then enduring the Breakfast-Club-style-insanity of our province’s yearly budget lockup to be briefed on the Ministry of Finance’s yearly plans brings to light the importance of some materials, plans & statistics to be kept under-wraps for a certain period of time before they’re mature.

But what about the pre-maturity-time, you ask…the adolescence of our legs’n'regs?  Well, Change.org’s 250K votes submitted as a part of the Change for America contest indicates that citizens are more than willing to contribute their 2cents & I’d assume that they have realistic expectations of the impact their submissions’ll have if they’re not echoed in many others (sorry to the sad interweb user who voted 1.39M times, they have these tracker thingers that can measure that stuff nowadays :S)

The *real* pre stages on the political side are the leadership races & grassroots level riding association cage matches…it’s one thing to encourage open data from the ‘crats…but why do we expect so much less from the politicos?  I was encouraged to read that the Ontario Dippers had increased its membership by 25% ramping up for their spring leadership race.  Think it helps when you’re soliciting sales for those lil’cards that you can promise all members a chance to vote for their leader in what’s called a ‘preferential vote contest‘, which lets voters rank candidates on a ballot (don’t get me started on voting & my love of rankin’family solutions for electoral disfunction).

More posts to come about the events themselves & how these transparency trends will no doubt change the game for government, NGOs, advocates of all stripes online…

Requisite Music Reference – This is the best radio station for hip hop mixes – Cerritos All Stars Live Interactive Mix Show.  Amazing.  Makes me wanna move into a bigger’do & invest in some 1s’n’2s