Last week, Heads of State from over 100 countries met in Copenhagen to negotiate an International agreement to tackle climate change in what has been described as humanity’s last chance to deal with the crisis.

As millions watched in hope, citizens’ organisations launched an unprecedented global effort to influence the summit, and ensure a fair and binding treaty.

The ‘ tck tck tck ‘ campaign, an alliance of over 200 organisations working together for climate justice has created a unique campaigning platform, to mobilise over 100, 000 people on the streets of Copenhagen, and a further 15 million people around the world in a range of actions from candlelight vigils to flash mobs and street marches.

Describing the approach, Campaign Director Ben Margolis explains how they have used a combination of offline action and online coordination mobilise strategically with targeted campaigns: “On December 12^th we launched a global day of action called ‘The World Wants a Real Deal’, over  3000 candlelight vigils were organised in 139 countries. If it wasn’t for digital media our efforts may have gone unnoticed, but we were heard loud and clear and images of citizen action were broadcast across the world.”

To capture images from local events the campaign set up a flickr photostream, all partner websites contained an email link where event organisers could send photos, which were automatically added to the photostream.  Teams of digital campaigners in various time zones would then tag and sort the photographs according to media relevance, country and picture quality.

While photos provided a useful resource, video content was also seen as crucial for securing press coverage. However the campaign team faced the triple challenge of collecting video, accessing suitable formats finding capacity for professional editing.

To address this, tck tck tck subscribed to a new online service hosted by ‘Citizen Global’. This web-based service allowed the team to create a collaborative online studio including the necessary tools to edit, mix and remix clips at broadcast quality. Individuals and partners were able to upload video content directly to a climate change project space, where staff and volunteers could also edit and process incoming content and issue it for distribution to media networks through RSS and other forms of syndication.

”Within a matter of hours, 526 videos were uploaded to Citizen Global and over 12, 000 photographs were received on our flickr photostream. We were all quite astonished, we could never have collated this much content in such a short time without these tools, we received hundreds of incredible videos we could then use for advocacy”, explained Sam Mclean, a digital campaigner for partner organisation, Avaaz.org.

(To see an example of what can be produced see The World Wants a Real Deal Video )

In order to promote these digital assets, tck tck tck harnessed the power of social media releases (SMRs) using a web-based tool call ‘Pitch Engine’. This allowed any supporter or partner to produce their own press release instantly co branded with tck tck tck; this release could be indexed by Google within hours and posted to twitter, digg and other social media sites, linking to relevant digital assets on flickr and Citizen Global. Journalists could access a suite of content to support their stories whether they were reporting locally, nationally or internationally. Bloggers supporting the campaign were also able to use this content in their posts and generate ‘chatter’ which is often picked up by mainstream media.

“This was the first time we used this strategy. Our goal was to deliver a powerful message and it was of course very risky. We effectively relinquished control of media production and messaging, but our reach and influence increased significantly and we provided people with the logos and a broad template” Said Karina Brisby, Head of Digital for partner organisation Oxfam.

SMS text messaging also played a role. The Clickatel service allowed tck tck tck partners to communicate with each other, organise flash mobs and respond rapidly to developments at the summit. In one instance where negotiations were ignoring the needs of Small Island States, vulnerable to climate change, the campaign team were able to organise a flash mob using SMS to contact accredited civil society delegates inside the conference centre.

‘Google sites’ allowed organisers to develop a knowledge hub with contact details, key documents, schedules, location maps, news updates and meeting minutes as well as a rapid response list serve.. “The Google site provided an instant intranet for partners and organisations to work together in our advocacy efforts and share intelligence. This had a significant impact on our ability to respond rapidly to developments within the summit and deploy resources as needed” explained Jean-Marc Mangin, Executive Director of the Global Call for Climate Action (GCCA).

Looking under the hood of civil society campaigning at Copenhagen, it is clear that a new form of advocacy is emerging, mobilisation has moved beyond national campaigns, global challenges have necessitated a new form of citizen action, where digital technology is enabling people to act together across borders. Organisations are developing the capacity to respond rapidly and build targeted campaigns to influence change.

As the dust settles on a Summit and hope of a fair and legally binding climate deal fades, perhaps new hope lies not in the capacity of world leaders to find solutions, but in the power of the new global activism. Was Copenhagen simply a moment in the political calendar, or the birth of a new and powerfully equipped citizens movement?

In the near 30 years MTV has been in operation, it has played a tremendous role in shaping popular youth culture.  In addition to the videos, popular culture and reality TV shows, the network has a long history of promoting social activism through innovative campaigns.  The channel has covered political, social, and environmental issues and used its vast network of resources to get the messaging across.

One such campaign is the “Staying Alive” campaign.  It was initially launched in 1998 as a TV program to raise awareness on safe-sex and HIV/AIDS issues.  At the time, Bill Roedy, current Chairman and CEO of MTV Networks International realized that the original MTV generation grew up without any formal HIV/AIDS awareness education.  Roedy’s extensive work with UNAIDS had him recognize the importance of addressing this topic as part of global youth citizenship, and the impact the education can have on youth health and sexual identity.  Since being launched, Staying Alive quickly became one of the world’s largest awareness and advocacy campaigns for HIV/AIDS.

After almost 6 years of success, the MTV Staying Alive Foundation (SAF) was founded in 2004.  As the TV program team met with various teens and young people to film documentaries and PSAs for the campaign, they quickly saw the dearth of ideas the youth had and their lack of resources to materialize these ideas and projects.  From there, the foundation was built on the philosophy of connecting youth at the grass-roots level to provide resources and tools for causes around HIV/AIDS awareness.

Paul Dien, Director of Strategic Partnerships of the MTV Staying Alive Foundation says they realized as a grant writing organization that SAF “can do more than just give [grants], we can also help inspire the youth.”  The foundation’s mission is to “encourage, energize, and empower young people who are involved in HIV/AIDS awareness, education, and prevention campaigns.”  Staying Alive Foundation fulfills on this mission through small scale grants of up to $12,000 to youth and adults below 28 years of age.

With MTV’s pervasive brand presence and ample resources for messaging, SAF has a powerful platform to pursue its objectives.  In addition to MTV’s traditional media resources, the organization uses various new media tools such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and Mashable to build online ubiquity.  When asked what differentiates SAF from other HIV/AIDS awareness organizations, Dien says that SAF is a multi-platform organization that has a strong online and digital presence as well as marketing savvy from staff members’ years at MTV.  Dien also acknowledges that leveraging the MTV branding helps to “cultivate compelling stories to the audience.”

As an example, SAF has appointed two celebrity ambassadors, Travis McCoy and Kelly Rowland to further the organization’s efforts.  The use of celebrity representatives provides yet another avenue for SAF to reach mass audiences on awareness about HIV/AIDS.  As part of his ambassadorship, McCoy mentions his involvement with Staying Alive in his Tweets, and has over 900,000 followers on his Twitter account.  Despite any potential capital resource constraints as a non-profit organization, the use of social media in this manner is highly cost effective, as it serves as a cheap, quick, and expansive communications tool.

Another innovative approach incorporating new technology was a campaign called “Stand By What You Say” from 2008.  The aim of the campaign was to encourage and empower young people to speak openly about sex and HIV/AIDS in an effort to reduce stigma and discrimination often associated with the disease.  The campaign was a groundbreaking cause-related social networking campaign utilizing voice powered technology.  People were prompted to call a number and leave a voice message which would then be converted to text.  This text would then be posted on an online blog to further community engagement and discussion.  Upon leaving a message, callers were subsequently asked to make a pledge to the Staying Alive Foundation.

A campaign like “Stand By What You Say” breaks the mold in the manner in which people make donations to charities, as well as how people share sensitive and personal topics on a large scale without fear of embarrassment or retribution, while simultaneously fostering open dialogue.  The campaign demonstrated that youth and young adults could involve and educate others to change attitudes about the AIDS epidemic and safe-sex measures in a cutting-edge way.

SAF’s work is promoted with no political agenda, and much of its educational resources- TV programming, video, and literature are rights free.  Taking this approach helps the foundation promote its objectives to as broad of an audience as possible, and fosters a sense of community through active information sharing.

Aside from the MTV Staying Alive Foundation, Population Services International’s YouthAIDS is the most comparable organization active in this space, with efforts to educate youth about HIV/AIDS through the use of media and pop culture.  What distinguishes SAF from YouthAIDS are its grants to the youth to help launch programs and projects related to HIV/AIDS awareness and education.

As Dien notes, SAF is “trying to do it full-out” in its approach to get the right messaging across to its audience, and it will be interesting to continue to follow the organization while it works with MTV and the cadre of associated brands under the Viacom/MTV empire.

http://foundation.staying-alive.org/en

Breaking the Silence is an organization run by veteran Israeli soldiers who have served in the occupied Palestinian territories over the past ten years.  The goal of the organization, with a staff of ten, is to “bridge the gap of information between what the soldiers see, experience, and participate in during their service, and what the Israeli public is aware of,” explains Avital Aboody, a current staff-member and New Israel Fund/Shatil Social Justice Fellow.  It doesn’t take much to realize that this organization probably does not have a ton of support in its home country, as a majority of Israelis have shifted to a more conservative political stance since the second Intifada began in 2001. 

The staff of Breaking the Silence claims that they are not particularly media savvy and not unique in any way with regard to utilizing social media tools.  According to Aboody, the “primary goal of using the website is reach as many people as possible and to enhance our ability to raise widespread awareness.”  While most non-profits prioritize raising funds through their websites, Breaking the Silence is not all that concerned about funds, which it receives from various foundations and donor governments.  The organization’s goals, instead, are “increased awareness and transparency between the public and the military,” says Aboody, and Facebook, in this light, has lately been a key to their success.

With a Facebook group and profile in place, Breaking the Silence has been able to “maximize our ability to communicate with our allies around the world,” says Aboody.  So far, she exclaims, joining Facebook “has been very very successful and has allowed us to attract a lot of new people to our events,” including tours of the occupied territories and lectures about the daily actions of the Israeli military.

As a politically active organization in a region of the world where tensions are deep and war has occurred every decade since the late 1940s, Breaking the Silence must rely heavily on its ability to find remote allies to strengthen its power base at home. Aboody explains how the organization has recently faced “efforts by the government and an NGO-monitoring organization to censor our information to keep us from ‘breaking our silence,’ but media tools have been helpful because we can quickly elicit the support of like-minded groups who are willing to stand behind us and vouch for our legitimacy.”  As they see it, they can’t be all over the world at all times with a staff of their size, but with Facebook they can easily make their message seen and heard by many more people than they were capable of reaching beforehand.      

It may sound like the days of “grassroots” advocacy (picketing for hours and staking out on the streets for days to get petitions signed) are just about over.  Do activists no longer see the value of face-to-face interactions, opting instead for YouTube, Facebook, or Blogspot to engage the public with their message?  Are they spending more of their time navigating the Web than they are actually changing the world?  While this might appear to be the case for Breaking the Silence, the organization’s staff-members do not report feeling like they spend more, or much, of their time for that matter navigating social media sites.  Because it’s so easy to keep up the Facebook group page and profile, and the website designer manages the website, most of the staff are spending the majority of their time continuing the one-on-one interactions with people on the ground.  They continue to take people on tours of the territories, hold lecture series, and interview veteran soldiers about their years in the Israeli Defense Forces. 

The internet is just part of the process of engaging with the public; it is not the process itself.  If anything, for the passionate employees of non-profit organizations who want to make the world a better place, social networking sites like Facebook are simply a more efficient and effective way of continuing the legacy of grassroots advocacy and inching that much closer to their desired goals, and they still get to find out this weekend’s party line-up and what their friend’s cousin ate for breakfast while they’re at it.

This year NGOs campaigning for action against poverty and climate change watched in awe as developed world governments mobilized over $8.43 trillion to bail out financial institutions and stabilize their economies.

According to Oxfam, this would be ‘enough to end global extreme poverty for 50 years and a massive step towards ending it forever’.

“Developing economies have been left reeling from a crisis they had no responsibility in causing. The actions of the G20 so far have been like rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic, and now they are running for the lifeboats leaving the rest of us to drown. The biggest problem is a lack of accountability at these meetings. Peoples voices are totally excluded.”  (Dr. Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director, Greenpeace)

After years of traditional advocacy at international summits and limited traction, Oxfam and other NGOs are now looking to the online world as a way of bringing voice, transparency and accountability to global forums to help mobilize political will and action.

‘Voice’, an initiative lead by Oxfam, and hosted on ‘writespeakact.org’, seeks to connect bloggers to important political events, where they can gain unprecedented access to policy makers and world leaders.

‘We assist bloggers with gaining accreditation to international summits, arrange briefings, interviews and press conferences. We want to amplify existing voices and support new ones in order to build greater participation and representation“(Jason Wojciechowski, Voice Project lead)

The project launched with “G20 Voice” in April 2009 at the G20’s London Summit, an online election was organized for 50 blogger spaces; ‘widgets’ were placed across partners’ websites.  The ‘Voice’ project team invited people to nominate and vote for their ‘Voice at the G20’.

Blog writers hailing from “bitchbuzz.com” and ‘jackandjillpolitics.com’ to “saudijeans.org’ and ‘oneworldsouthasia.net’ were accredited and brought to the summit to cover proceedings and share their analysis with the world.  The hope was that blog coverage of these events would generate greater awareness of the issues discussed and increase public pressure on world leaders to act against poverty and climate change.

“This was the first time bloggers were able to gain access to the G20, we received a huge amount of media coverage and interest in our bloggers perspectives on the issues being discussed. We set up meetings between the bloggers and lead G20 negotiators for the US and UK and one of the bloggers even asked a question at the closing summit press conference.” (Jason Wojciehowski)

In September 2009, the project evolved further, and ‘ClimateVoice’ was born along with ‘HerVoice’ as a way of bringing bloggers into UN Meetings on Climate Change and amplifying the voices of women at the UN. Bloggers were able to register at ‘writespeakact.org’ where they could sign up for specific events, see their custom schedule along with schedules of other bloggers, whom they could then communicate and connect with. The new format enabled greater collaboration and coordination amongst the bloggers who could discuss which events they would like to attend, request more information and post links to their content. Partner organizations were able to invite bloggers to come and cover their events and organise ‘blogger briefings’ on key development issues.

Bloggers would tag all of their content with either ‘ClimateVoice’ or ‘HerVoice’ which allowed the project team to aggregate all the blogs and   link to them using twitter and facebook. The initiative provided over 100 bloggers with access to a range of events including round table meetings of world leaders, press conferences, film screenings, debates and panel discussions.

“However we still haven’t managed to build a large enough blogging community that can continually follow these summits and generate enough chatter to make a significant media impact.”

The next phase for the voice team, 9 months into the project, will come next month in Copenhagen, where Oxfam is partnering with members of the ‘tcktcktck’ campaign to launch a blog space at the Cop15 climate summit which will be called the ‘Fresh Air Center”. The plan is to create a digital space for accredited bloggers within the summit to use for rapid response press conferences, interviews and meetings with brought-in experts, whilst also attracting the interest of Cop15 delegates. In order to reach a wider audience, digital campaigners from the following organisation will support the Fresh Air center and ensure bloggers are connected to developments as they occur:

• Avaaz
• Greenpeace
• Oxfam
• CAN
• IndyAct
• NRDC
• 1Sky
• UN Foundation
• 350.org

Bloggers form the following organizations have agreed to join the initiative:

• Huffington Post
• Treehugger
• OneWorld
• CampusProgress
• GlobalVoices
• TheUptake
• ClimateProgress
• Adopt-a-Netogiator

In a short period of time, the ‘Voice’ project has become a standard feature of international summits on poverty and climate change, it has empowered bloggers from over 50 countries and reached thousands of people across the world with diverse perspectives of what is happening in the worlds most powerful forums. While this initiative is still in its infancy, it represents a growing trend, an online revolution, which is now spreading offline, and affecting the way people participate in fundamental ways. Voice at global summits which once belonged to invited elites, is now available to thousands of people, following the actions of world leaders, sharing their perspectives and increasing accountability by one more notch. What comes next? Governments: Watch this space!

After hanging around for a few more minutes, one might notice the constant circulation of women who come in and out throughout the day.  The women sit down with the two staff-members, Executive Director Ana Moraga and Program Coordinator Wendy Rosales, spilling the recent news and gossip and chatting away about their lives.  They have ups and downs like any other woman I know.  They might bring up concerns about their children not attending school, or anxieties they’re having about their family members’ financial troubles.  So what’s special about this organization?  The women come from one of most marginalized groups of women in Guatemala (not to mention the rest of the world).  The women are sex workers.

MuJER, which stands for Mujeres por la Justicia, Educación, y Reconocimiento (Women for Justice, Education, and Awareness), is a small non-profit organization dedicated to assisting women sex workers in Guatemala City in empowering themselves through classes ranging from literacy courses to beauty certification courses.  MuJER also advocates for the human rights of sex workers.  Fundraising, as for many non-profit organizations, is a key ingredient in MuJER’s success.  But the serious challenges inherent in trying to raise donations with such a tiny full-time staff, a challenging and unique mission, and a clientele of low-income, and often socially rejected women are undeniable. 

The question, then, is how does such a small, under-resourced organization raise enough funds and make enough of an impression on potential donors to sustainably achieve its objectives and provide its services to the women?  The answer lies in the Internet. 

MuJER is merely four years old.  It has 501(c)3 status in the United States so that Americans can make tax-deductible donations to the organization.  One of MuJER’s main fundraising goals is to market itself to American donors, as there are many US donors who are interested in global human rights issues (not to mention that there are significantly larger numbers of donors ready and willing to donate to non-profit organizations in the US than there are in Guatemala).  But how would someone in the US even learn of MuJER?  And why would anyone from the US contribute to MuJER over other organizations? 

These were some of the important questions Ana Moraga, the co-founder and Executive Director of MuJER, had to grapple with over the past few years so that this past summer, when I arrived as an intern, the first task on my list was to assist in the redesigning of the website.  MuJER’s original website was not especially inviting, interactive, or informative.  Donating was not really possible through the site and there were no profiles of the women, very few pictures, and only a brief summary of how the organization was founded and what its goals were. 

Throughout the summer, the web-designer Walter Aguilar, Ana Moraga, and I set out to recreate MuJER as an internationally connected, socially networked, interactive, and trailblazing organization that would inspire donors to donate, volunteers to volunteer, and others to simply read, discover, and get to know the organization.  We completely redesigned the website (mujerguatemala.org) adding pictures, personal and inspirational stories from the women, information on the challenges facing sex workers in Guatemala, and an online store selling the jewelry the women make in their jewelry workshop (jewelry is bought through PayPal or Google Checkout).  The site was built on WordPress, a free, open source web design system that makes it easy for non-techies to contribute to changes on the site.  

“Through the website, people actually know about us in the States,” says Moraga.  “We just got a volunteer who is going to be with us for a year and she found out about us through the website,” she cheerfully remarks. 

With the new website up and running, we realized that MuJER could potentially connect with many more people if it diversified its use of social networking tools.  Thus, we created a facebook page and a twitter account and invited friends from near and far to join the group. 

While these are all important accomplishments for an organization like MuJER, there are countless more steps the organization can take to increase its online readership, self-advocacy, and fundraising potential.  When I left in August, I couldn’t help but feel anxious about the fate of the organization’s Internet connectedness.   I was leaving, Moraga was planning on moving to the States in October, and we were both concerned about who would keep the website, facebook page, and twitter account active and up to date. 

The problem many small non-profits face lies in the lack of staff time available to make full use of all of the good the Internet can bring to an organization.  Without updates, tweets, wall posts, and blog entries, potential supporters in the US might lose interest and forget about an organization as geographically distant and unknown to the US public as MuJER.  As a former intern, I have an immense amount of respect and appreciation for the incredible work MuJER has done and is still doing with and for sex workers in Guatemala, but I worry about it not accomplishing as much as it can if it doesn’t find a way to keep up with the pack.  Hopefully this won’t be the case.