What this means for campaigners

ANDY GIBSON, Head Gardener, Mindapples.org

If you have something to say, it has never been easier to shout about it. As this handbook outlines, there are now so many platforms to communicate your message - blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Pledgebank, Social Actions – that anyone can promote their cause to the world. In fact, the BBC closed its Action Network in 2008 principally because activists didn’t need any more technologies to campaign and organise around issues.

Good campaigners don’t care about the software, only about the size of the audience. As Simon Berry showed with ColaLife, there are a lot of people out there willing to support a strong campaign with a clear message, as long as they get to hear about it. An individual or a small group of volunteers now has a reach comparable to a large campaigning charity of twenty years ago, and for organisations with richer resources the possibilities are huge.

So in some ways campaigners have never had it so good. However, as it becomes easier to talk, it also becomes harder to make yourself heard above the din. The days of throwing money at a campaign and watching the mass media ‘push’ your cause to the world are increasingly distant. If people like what you are saying, they will pledge support, take action, and even promote it for you; but if you aren’t talking their language, they will increasingly screen you out and focus on something more appealing.

Campaigners are in a strong position to be heard in this noisy new world: they have something important to say, and they have genuine passion for what they do. The task of the modern campaigner is to convert these two qualities into attention, by speaking honestly, telling relevant human stories and constructing the campaign in a way that lets people contribute.

Be promiscuous: go where people are and invite them to contribute in whatever ways they want. For example, the main Mindapples.org site lets people share the five things they do regularly to care for their minds, and browse other people’s answers. But on Twitter people can share what they’re doing right now; on Flickr they can share photos which make them feel happy; people can even tag mentally nurturing songs on Last.fm, and make YouTube videos – all by tagging them ‘mindapples’. We even invite companies to use the Mindapples test to start conversations with their staff about stress and wellbeing, and encourage interested people to take the concept and use it in their workshops, marketing and training programmes. However people choose to engage, we respect their contributions, and how they choose to communicate. It’s about giving people many ways to add their personal stories to our cause.

To communicate successfully in this new environment though, the nature of the message has to change. Firstly, it needs to be strong enough that it can be retold through the ‘chinese whispers’ of conversations without losing its efficacy. Secondly, it needs to be positive: it is much harder to attract attention if your cause is unpalatable or difficult to explain. Social media campaigning favours simple messages that people want to hear, not complex uncomfortable truths. Instant gratification gets people’s attention. Worthy messages about what we must do don’t cut it with today’s overwhelmed audiences.

This doesn’t mean that difficult or unfashionable issues can’t be tackled effectively through this medium – but it does mean we have to think harder about how to do so. Rather than making an argument and battering audiences into submission, look to start conversations about what people want, and then give them simple things to do about it. It’s not about changing minds any more; it’s about asking the right questions, rallying a community, telling the stories, and supporting people to change their own world.

Clay Shirky said of the recent student campaign against HSBC’s overdraft charges that the key enabler that the social web provides is to let the person who has figured out what to do share this information with the world, to allow others to copy them. It wasn’t the press attention or the size of the Facebook group that made the difference: it was the person who posted details of how to switch to Barclays. Social technologies enable previously disconnected groups of people to act collectively in mutual interest to change things themselves, without the need to lobby for change.

Campaigning has become the art of creating – and leading – social movements. Senator Bill Bradley (quoted in Seth Godin’s Tribes) defines a movement as having three components: a story of the future we are trying to build; a connection between and amongst the leaders and members of the movement; and something to do. Technology takes care of the middle bit: the rest is up to you.

So rather than telling people what to do, share what you have done and invite others to join in. Find a shared vision of the world we want to live in and give us simple ways to create it together. Because with the instantaneous, global reach of modern technologies, whoever can find the right questions to ask, the right small actions to encourage, can make a real difference.