This week has seen the launch of World Animal Protection’s Exotic Pets campaign – including a campaign action to stop Turkish Airlines from alledgedly trafficking endangered Grey parrots, and a spoof website intended to expose the darker side of buying exotic pets.
This week I’ve been at the eCampaigning Forum 2013 (#ECF13) which is why I’ve been tweeting a lot. So here is my top ten list of interesting things I learned about running campaigns on the internet!
Check your ego at the door! the 2012 Obama campaign did a lot of testing of their emails – 4-6 different drafts and 12-18 different subject lines which they tested against a random sample of their email database. When they ran an email derby, the team of experienced staffers were less good than random chance at predicting the winning email. Testing was responsible for 1/5 to 2/5 of the Obama campaign’s online fundraising total.
The largest female image in the Sun is always page 3 (even in the olympics). Lego didn’t know what to make of Leanne 22 from Legoland, but they’ve stopped advertising in the Sun because of the brilliant ad-hoc no more page 3 campaign. Social media activists rule.
Open source campaign tools can look just as good as their closed source counterparts (when they’re finished). Can’t wait to download Campaignion – there’s also a list to try out the hosted version if you’re a campaigning organisation.
Something works on facebook? promote it. For 3 thousand euros one image got 47 thousand facebook likes for Greenpeace Hungary.
David v Goliath campaigning works. When EDF decided to attempt to sue the campaigners who blocked a gas power station, the interest from the public was far greater than that for the original campaign. Using triggers of freedom of expression, corporate bulling, and public outrage at the massive profits of gas companies, No Dash for Gas got a platform to talk about Climate Change, and inspired a spin off EDF*off.
The Whitehouse always takes part in Blog Action Day. It’s on the 16th of October 2013. You can register your blog here.
Old Street has the biggest concentration of hipsters in Europe. Which makes it a good place to launch a spoof VW darkside campaign. Making sure you tweet on an event hashtag before it even starts helps dominate the conversation. And (other than trying to take the video off youtube) Lucasfilm took no action against Greenpeace, and VW backed down.
We still don’t know what the next big thing is. It might be lots of things, it might be mobile (again), GIFs (again), handwriting in dead tree format (again), kickstarter (again), gameification (again). Rolf think’s it’s 3d printing.
Bloggers are like fussy cats, and supporters are like loyal dogs. Cats are fickle and need lots of attention, or they’ll go away. Having a long term blogger strategy is a good idea, as is an excuse to show lots of cat pictures.
In 2022 the socialmediatization of politics will be complete. Twitter might allow A/B testing, and we’ll all have moved away from our computer screens. There might be a lot of competition in the campaigns space, and big charities might be using supporter-self-serve campaigning models. There might also be robot ninja drones and interesting new words. I probably won’t have my flying car, but I prefer bicycles anyway.
There are lots more worth mentioning – it is possible to create a campaigning website in 7 minutes, but harder still to convince someone to change their Twitter profile picture. Right Angle (the right wing competitor to 38 degrees) has an entertaining achievements page. And top ten lists of things are nice to share on blogs…
For more information check out the Fairsay eCampaigning Forum website where there’s a whole lot more about the conference, and the handy email discussion list that goes with it.