Blog: Advocacy

Using Maps to Convey Information and Get People More Involved

Yesterday's announcement that the UNHCR and Google are mapping humanitarian work in refugee camps is a really encouraging sign of what's to come in online advocacy. Maps are incredible for the amount of digestible information they can quickly convey to a reader. 

Here's the part I loved most from what the UNHCR is saying about it:

Highlighted are not only the physical area of the camp and surrounding country, but key parts of daily life such as education and health in photo, text and video format. Within seconds, Google Earth brings the daily life of a refugee camp into your home thousands of kilometres away.

UNHCR is doing great work on the ground in places like Darfur, and they're generating content that really wouldn't have as strong an impact displayed in another way. In one glance, you can quickly get a sense of the water resource situation in this camp and the gaping lack of a health care facility.

RHRealityCheck.org Named the Best Electronic Forum in the Global Media Awards

A big congratulations to RH Reality Check for winning a Global Media Award from the Population Institute!  I’ve been lucky enough to work on both ends of this project, first working to get this publication off the ground with RH Reality Check and then working to improve the website and the technology that drives it with Development Seed.  I know the team at RH Reality Check works hard to gather and put out great information on sexual and reproductive health and rights and works to stay on the cutting edge.  The work they have done to build a dynamic, issue-specific news hub is really impressive.

From the Population Institute:

“RH Reality Check will receive the Best Electronic Forum award for its commitment to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights. The website is an easily accessible online resource for evidence-based information, provocative commentary and interactive dialogue on these issues.”

It’s great to see the website get this recognition for accomplishing its goals. RH Reality Check was started back in 2006 with the aim to make credible information more accessible to people in the reproductive health community and to become an online hub for people in this community.

Development Seed teamed up with them to help them do this. When RH Reality Check came together, the format was a relatively simple blog layout. Within six months, they had brought together close to 100 authors and were posting content several times a day – ranging from breaking news stories and political commentary to stories about the real-world impact of different policies on women and children around the world. The website underwent a dramatic transformation to better feature the wide variety of content and turned from a blog into a newspaper-style website designed to showcase their content, make it easy to find related information and blog posts, and highlight the well-known experts that blog for RH Reality Check. The layout was made easy for their team to update by using Drupal’s panels module, nodequeue, and node as block.  

We also set RH Reality Check up with a version of Managing News to help them track all the news that was being published in their field and easily republish the stories they found most relevant to their readers. We continue to work with their team to maintain the website and keep improving it.

But this technology wouldn’t matter without the great editors and contributors at RH Reality Check who make sure the publication puts out excellent information that its supporters want to read.  Congrats again to the whole team, and nice work.

Being Active Online Makes for Better Campaigning and Causes More Change

Fifteen-year-old Arigona Zogaj is about to be deported from Austria back to Kosovo. Her family came to Austria five years ago illegally and applied for asylum. This summer the Zogajs ran out of legal options and were told to leave the country or be deported. After immigration agents visited Arigona's house, she went into hiding. On October 5th, a video message of her was aired on Austrian national TV ORF and has drawn much public attention. 

I wanted to find out what I could do to support Arigona and her family, so I did a quick online search for campaigns. "Arigona Zogaj" and "Zogaj" didn't turn up anything helpful. Next I looked up organizations backing the family but found on their websites only general articles and those centered on the debate around "Bleiberecht" - the right for illegal immigrants to stay in Austria if they are well integrated. The only real action I found being done for the family was an email campaign run by the Upper Austrian Green party. 

So I joined the Green party's email campaign and uploaded Arigona's video message to YouTube to help spread the word. It instantly got attention of hundreds, and after six days it stands at 16,600 views and 46 comments. The same video was uploaded a day earlier by dispatch05 and has been viewed 8,000 times and commented on 89 times. I don't know how many times the original video has been viewed.

What the heck. Why isn't more being done on this? I asked the Upper Austrian Green Party what was going on with the advocacy community in Austria, and their press speaker Dietmar Spöcker wrote back that the email campaign I mentioned had pretty good results for Austria: 2,000 respondents.

To create real pressure there needs to be more, much more.

This should be treated as a unique window for making existing Austrian immigration laws more liberal. Recently reported individual cases of deportees like Arigona's have greatly risen public awareness and have sparked debates on all levels.

And there's a lot that organizations can be doing more to push this online at little cost. Here are a few suggestions: 

• Be present on existing online discussions. These are in DIRE need of constructive and informed comment. On channels like the YouTube video posted above, ignorance starts to rule. It's simply destructive to leave these arenas to insulting comment combatants.
• Inform by generating better content on existing online channels. Post videos of current developments on YouTube, post pictures about demonstrations on Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace. Don't wait until Austria is online, generate content - Austria is online-hungry, people will watch and engage.
• Use your own websites better and give visitors clear ways they can support Arigona and get the facts on the issue.

Some people and organizations are taking these actions, but not enough. In his reply to my inquiry, Dietmar Spöcker said that political debate in Austria doesn't happen online as much as in other places like the United States. This is true. But the Austrian online community can't be ignored, and the views and comments on Arigona's video on YouTube prove this. Advocacy organizations need to make the first step, and soon. They can't afford to wait until the last Austrians are online - the internet provides too big an opportunity for engaging people and bringing about change.

Latest developments in the case of the Zogaj family: Arigona left her hideout and gave a press conference (German).English news about the Zogaj case

Online campaigns:http://www.austria4arigona.athttp://ooe.gruene.at/(I am sure there are some I didn't find, I would be happy to see more in the comments here)

UN Millennium Campaign Reaches Out to Facebook Community

Facebook became one of the most talked about social networks in the United States when they opened up their API this summer, and new Facebook applications have been popping up like crazy ever since. In addition to all the super poke and zombie applications, some interesting organizations and causes have entered the mix like the UN Millennium Campaign, who launched a Facebook application a couple weeks ago. (Disclaimer: They’re a client of ours and we recently built two websites for them, although we didn’t do any work on this application.)

This is how the application appears in my Facebook profile. As you can see, it’s a big old clock counting down to the campaign’s deadline to end global poverty. I picked this image because I think it’s powerful, but there are two other options you can choice from as well – a countdown clock to the next Stand Up Against Poverty event and a photo of the day, which is pictured below.

I particularly like the share button that’s on all of the profile widgets, which lets your friends add this application to their profile with just a click. This is a great feature to help spread the application virally, and one that I haven’t seen on too many other Facebook applications. Also there are links to the application’s main page and some of its main features, like blog, events, and friends hall of fame, which are good to get people interacting with the application.