Blog: Offsite Strategy

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.

SXSW is over (at least for most of us geeks…it’s still going strong for the rock stars). The ends of things always seem worth recapping, so that’s what I thought I would do here.

What was the biggest thing that everyone was talking about at SXSW this year? At least at the sessions I went to, I’d say it was the disappearance of the internet from our lives and what it will mean for everyone. Not that it will cease to have a presence in our lives, but exactly the opposite — that the web’s pervasiveness and its full integration with other technology is nearing a crucial point, after which we will gradually start forgetting it is there. With the internet having been a novelty for the past decade, this paradigm shift will have a huge impact on advocacy organizations and campaigns (and everyone else). Like the telephone and TV before it, simple use of the media will not establish anything special. Using the internet well will increasingly have more to do with being clever and with serving constituents, and it will have less to do with buying the fanciest new tools.

At any given time at SXSW, starting at 10 am and ending some time close to 2 am, there are 8 or more events happening simultaneously. It gets exhausting after 5 days, but there have been some great highlights.

Mobile conversations of all kinds have been interesting, ranging from designing applications and sites for the mobile web and mobile devices to using a single mobile phone to provide internet and telephony access to an entire village in Sub-Saharan Africa. Taken together, the “point” appears to be that the distance between mobile devices and our desktop computing is blurring, and will continue to do so. Integrated communications technologies and strategies will be the way of the future.

Some of the really neat ideas that I’ve heard discussed:

I love reading the annual Drupal predictions for the New Year and thought it would be a good time to share some of our goals. A lot of them have to do with our work with Drupal, but they are not just technical; they are all rooted in the needs of the progressive organizations we work with.

We will focus our energy in three main areas in 2007: building dynamic intranets for large and geographically disperse teams, making multilingual websites work better, and focusing on offsite network centric outreach. A lot of this is because of our continued specialization in international development.

Yep, the Washington, DC, web strategist mentioned in this month’s Wired magazine is our very own Eric Gundersen. The article, Commercial Break, talks about Chevy’s now notorious advertising campaign for the Tahoe and how it was hijacked.