offline activism

Clay Pope is the Executive Director of the Oklahoma Association of Conservation Districts, and has been severely impacted by the lack of organizing both online and off in his state. Great to have him guest post to motivate folks! --Sarah

Want to make a difference? What are you doing about it? Really, what are you doing?

I think it is great all that is going on in with young voters twittering, blogging and all; but at the end of the day, how can we continue to push that into offline actions?

It is easy to get caught up in the world of the web, cell phones and virtual interaction; too often we let ourselves get caught up in the conversation among our friends, talking in a virtual echo chamber where we really don’t have a true discussion, we simply get our preconceived notions reinforced by like-minded people with an occasional interruption by someone who holds a directly opposed opinion and only enters the conversation to upset those of us on the other side.

Bottom line, are you putting your beliefs in practice? If so how? Are you volunteering in your community? Are your friends? Are you engaging in conversations with people in your neighborhood, your community, your town and seeing what the views of the people in the non-virtual world are? Do you work in a Church, Temple, Mosque or Synagogue? Are you volunteering in a city campaign this Spring? Have you ever thought about running for office?

Have you talked to your member of congress? Yeah, I know you e-mailed about that issue last week, but have you actually gone and seen your member of congress when they are back home in their district? Have you visited your state capitol? Have you watched your city council or county commissioners do their work? Have you raised questions with these folks directly?

I know it is a lot more fun to get in a chat debate about the wisdom of the AIG bailout with someone in LA, but is that really going to influence the opinion of the person who will actually vote on this issue in your name? And, if you are focusing on issues like the debate on the national economy to the exclusion of all else, you are not paying attention to the sales tax increase in your local community to pay for the bridge being built by the Mayors son-in-law. Do you know what your state legislature is doing (or not doing) for the environment if you are only following the debate on global climate change in Washington D.C.? Who will you have more influence on, the state representative who will be personally knocking on your door next election year or the Congressman who will campaign through mail pieces and TV ads?

The electronic universe is great. We can talk to each other and reach out into a world wider than our parents and grandparents could have ever imagined, but as state legislatures are finalizing their work this Spring spend some time talking in a personal way to your elected official. As city elections approach don't forget to vote and take your friends to the polls.

We can quickly and easily make a huge difference on policies that have a faster and more direct impact on our lives. As they say – all politics is local.

It's a HUGE pet peeve of mine that so much reporting on technology and the youth vote boils down to "Obama has more friends on social networks, giving him a lock on the youth vote." That's really the equivalent of saying that "Obama gave out more bumper stickers than McCain so Obama will win the youth vote." It totally misses the fact that Obama's success with youth is much deeper, rising from his campaign's ability to convert those friends into online donors, virtual phone-bankers, and self-organizing, offline activists.

As an antidote to that kind of reporting, I want to point everyone to Sarah Lai Stirland's excellent Wired News article about Obama's use of technology. It's one of the best pieces I've read this year describing how the campaign's technology infrastructure informs and amplifies traditional campaign field work.

I'm still playing a bit of catch-up and just came across this excellent and thorough rebuttal by Georgia10 to Sally Kohn's op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor excoriating Millennials as a generation of individualistic, ineffective online activists.

Kohn responded to Georgia in the comments, saying (in part):

Still, I think it is critical that we place internet activism in context --- yes, valuable as one new tool in a broader toolbox of strategy but one with limitations. Mouseclicks and Facebook pages replacing door knocking and house meetings removes an important element from our political activism: relationships. Power is about relationships; and challenging power is about the ability to mobilize relationships toward a common purpose. This is what Alinsky was talking about (as Georgia10 cites); this is the lesson of every political and social movement before and after.

The emphasis here is mine because that is the crux of what is wrong with Kohn's argument. Sally is setting this up as an either/or proposition and creating a false dichotomy. There is no hard evidence showing that internet activism decreases offline activism. This is not a zero sum game in which there is a limited amount of activism and every minute spent "clicking a mouse" replaces a minute that would have been spent knocking on a door.

In fact, the opposite is true. According to a report on youth civic engagement in 2006by CIRCLE (pdf):

Internet Use and Civic Engagement

We separately asked about the frequency with which people go online, whether for news or other purposes. According to our survey, 69% of young people reported using the Internet at least a few times per week, and 41% reported using it daily. In general, those who use the Internet at least a few times per week are more engaged than those who never use it, while those who use it daily are the most engaged. For example, among those who do not use the Internet regularly, 72% are disengaged, and 23% have not participated in any civic engagement activities we measure. In contrast, among those who use the Internet daily, only 49% are disengaged, and only 10% have not engaged in any civic activities. That remains true even when we take into account the effects of education.

The term engagement here measures a variety of indicators, including voting, community service, community problem solving, boy/buycotting products, canvassing, holding political conversations and more.

Statistics aside, there is hard evidence all around us that online engagement can produce just the sort of on-the-ground, community activism that Kohn desires. In 2006, tens of thousands of young immigrants and 2nd generation Americans took to the streets to protest harsh, anti-immigrant legislation in Congress. Those mass protests, which received national attention in the media and undoubtedly played a role in beating back the Sensenbrenner Bill, were organized primarily via MySpace and text messages. Without the internet, one of the largest and most successful student protests in our recent history - and one that did not address an issue of great concern to white upper-middle class elites - would not have occurred.

In her reply to Georgia, Kohn says that we need to consider the internet in context. I couldn't agree more, I just wish she'd taken her own advice.

I'm sitting in on a panel entitled "Making Onffline Magic: Converting Online Friends to Activists on the Ground." The Panelists are:

• Joe Green - Facebook Causes
• Austin Walne - Fred Thompson Campaign
• Cyrus Krohn - RNC eCampaigns
• Matt Ewing - MoveOn

I'm running a similar panel at Netroots Nation, so I'm here taking notes (aka stealing good ideas for Austin).

Joe Green says - Social Networks are important because there is "peer-verified identity." Took away the anonymity of traditional internet interaction. The social graph, and how social networks like Facebook map the social graph, is the catalyst for moving online action offline and vice versa.

Austin Walne says - On campaigns, you always need to be giving volunteers new things to do otherwise they will lose interest. Like offline, must have a way to keep the hard core activists busy and find way to move the casual supporter into the network. Online work makes it easier to find that casual supporter and engage them. Power of Facebook is in 1-1 interaction, not mass communication. Need to recognize and work within those bounds.

Cyrus Krohn says - Started Slate.com and founded The Well. Saw the power of communities to self organize online.

Matt Ewing says - Trying to scale "tried and true" tactics online. Trained activists to do press-conferences on the release of an Iraq report. What are the ways that you can take advantage of traditional tactics and use the internet to take them to scale. Must view this as you providing people a service. Learn to let go - with scale organizations must also lose control.
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Q&A:

Joe Green - Online activism can remove some of the social pressures associated with activism (phone banking in which the user enters their own number into a website which then auto-dials people on their behalf).

Cyrus Krohn - offline impact of online delivery of materials is underestimated. If you are putting out flyers via PDF, you are pushing costs out to those supporters. At scale, that is a huge money saver. Old school but effective.

Matt Ewing - MoveOn's model is more sustainable than a campaign and flexible. They are not trying to force anything on their members, they are trying to find out what their members already want to do and then facilitate that action on a mass scale.

Matt Ewing - MoveOn has on-the-ground councils. They invest in those people and then can leverage them to increase energy and interest to kick-start the online components. Old school but effective.

Matt Ewing - How do you bring people up from casual participants to hardcore activists? It's just good organizing. Providing a wide leadership ladder to move up. Make it easy/efficient/engaging to move people up.

Joe Green - Key to "moving people up" online is the friendship networks - giving them someone to be accountable to. That shows them that there time is valued and valuable. Show them how and why what they are doing is important and have both campaign higher-ups and friends express that to them. Online doesn't yet have as good a way to do this as offline organizing.

Cyrus Krohn - good testing to tell you who is doing what to create a model for "what the next step is" for any given level of activists.

Matt Ewing - agrees wth Cyrus. That kind of database knowledge is key.

Austin Walne and Joe Green - The internet is not magic (damn!). It takes work and smart organizing.

Audience - great question about how we can overcome over-saturation in the online activism market (eg. Facebook Causes/Groups).

Joe Green - Exploring slightly higher barriers to entry or ways to promote more action. His example is requiring members to do a specific action (donate, write a letter, etc.) or risk being thrown out the group.

Matt Ewing - the power of online isn't in getting the apathetic to care it's in getting the people who care, but don't know what to do, an avenue for participation.

Joe Green - total apathy is a myth. You just need to ask someone to participate enough times. Example - Plaxo and Facebook growth: if enough people ask, critical mass gets high enough that everyone starts to participate.

Cyrus Krohn - Open question not addressed here is Mobile, where you are totally merging the online and offline. Getting that to work is the next big thing.