online activism

The Pew Internet and Life Project just released a new report on online civic engagement that has received some big press, including BBC and Associated Press. In short, the Pew's report states that online activism has the same gaps w/r/t income and education that we see with offline activism. Press accounts have focused on the continuing gap in engagement between rich and poor. This thesis isn't as strong when looking only at young people, the age group most likely to engage in what the Pew calls "new" activities such as "making political use of social network sites" See their nifty table below.

When the above findings are analyzed by income status (income seems to be less of a factor in online engagement among 18-24s), there are important caveats mentioned:

It is difficult to measure socio-economic status for the youngest adults, those under 25, because many of them are still students. This group is, in fact, the least-affluent and well-educated age group in the survey. When we look at age groups separately, we find by and large that the association between income and education and online engagement re-emerges -- although this association is somewhat less pronounced than for other forms of online political activism.

The last bit is consistent with what other research in this field has found, specifically that the gap in activism between rich and poor is smaller online than offline. Income is tough to measure, especially in a survey such as this, so I think the focus on the class politics in this study and in the news stories is totally wrong. For one, educational attainment is what we know to be one of the most significant factors in civic engagement (as shown in an academic publication by the authors of the Pew study). It's also a more accurate measure on a survey. Furthermore, the Pew study does not use cell phones; their defense:

In addition, this was the final survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project not to include a random sample of respondents contacted on their cell phones. Young adults and minorities are more likely not to have landlines and exclusively use cell phones. A sampling on cell phones would likely have produced more young respondents and more minority respondents. The data here were weighted to reflect the composition of the entire U.S. population and there is evidence in other Pew Research Center surveys that the absence of a cell sample would not substantially change the final results.

The good news is is that it sounds like the next surveys will include cell phones. The troubling thing to me is that it's been 10 years since the last Census and the weighting (statistical way of making the survey sample be representative of the larger universe - the whole U.S.) could change significantly after 2010. All this is to say that not sampling cell phone users in this current Pew survey neglects the activism through mobile phones and omits a significant number of young people that do not have land line phones. It's possible that cell phone only users have difference engagement patterns that those with a land line phone. There are many hypotheticals so feel free to dream up your own.

The focus on online activism and class in recent months, including Danah Boyd's research, put too much emphasis on online activism and class politics in a way that isn't constructive. Facebook and MySpace are social networks that many people are on, but not everyone. Cell phones on the other hand, have penetrated every market and demographic. I understand that we cannot let the digital divide get out of control and that the internet provides a democratizing value. And yes, people act differently on various social networks, but there are like a gazillion social networks, used for a variety of purposes (there is only one SMS). Some social networks are even geared towards specific demographics, tastes and interests. There is nothing wrong with this considering the fact that in- and out-of group dynamics are always at play with humans.

OK, back to cell phones. Studies like these that focus only on online activism take away from the important activism down through phones. It's all digital, it just might not be the internet. Sharing a breaking news alert or reminding a friend to vote via text is a powerful form of one-on-one communication. Building a national broadband network is going to take time, but we already have the mobile communications network to take advantage of. In other countries, citizens use their phones for a variety of business and civic services. In the U.S., businesses are getting smart to using SMS to alert customers about identity fraud. The University of Maryland uses SMS to reach it's student population in the event of an emergency. Advocacy campaigns and all levels of government should think of SMS and cell phones (not necessarily smart phones) as a cheap and direct form of communication. Websites are constantly be upgraded and retrofitted with more and more interactive features, but if they aren't accessible to everyone, specifically poorer Americans, then so what. Innovation is easy when it has no bounds; it's much more challenging when you have to keep it simple (I think Einstein said something along these lines, so there). Companies like CREDO Mobile and The Extraordinaries are built on the power of cell phone activism.

We need to better measure activism with cell phones, as well. Amidst the growing demand for online engagement research, we should be careful to broaden our horizons to think of it as digital engagement. There are so many ways to connect virtually, many of which don't require the web. Word on the DC streets is that the National Conference on Citizenship, the U.S. Census Bureau and others are trying to identify some "e-citizenship indicators" to add to various government surveys. Here's hoping they don't forget to add questions about cell phone use.

A listserv I'm on has had a very interesting thread about Tweeting recently beginning with a piece from Politico that says more GOP electeds are on Twitter than are Democratic Elected Officials almost 2:1 - 100 to 56 according to Tweet Congress.

"A total of 261 Dems are ignoring the new technology (Claire McCaskill ain't one 'em) compared to 119 non-Tweet R's."

This broke into a discussion that questioned the demographic of Twitter and its usefulness to the political youth movement as well as its effectiveness for advocacy and/or outreach.

According to the Nielson Wire

"Twitter’s footprint has expanded impressively in the first half of 2009, reaching 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in June. Perhaps even more impressively, this growth has come despite a lack of widespread adoption by children, teens, and young adults. In June 2009, only 16 percent of Twitter.com website users were under the age of 25. Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent."

What Jason Pollock from The Youngest Candidate remarked was that early adoptors of Twitter were already middle aged, where early adopters of Facebook and MySpace were in their teens and 20's. Twitter was more of a technology phenomenon when I began using it, but it has grown from there to become more of the social network people see it as today.

The major focus for me has been with search engine optimization. You hear this thrown around a lot but, essentially it means that the more sites you promote your blog posts to, the more ways people are able to find it, and the higher it will climb in a google search.

My example to the list was something we orchestrated earlier this year during the Kansas Legislative Session. A number of my friends were early Twitter adopters, and have talked it up so significantly that everyone we know is now on Twitter, creating a predominantly progressive following on the site in Kansas. So while nationally there might be more GOP elected officials on Twitter than democrats, in our state, progressives dominate the pool and use it constantly to promote progressive blogs and bloggers, causes, and candidates, while also waging major hits online to GOP electeds at the federal and state level.

We suffer from a profound lack of transparency in our state Capitol. There are no video or recording devices allowed inside the chamber or committee rooms. If you want audio you have to go get the day's tape and search for the quote you want. Then basically put the audio into a video that just features the member's photo. It sucks. But, this past session we had progressive lobbyists and bloggers live tweeting the legislature and committees with our offensive network of retweeters prepared to spread the word.

Early in the session then Governor Kathleen Sebelius (now Secretary of Health and Human Services) had proposed solutions to the budget difficulties Kansas, like many other states, was having. The GOP lead legislature wasn't interested in pushing the Governor's plan and as such threatened to shut down the government. We knew there was going to be a throw-down throughout the day and had primed our group to be prepared to Tweet and drive traffic all day about how the GOP didn't care about regular people in Kansas.

It began early with a few blog posts on Kansas Jackass , and a clever name PayCheck Gate. Then the tweet storm began. For a few hours we tweeted and encouraged other to do so about the controversy, we encouraged people to call elected officials, we crossposted blogs, and everything had the tag #ksgop.

People made fun of us, asking why we were promoting progressive values like getting paid all while labeling it with KSGOP? It seemed silly. Until about three o'clock that afternoon when a google search for KSGOP reveled our blogs as the #1 search. Second, was the thread on search.twitter.com for our hashtag, and third was the KSGOP's website, which by the way, is www.ksgop.com.

So, while I agree that there are limits and flaws to organizing with Twitter, you can build a powerful social media advocacy movement that young people can participate in via smart phones and sometimes while at work or in class. Further, it doesn't require youth to give money, write a letter or email, or make a call. You can create the movement, activate it, then do a process story about it followed by fundraising around it's success. You can use it to tear down and build up, depending on your agenda or your org's strategy and goals.

Best Practices

Many of you have heard me say that my real job at Mixed Media is to just cause trouble on the internet all day. But its something everyone can learn, develop, and foster if they have the time and energy to do so.

My suggestion, particularly to those organizations or campaigns working in the states or in specific cities that are smaller (like Atlanta vs Chicago and NYC) is to do a workshop for your members on Twitter. Show them the practical applications, how they can use it to help, and network them in with your movement. Use it to promote small things first like blogs or news pieces. Watch via search.twitter.com or BackTweets how the branches of the tree work, if it's not working build your base with more workshops, or consider doing blast emails or facebook messages asking folks to RT @Whoever or change their status update.

Your result will be a following much more powerful than someone who has 40,000 friends - it will be hundreds of people that will retweet and advocate for your causes.

You can build local and regional movements quickly and easily then use them to promote your organization, have friends help cultivate small donors, promote online outreach, and give your members some form of consistent participation that they feel is meaningful without having to donate money all the time.

Twitter - USE IT! If you ever have any questions feel free to email me - my information is on the about page.

So, like, surprise! It might not be interesting that young people are moving towards online activism, but just so that the MSM knows what's going on, I will pull out a quote from Pew's latest study, entitled, Internet's Role in Campaign 2008: "Among young voters and those with broadband connections the Internet has eclipsed traditional media like television, radio and newspapers, the survey found." That's right, the Internet has WON! (By being the most democratic, open-source place for news, information and fact-checking.)

* 49% of Obama voters shared text messages related to the campaign with others; 29% of McCain voters did so.
* 17% of Obama supporters and 7% of McCain supporters got text messages directly from a candidate or party.

This makes sense. Businesses like CREDO Mobile, a Working Assets project, link progressive organizers, activists and everyday citizens. Given that young people are the most likely demographic to own only a cell phone, outfits like CREDO and others that connect organizers to mobile phone users should stand to gain a lot as progressive activists build upon the online organizing lessons of 2008. One of those lessons is that online video works! (If you haven't checked it out already, watch FM's own Sarah Burris on why paying taxes is important--the video was picked up live on CNN yesterday.)

Video advocacy is becoming even easier, because you can broadcast from your mobile phone using Qik. The flexibility of broadcasting yourself from your mobile means that folks can spend less time behind a computer, and more time doing advocacy when and where they want. Also, videos are a better medium to reach youth of color and those in low income communities, so 2010 may be the first real test of how Qik and online videos can be used to target younger folks that are generally left out of the political process. (Shana Glickfield over at NextGenWeb.org has a nice summary of how to use video advocacy.)

The Pew study also confirms that young voters are very active politically on social networking sites, and are the most likely age group to "customize political or election news." Young folks understand that you still need to make the Internet personal. Customizing a message for a target audience, whether that be high school students or union members, helps increase the probability that they will read (and possibly re-customize and share) the message.

While many young people are digital collaborators, they still haven't forgot the power of personal communication. The 2008 election wasn't about young voters on Facebook; it was about young voters talking to each other (using any medium) about politics and the election. I'll say it again because it bears repeating if you want to work with the Millennial generation: PEER-TO-PEER works! With all of the information available today, folks need someone they can trust to help them navigate and validate that information. This means that sending a surrogate on behalf of a candidate is probably less likely to win votes than if you were to organize a group of young people to reach out to their friends and peers.

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.

I have been thinking about the generational differences in the use of the internet for political expression. I want to share my basic idea and hopefully you will share your thoughts about the subject.

We know that despite the stereotype, most political bloggers and active members of blogging communities like Daily Kos tend to be older, with Millennials not having a huge presence.

I believe that younger voters express themselves politically online using social networks as opposed to blogging. Their involvement and sharing has more of a retail peer-to-peer feel to it as opposed to blogging, a more wholesale form of expression.

One of the things we know from life is that a person has a much better opportunity to find like-minded people to discuss things with when they are in high school or college. There are a lot of people from the same generation concentrated in one place. Younger voters don't have to look very far to find friends to talk to about politics in real life, and they tend to engage online by sharing with those people through social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Older voters tend to have a harder time finding such people in real life. Many spend the majority of their time with a small group of coworkers, and a lot of employers don't encourage political discussion. These people who are passionate about politics look for an outlet for them to express themselves and find a community. They find this outlet in blogging communities like DailyKos. For the most part they have never met the people they end up discussing politics with in real life, at least until they attend some kind of meetup like Netroots Nation.

When I first started blogging about youth politics I wondered why there weren't more comments and why there weren't many young people blogging relative to those who are older, especially since our generation is supposed to be savvy digital natives.

My belief is that many young voters don't have to broadcast themselves online. They have people to talk to in person, and their online involvement is with those same people on social networks.

So those are my quick thoughts on this. What are yours? Help me flesh this idea out by sharing your ideas in the comments.

According to the Oklahoma University paper, students are coming together to help US Senate candidate and FM Youthy Candidate Liveblog guest Andrew Rice online using Facebook to mobilize young voters in Oklahoma.

"Matt Tepper, field director for the Andrew Rice for U.S. Senate campaign, taught volunteers how to use the Rice for Senate Volunteer Center application and spread Andrew Rice’s message. The Facebook application offers another way young people can get involved in a grassroots campaign, he said.

“We’re one of only three campaigns in the country using this,” Tepper said during his demonstration.

Volunteers can add the interactive application to their Facebook profiles. The application provides users with a name and phone number, and they are expected to call the person on the list and follow one of three scripts."

Thomas Friedman eat your heart out....

LINK TO THE APPLICATION (must be logged in)

They were developed by the folks at Nico Networks who are responsible for such things as the Got Tuition? Facebook Application and the Rock the Vote Action Center on Facebook.

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.

The Center for Community Change's Sally Kohn has a piece today about the passionate Millennial activism that is taking place online and the extent to which it happens off line.

We've kinda heard this complaint before with Thomas Friedman's Generation Q piece that slammed the Millennial Generation for not being disgusted enough by our contemporary world to take to the streets. In Mike's rebuttal of the piece and indeed many of us who spoke out against Friedman's uneducated assumptions, it isn't that Millennials aren't taking to the streets, indeed they are, they are just virtual streets

Kohn is bothered by the virtual part. She agrees that young people feel "deeply connected" with causes - things going on in Darfur, Tibet, you name it.... Bus she fears the online activism will "erode the community values [Millennials] seek"

"On the one hand, they have grown up with new technologies that have helped the world connect more easily; on the other hand, they have been raised alongside the rise of hyperindividualism in American culture that has isolated us from each other and the world around us...

But social movements are based on collective action. The American Revolution, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and every significant social change movement in between and since has relied on community organizing, building mutually responsible communities to challenge the status quo."

Kohn says that the internets are very individualistic. Seems Kohn hasn't heard of Web 2.0. I don't know about ya'll but we are collectively communicating right here on the tubes. And this blog is fed into facebook - which if you haven't seen it is this SOCIAL networking site where all these people who went to school together, work together, or associate in the same causes collectively chill together on line.

For example, Invisible Children started out just on MySpace and Facebook, living through social networking sites, this organization brought awareness and action to a cause among an age specific group of people. Now, young people are serving to help walk these children to safe houses daily, people are donating online, showing the film, and raising awareness about something no one was talking about a few years ago.

IC isn't the only one. Save Darfur is another cause that I hardly think would have the passion and power that it does today without a mobilized group of people online. If you look at online donations on Change.org or the FB Causes application you see that Save Darfur has raised $2,657 on Change with 1997 actions and $24,000 on the Causes Application on Facebook.

Young people have a lot of power and that power can take place on-line or off, each action is just as valid and just as powerful and appreciated. No one should be allowed to get away with diminishing that.

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.

Just a thought: I was reading through a post about the new Change.org App and Petitions Application on FaceBook and my mind wandered to the questions of effectiveness and impact and youth engagement.

I've read a variety of journalists, pundits and even activists questioning the utility of FaceBook organizing . . . is it effective . . . are young people gaining a false sense of participation, believing they are changing something when all they are doing is building their "friend" list, etc.?

This strikes me as rather the wrong way to think of it. Young people - or really FaceBook users - have shown a willingness to do things online for the issues they believe in. Don't the burdens of effectiveness, utility, and social impact rest with the organizations creating those applications? The growth of the Causes App shows that young people will use these tools, it's up to the organizations to actually put some thought into what functionality will help accomplish their policy goals and then incorporate that FaceBook activism into a larger strategy.