The report, titled “2009 eCampaigning Review Insights & Benchmarks,” was released this past week at an event in London (and via webcast). I want to share some of the highlights from the launch presentations of Duane Raymond and Jess Day, but if you want to skip ahead to the download, you can scroll to the bottom.

Report highlights

65% of actions reviewed in the report asked people to add their own message (whether this was a petition, or post, etc.). This is great because letting your supporters personalize or otherwise get more involved in your actions will only help build a commitment to the outcome of your campaign or action as well as encourage your supporters to ask their friends or colleagues to participate as well.

Only 43% of actions linked to background information. People may worry that if someone clicks on an action button, say, on your home page, and then you provide them links to more information about the topic of the action, that they will click away and never actually complete the action. Nope. People may want more background information but that’s because they are interested! Most all of the actions reviewed in the report that even those that did link to background information, those pages didn’t link back to the action. That’s why people aren’t completing the action. Remember to link to actions from everywhere on your site that is related to the action!

Resources or capacity are still an issue — the big organizations do better with online actions. This isn’t really a surprise as bigger organizations naturally have more people/staff and time, technical capacity and so on (many groups working on advocacy have only a couple people vs a large organization with hundreds).

58% of the actions scored full marks for visibility within their websites. That’s not a very high number for succeeding at visibility of actions on the one space online you have complete control: your own website.  There are lots of places where actions could be included to be more visible, like the above note of including them on background information (or blog posts!).

11% of campaigns had no target (meaning, “join the campaign”).  Be sure that if you are just trying to get supporters, or grow your list of interested people who could sign a petition or do other actions later on in your campaign or work, that you create an action that isn’t seen as empty or short term (literally just “we want your email”).

37% of the actions did not generate a thank you email after taking action; 74% sent poor quality thank you emails; and 69% do not send a follow up email within one month of a supporter taking action. This is bad news! After someone donates, signs up or completes any other action for your organization is prime time for providing relevant follow-up options to get more involved, learn more, or support your organization/campaign in other ways.

50% of organizations had databases that included 40% or more of inactive supporters. It doesn’t help your cause to have people in your database that aren’t really there.  Provide ways for people to update their contact information or change their email address.

“If you stand back from the survey data these is one very clear message: strategic personalization and targeting are on a level of sophistication that many groups are still struggling to reach.” This means specifically working on segmenting your database and testing messages.  Track your supporters’ actions to know who you should target for which actions and when.  Succeeding at this, though, isn’t reliant on the tools but staff time and knowledge about how to do it.

Download reports

Visit the Advocacy Online website for more details and downloads.

• Advocacy Online summary document: download
• benchmark data (author:  Duane Raymond): download
• e-action review (author:  Jess Day): download
• e-campaigning survey (author:  Jess Day): download

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Recently, Bebo hosted an all-day event for members of the No to Knives and Crime Coalition, as well as others working in the sector of positive youth engagement in London and beyond.  I want to share my slides and notes here for those who attended as well as for all those out there who didn’t.

My presentation (above) concentrated on a few case studies where certain technologies were the appropriate tools for engagement and aided work to connect, empower, and educate youth communities.

There are really just so many great examples for this topic.  If you are looking for more examples about social media and communications technologies applied to youth empowerment, here are some additional links/groups to check out:

• http://bom411.com (social media used as outreach about teen dating violence)
  
• “huge forum success via virtual worlds (e.g. Habbo’s InfoBus re: curbing violence against gay teens; developing understanding via the Matthew Shepard Foundation visiting ‘in-world’ or the War Child Int’l foundation partnership to focus in-world on kids impacted by violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda etc. (they hosted a cool “virtual Global Peace” gathering inside their world to coincide w/last fall’s UN discussion of same: http://tinyurl.com/ngzfxm)” – from Amy at Shaping Youth
• http://www.myspace.com/invisiblechildren
• http://www.myspace.com/oxjam
• http://geturvoiceheard.co.uk
• http://engage.wesharestuff.org/
• www.publicmattersgroup.com/about.htm
• www.marketmakeovers.org
• www.vimeo.com/publicmatters
• headspace: The National Youth Mental Health Foundation in Australia

After the case studies, I focused in on two aspects of the strategy building that are most important:

The Audience: If you do your research (even if you are “sure” you already know), you can identify your audience, those you already talk to and those you don’t. You can figure out how best to communicate, and how (both the medium and the words).  You can see more about this in the slides above.

The Goals: Yes, we all want to, in this case, fight knife crime; but that’s not our goal.  Take the time to identify your goals focused on living in and inviting youth to co-create a community without knife crime.  There is more about goals in the slides above.

If you would like to view the presentation above with the speaker notes included, click here.

What do you think? Has your organization tackled issues in the youth community and used new technologies to support your work? Share your story – we’d love to hear it!

Cross-posted from Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech.

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