The interesting thing to me about self-organized online campaigns, whether it's change.org
or sign-on.org, is how active the internet public will become if you give them the tools
to do for themselves.
The trick then is to take this huge community of people who have gone from education to
organization to advocacy, and stitch them together into a network that has political
power.
And by political power I mean it is noticed by the media, it has access to decision makers
and governments, and it has a story to tell that can capture the imagination of an even
broader public.
To me that is one of the core challenges of today's NGOs, no matter whether they're working
on environment or education or internet policy is how do we take the energy and enthusiasm
of the internet public who are creating their own campaigns and put them together into a
network that is more powerful than the sum of the individual parts.
I had a lot of experience when I worked at the State Department dealing with a big dusty
institution that hates to change, and it changed rather quickly to start using social media
and start thinking about the internet for two reasons, one is we had a really dynamic
leadership who told a story about how the internet was changing diplomacy in the case
of the State Department and empowered young creative entrepreneurial people to build new
kinds of programs.
So I think the key to organizational change to take advantage of the internet as a new
resource for advocacy is a cultural change inside the organization that embraces experimentation,
that makes it okay to fail, and that quickly adapts the key tactics of the organization
to take advantage of success.
Election time is the best time to get the attention of government because every politician
is thinking how her constituency might respond to this issue or that issue.
So the most important thing for organizations is to tell a narrative that makes it into
the broader national political discussion.
So how can I tell a story about my issue that captures the attention of political leaders,
that captures the attention of traditional media, and that brings a broader following.
Now I can do that on my own if I'm a big organization, but most of the time I'm going to have to
work with a network of other organizations who all agree we've got to tell a common story,
we've got to get attention, we've got to demand that political leadership responds to our
issue.
And once they've responded, engage with them throughout the rest of the campaign so that
issue stays as a part of the big campaign narrative that everybody's writing about
and everybody's talking about as you head towards election day.
