Guest Bloggin': Using Social Networking to Stop Genocide

11:30 AM Sep 25, 2006

The Genocide Intervention Network and its partner organization, STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, both began their life as student organizations at Swarthmore College and Georgetown University, respectively. Now partners and visible leaders in the anti-genocide movement, STAND encompasses student groups at more than 300 colleges and 200 high schools, while GI-Net provides effective tools for all individuals to help stop genocide through advocacy and fundraising for civilian protection.

How did these organizations go from small student groups to national non-profits in less than two years? Among other methods, through online social networking, sites that promote connections and collaboration between people who share similar interests, geographical backgrounds or schools.

GI-Net and STAND were well-positioned to take advantage of social networking because their primary base was students between the ages of 15 and 25, some of the earliest adopters of new online technology. Yet even as the organizations have grown — and, for GI-Net, expanded well beyond its student origins — social networking has proven to be an important way to develop and engage our membership.

While our current focus is on Darfur, our larger goal is to create a permanent anti-genocide constituency so that when mass atrocities occur again — as they likely will — the world will be well-positioned to respond quickly and effectively. The primary reason countries take so little action to stop genocide is because there is no political will to do so. This is our long-term approach to building the movement, and it coincides quite effectively with many of benefits social networking: education, collaboration and collective action.

While STAND and GI-Net do some traditional fundraising and lobbying, our primary focus is on empowering our members. So, for instance, most of the donations we receive go to fund civilian protection in Darfur, rather than our efforts alone — meaning our members have a real, concrete effect on the ground in Sudan. Similarly, our advocacy is often focused on giving our members effective tools to engage in their own actions, such as our recently-released Darfur scorecard. With a social networking approach, we can extend this empowerment approach to people who otherwise would likely have not come in contact with us.

Community Profiles

Among high school and college students, Facebook and MySpace are two of the most heavily-used websites — the latter being the sixth most-visited website on the Internet. Setting up group profiles on either service is fairly straightforward, though in Facebook's case you will need to enlist a current student to create the group for you (they only allow .edu addresses to register).

On our profiles, we publish the latest news from our organization and links to current campaigns. We use Facebook's messaging service and MySpace's blog and bulletin features to adapt our action alerts into slightly shorter, punchier versions that are then seen by all of our "friends."

Attracting friends will likely be easier than you think — though it might consume a fair amount of time. If you have demographic information for your members, one option would be to send an announcement to those under a certain age once you have your profiles set up. A strategy that we employed was to look for other groups with a similar focus, be they other organizations or ad-hoc groups, and then inviting their members. Unfortunately, neither MySpace nor Facebook allows you to do this all at once — you'll have to click on each individual to invite them, one at a time. When STAND launched their national profile on Facebook, they chose instead to send a message to each of the administrators of the local STAND profiles — which had sprung up organically already — and asked them to send a message to their users.

Marc Ruben, a consultant with M+R Strategic Services recommends that you make sure the profile is complete before you notify people, as most will look at your page only once, right after they "friend" you. Facebook does not allow much customization of the profile beyond a logo and description, but with MySpace, you can really go wild. There are several free services that will help you customize your profile without needing to do too much direct coding. Japhet Els, an online organizer for the Rainforest Action Network, recommends that your profile be "hip" — "If they don't really love your homepage they probably are looking for something a big more edgy," she writes.

We also post some of our action alerts to related groups in LiveJournal and have plans for expanding to Friendster, but haven't had the resources to undertake that at this time.

We have used social networking sites for advertisements as well as profiles — this was one way were able to attract more than 400 students to DC for a conference and lobby day just a few months after we were formed. Similarly, a targeted campaign of Facebook ads in Indiana netted us a large number of students willing to call Sen. Richard Lugar's top donors (which we collected from opensecrets.org) and ask them to pressure the senator to approve a bill on Darfur he was holding in his committee.

References:

* GI-Net MySpace Profile
* GI-Net Facebook Profile
* PETA Online Action Center
* Oxfam MySpace Profile
* Military Free Zone MySpace Profile
* Marine Corps MySpace Profile
* "Using Social Networking Sites to Find Supporters," by Colin Delany of epolitics.com
* "MySpace, MyPolitics," by Ari Melber in The Nation

Multimedia

GI-Net has, to a lesser extent, used both images and video to spread our message. We have a paid Flickr account on which we post images from Darfur-related events. Our members who have Flickr can post images in their own accounts and use the tag "antigenocide," causing them to show up in a photostream of the latest images from the anti-genocide movement. We hope to be featuring this photostream in an upcoming website.

Because GI-Net and STAND have such small staffs, it has been difficult to fully realize the potential of many aspects of social networking. One small step we took, however, has been pretty successful. We spent a couple of days creating a short video on Darfur using the Apple iMovie software. We posted the video to YouTube — like a moving version of Flickr, and another top-visited site on the Internet — and also posted links to it from our website, MySpace and Facebook profiles. It's hard to measure the direct effect of the video, but soon after we posted it on our MySpace account we started getting 20 or more friend requests each day. That's probably because we made it easy for people to cut-and-paste the code for the video into their own profiles and emails, allowing it to quickly spread throughout the site.

While I'm on the subject, there's a lesson here about this kind of content and about engaging with social networking in general: sometimes, you have to let go. It's true that someone could start posting pictures on Flickr of irrelevant things and tag them "antigenocide," or that some of our biggest fans hosting the YouTube video on MySpace might have profiles that would make some of our donors cringe. Perhaps even more significantly, it's possible that some of the people who encounter us on these sites never make it to our main website, never sign up for a newsletter, never complete an action, never make a donation.

For us, it goes back to our mission: to empower our members to prevent and stop genocide, and in so doing, to create an educated anti-genocide constituency. While we do, of course, want to increase our membership rolls and make ever-larger donations to civilian protection, in some respects it's not always necessary for people to perform every anti-genocide action through our organization. If our videos or emails or profiles get people talking more substantially about genocide — and the concrete ways in which they can actually prevent and stop genocide — then in some sense whether they end up on our mailing list is somewhat beside the point. Through their knowledge they will engage others, and ultimately enhance the anti-genocide movement we're helping to build. Your goals and your experiences on this front may be different, but to really see the full power of social networking, you have to let it be a network — and in some cases that is going to mean sending something out into the ether, stepping back, and letting go.

Extending the Conversation

A final aspect of social networking is the weblog (blog) community, in which writers post stories online and cross-reference their stories to other websites and other postings. Again, because we have such a small staff, we have not been able to engage in this as effectively as we would have liked.

On our primary site, all of our regular "stories" — action alerts, newsletters, weekly news briefings, press releases, etc. — are released through blogging software known as WordPress. This is software one installs on an organization's website; a different option is a hosted service like Blogger. We gather all of our stories together and use the FeedBurner service to publish it as an easily accessible "feed." This makes it easy for bloggers to comment on our stories, as well as the more technically-inclined to subscribe to our live feed in browsers such as Firefox or in specialized news readers.

Much of the approach of advocacy in the "blogosphere" draws on a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto, which argues that "markets are conversations" because of the way the Internet has allowed consumers to talk among themselves — and more significantly, to talk back to companies. In recent years, membership and online advocacy has been more thoroughly realized as a conversation, rather than simply a mass of followers paying their dues and repeating the latest talking points.

Despite our constraints of time and resources, GI-Net tries to contribute to this conversation by, for instance, adding to the Wikipedia entry on Darfur. Wikipedia, a collaboratively-edited encyclopedia, is another top-visited site — in fact, the few links on Wikipedia pointing to us generate nearly half of all of our visitors from other sites.

Our Darfur scorecard website is built on a content management system known as Drupal, integrated with our Democracy in Action account. One of Drupal's available modules is a "social services links," which you will see on the right-hand side of many pages. These services — del.icio.us, digg, magnolia and technorati — serve a variety of purposes allowing people to bookmark, rate and blog about the pages they link. Although we have spent very little time integrating these services into our campaigns, they will likely become increasingly useful as our commitment to blogging increases.

References:

* GI-Net's Feedburner feed
* NetSquared resources on blogging, tagging, podcasts and wikis
* Network-Centric Advocacy blog
* Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology blog
* "Can Blogging Stop Genocide?" (PDF), an older presentation on GI-Net's involvement in online advocacy

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