Click advocacy: What is your click worth?

(Yep, this’ll take a few minutes to read. I promise it’ll probably be worth it. But if you don’t feel like it, here’s the 3 sentence summary: 1 Click-related advocacy has reduced engagement barriers farther than ever before. 2 This is good if it brings people onto an engagement ladder, or bad if it let’s them assuage guilt without having done anything more, increasing our advocacy noise. 3 Good organizations help people move beyond their click, back it up with real actions in the real world, and make their online campaigns unique and engaging. There you go!)

Online petition sites gain steam with every new name. Some Facebook Causes boast supporters in the millions. Avaaz.org regularly sends out bulletins to millions on everything from Burma to bankers. Twitter was lauded for hosting a groundswell of support for protesters in Iran, and even postponed a planned maintenance shutdown to keep the medium available during the recent election backlash.

On the surface, and to those who spend only a click’s worth of time thinking about it, this might seem like a good thing. A mass of support. A broadening of awareness. But what quality of awareness? Why is awareness helpful anyway? How far does it go to actually addressing the core issue? And how do we move beyond awareness building to actually getting things done?

A million clicks wide and one click deep

Common wisdom holds that awareness around a cause is a good thing. This has almost reached truism status in the social sector, with all types of energy and resources for campaigns based on this rationale. But is it? Is it worth spending the resources on one million online petition names, or one poorly paid activist who can act on more concrete avenues for change? One clue to answering this may be to understand what those million names are worth. As the cost of joining a cause drops dramatically, so does the strength of that engagement. And everyone knows it.

Good organizations know that to be effective, they need to move people from the bedroom to the street, boardroom, or somewhere in between. They need to provide avenues from that initial contact to higher levels of work. This often takes personal engagement. Take an example: the Weekend to End Breast Cancer. Sure, the goal is to raise money and awareness, and put pressure on various actors to tackle the problem. But look closely at how they do this: by making people walk 50km to raise money. Together. Listen to the stories afterward, and you’ll hear inspiration and commitment. You’ll hear people talking about their transformational experiences, and already looking forward to the next year. This is raising the level of engagement. So moving forward in tackling the real issue, how many clicks is each one of those participants worth? A lot. Advocacy that ends with a click is no advocacy at all.

Interestingly, the folks at change.org have put up barriers to engagement. To comment on a blog post you first need to register an account. Surely they are aware that this will reduce the number of comments. Surely they understand that they’ll eliminate those participants who can’t be bothered to register first. And that’s probably the way they want it – discussions undiluted by passing click activists. They keep the engagement focused on the people who really care, and thus keep the engagement at a higher level and the resulting actions more powerful.

Another reason for online campaigns may be that people can be influenced by them. Public pressure has worked well in the past: consider past campaigns to force companies like Nike to change their manufacturing conditions and address human rights issues in their supply chains. These campaigns needed many ingredients, but one of the most powerful was the simple signing up of the public. Consider whether Nike would even give a glance at a Facebook cause with the same numbers. They knew that behind a letter-writing or petition campaign in the 90s was a small army of committed and formidable activists. Now the person behind that Facebook Cause can be dismissed as a 15 year old in their bedroom that had a little time between homework and dinner.

The rise of generic campaigns

Now it could be countered that, well, even if that online cause doesn’t have as much impact as old-style awareness campaigns, at least it’s something, and anyway, the costs are low. Perhaps. But the benefits decrease with each carbon-copy cause. I have a Facebook friend who keeps inviting me to join causes. Dozens. I’ve declined almost all of them. And as I dismiss yet another interruption I conclude (rightly or wrongly) that she really doesn’t feel very strongly about any of them. Say she focused on one, and spent all those clicks promoting that. Maybe then I’d actually listen.

Expand my friend’s bombardment of causes to the entire click advocacy system. We’re now so flooded with identical appeals that each one loses meaning. The Petition Site came up with an innovative idea: let’s make it easy for people to start online petitions. Seems like a good idea, right? Maybe those petitions can actually make a difference. Maybe. But it’s a lot less likely when there are thousands of petitions that look identical, right on the same site. Almost 1.5 million petitions have been created to date. When asked to sign one of these, my gut reaction is either “why bother, they can’t even put in the effort to make their pitch unique’ or ‘why bother, nobody’s going to be swayed by another generic campaign.’ It’s vaguely pathetic, actually. If I were an impressionable politician, and an activist pointed me to their petition on The Petition Site, I’d take a quick look around. I’d see thousands of other, identical competing petitions. I’d see that some had more interest than the one directed at me. And I’d probably conclude that the movement behind mine isn’t particularly important or formidable. The real danger here is that people or organizations, particularly when starting out, get caught in the trap of easy click advocacy and fail to move beyond this. It’s easy to be proud and satisfied when your online campaign gets 100,000 signatures. It’s also easy to get complacent. And so, in the end, it’s easy to not have had any impact at all.

I click, therefore I am

Let’s first filter out the probable majority who have clicked because a friend asked them to, because it momentarily makes them feel good about themselves, because it’s cool or because they want to be seen as an activist. Let’s talk about those that actually felt some connection with the cause itself. Click advocacy is the ultimate lowest form of commitment one can make toward a cause. All it takes is 3 seconds of attention and a sight movement of the finger. I can’t imagine anything that requires less effort. The question then is: what comes of this. There are two main outcomes, either their commitment ends there, or it ramps up.

If someone identifies themself, with that ultra-easy click, as a supporter of a cause, this can be a good thing. If that’s a gateway click to substantial actions, then it’s a useful click. That has power. So it’s a good thing. Unless it’s an opportunity lost. If our clicker feels their guilt is assuaged after their 3 second online experience, and fails to move on to any real avenues of engagement they would have otherwise taken, then it has been damaging to the cause. How many people are moved to ramp up their engagement through Facebook? Exactly.

Let’s all meet at the bottom

Click advocacy is the lowest common denominator. Good organizations realize this. There are benefits in positioning a cause for the lowest common denominator. There is the potential for first-contact engagement through online campaigns, provided there is a clear ladder of engagement that rises from it. This is true of many crowd sourced or broad based initiatives: there needs to be a path emanating from it, that converts the cheap attention into something useful. It needs to be filtered and focused. It needs to separate the true, productive believers from the fleeting, self-serving masses. This way, an online campaign can be a door to something greater, not a damaging dead end.

A call to end click advocacy?

No. Not entirely. Is your organization trying to actually be effective, or just self-promote on the back of a cause? Be effective? Okay, let’s draw some conclusions.

First, don’t overestimate the strength or power of your click-based campaign. Because nobody else is.

Second, an online campaign by itself is no campaign at all. In the event that it leads to something greater, then it can be useful. But by itself, it’s at best useless, and at worse, damaging to the ever-growing sea of causes out there. Make that click lead easily and convincingly to greater engagement. Recognize stars as they rise above the single click.

Third, a generic campaign is a dead campaign. You want to be successful, right? Then be compelling, inventive and powerful, not generic. Make your campaign stand out. Avoid the easy path.

If you are not planning to build something greater from your click campaign, consider dropping it. It’s distracting the public from real movers, and allowing people to think they’ve saved the world with their finger. If you are building something greater than click advocacy, then have fun. There has never been a better time to trigger creative, broad-based support and engagement. Just don’t forget that ultimately, real change takes real actions from real people.

B

(another good article to read on this is From Slacktivism to Activism, by Evgeny Morozov, in Foreign Policy)

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Tagged as: avaaz.org, click advocacy, facebook cause