MajorityConnections: Turn Casual Supporters into Engaged Activists

Jessica, of MajorityConnections, writes:

…One of the most frequent comments I hear from activists is that they don’t understand why they need Facebook, Twitter, Ning, or any other social networking site and yet they can’t seem to get their groups off the ground. A similar lament is that while finding supporters isn’t a problem, getting them to stick around and become part of the organization is. When the success of your group depends on member engagement, fundraising, and spreading a certain message, it’s important that your internet presence give members and potential activists as many avenues for acting as possible.

If you find that your organization has plenty of support, but you’re having trouble transforming your support into action, there’s a good chance your group hasn’t fully embraced Web 2.0. Embracing Web 2.0 means not just creating dynamic websites where information is readily available, but creating campaigns where your activist base can easily interact with the provided information.

You should approach your new media strategy with two overall goals in mind:

• Goal 1: Provide good and timely information
• Goal 2: Create easy methods for engagement

To reach your broad goals of providing good information and making it easy to share that information, your web strategy has to begin with your website and branch out from there….Read the entire report on MajorityConnections >>

 

A Right Way and a Wrong Way to ‘Do New Media’

Eric Odom has a good post over at the #dontgo Movement, describing the current conflict between the Republican establishment and the center-right blogosphere. Basically, the Republicans want to control the message and the bloggers won’t be controlled. Odom also has some great advice for how state-level Republican groups can avoid this problem in the future. Here’s an excerpt:

I believe that it can be seen as innocent to misunderstand something such as new media, but I also believe that if you refuse to admit you lack the understanding, and instead assert yourself king of the realm, you FAIL.

As you can see, the Virginia GOP establishment, along with several key GOP insiders, have committed the ultimate new media sin. They did this by attempting to inject themselves into the Virginia blogosphere as a dominate resource that, according to them, will be the “ONLY major Republican blog in all of Virginia”.

[...]

When pitching yourselves as “A project of the Republican Professionals Network”, you should probably be professional enough to consult with actual bloggers to ensure you know the following.

1) A site built by Yahoo Hosting is not ground breaking in new media. In fact, it’s rather archaic.
2) A site with no RSS feeds that claims to be a “blog”… really?
3) A “Helpful Links” page that doesn’t link to a single Virginia blog is not really helping your pledge of being a new media source
4) If you’re going to ask me to volunteer, perhaps you should tell me what I’m volunteering for, and what I can do to help.
5) You should really have a phone number somewhere on your website
6) Admit you were wrong, get over it, and move on

Nuff said…