Building community in your area? Check out the newly-launched Community Organizers Handbook! Everything you need to start and grow a NetSquared Local group or any other community-powered program.
NetSquared is an initiative ofTechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
Amnesty Lifeline
Challenges Entered:
Amnesty Lifeline is a mobile action network making it possible for individuals to participate in urgent actions simply by sending a text message.
The purpose of the network is to mobilise people to act on human right offences happening worldwide. The set-up enables us to respond immediately in cases of crisis and measure the excact response rates on individual actions.
In Denmark we distribute a variety of urgent actions and campaign messages approx. once a week to the network. Right now there are approx. 12.000 participants in the network.
We also distribute good news and other relevant info.
How does it work - Amnesty Lifeline step by step:
1. Amnesty decides to act on an urgent action or campaign.
2. Coordinator writes: web text, sms text and appeal letter
3. Web site is updated
4. Coordinator imports new participants (from web module and mails) to server
5. Sms message is sent from server and within 24 hours responses are retrieved from server.
6. Number of participants is highlighted in appeal letter and the letter is faxed or sent to responsible authorities by mail and/or post.
7. If applicable, good news on the case is sent to participants.
We hope to be able to mobilise 50.000 individuals for the network before 2010 and expect that this will increase the impact we have for human rights.
Subscribe
NetSquared Newsletters:
>>Subscribe to NetSquared News and other email updates.
NetSquared Community Blog:
>> Subscribe to the Community Blog RSS feed.
>> Subscribe to the Community Blog comments RSS feed.
Ideas on frequency and incorporating in your campaigns
Hi Amnesty!
Looks like a good project - I'm sure many Danish members of Amnesty will appreciate recieving SMS updates rather than email. However, I have a few suggestions.
I think you should consider how often you send SMS to users, and not limit yourself to once a week. Indeed, the beauty of SMS is the immediacy - Danish mobile subscribers to your service will be sophisticated enough that I would think they would prefer to get an SMS as soon as there is an associated action which they can take which is likely to be effective. What is the response on the other end? A number to call? A response to Amnesty to sign onto a petition? The goal should be to send SMS only when a response will be extremely helpful. Some weeks that might be three times - at other times, a couple weeks might pass before you have an appropriate action for an SMS campaign. And I definitely think you should send follow up text messages to let your members know how helpful they've been.
I also wanted to recommend that email and SMS should be used to different ends (perhaps the same campaign, but different components of the campaign) because both are tools with different benefits and therefore different results. Email is a place where I'd like to get in-depth information on a campaign. I'd only like to receive an SMS from you if there were an immediate action attached. And I wouldn't want to receive the exact same message over phone AND email - that might lead to burnout.
Those are just some thoughts/suggestions. I think overall your plan to incorporate SMS is a really great idea, and I agree that it's an important way to connect young people to the cause. My organization, Digital Democracy, has also prepared a project for the UCB Challenge, called Handheld Human Rights. Our focus is a system allowing grassroots human rights organizations operating around Burma/Myanmar's borders to more rapidbly share human rights information via SMS. I see potential connections between our projects, such as whether aggregated information from our project (such as on political prisoners in Burma) could then be incorporated into your campaigns.
Best of luck! I'm curious to see how your project evolves.
A couple of queries
Hi ,
This project is obviously a good initiative, I just have a few queries,
Thanks
Rob Allen - (see my entry here)