Archive for March, 2009

1in10: A case study in social media campaigning

31st March 2009 by Fiona McLaren 4 Comments »

Tags:
Categories: Social Media & Campaigns violence against women

After a few weeks of number crunching, we’ve now put together a full case study of our 1:10 campaign for International Women’s Day and the impact it had.

I think the presentation below speaks for itself, but I would also like to reiterate how grateful we are to everyone who took part and how excited we are by the response the campaign received.

On the day, hundreds of you emailed your MPs and local councils to ask for better services for women. Thousands of you read about the issue and shared it with your friends, or engaged in fierce debate. All in all, we think this was a great example of how a simple online action, taken by many people,  can maximise the effectiveness of a campaign and hopefully, equate to real change.

1in10: A case study in social media campaigning

Please feel free to share and use this case study.  We’d also love to hear your views on this, so don’t be shy and let us know what you think!

Comment on this post

Visualising our data

24th March 2009 by Fiona McLaren Comments Off

Tags:
Categories: Social Media & Campaigns

Today Amnesty International published its annual death penalty report. To run through the headline statistics; at least 2,390 people were executed in 25 countries last year, which is almost double the number from last year’s report. China executed 72% of these and Belarus is the last country in Europe to use this inhumane punishment. On average, 7 people were executed every day in 2008.

The report itself offers an in-depth view on the numbers of people sentenced to execution and killed throughout the last year. It’s a bank of numbers that provides a snapshot into one aspect of worldwide human rights.

As a webteam, our challenge is translating these statistics, numbers and personal testimony into an engaging piece of content that makes the report accessible and understandable. Our web editor Sam, has spent the last week compiling everything we have; data, actions and videos; into this fantastic google map.

This is a great, and relatively easy, way for us to start displaying some of our most interesting data in a more useful format. Whilst this is a good start, it has also got me thinking about how we can build on this in future.

A simple way to progress would be the creation of more charts and graphs, much like this example from The Independent that breaks a huge amount of data down into three understandable graphics.

With sites such as Daytum emerging, producing attractive graphs such as these is becoming much more realistic for those of us without advanced photoshop or flash skills. Beyond these basic graphs though, I’ve been coming across more and more interactive map-based data visualisations.

Take Breathing Earth for instance. An interactive map that displays real-time C02 emissions as well as birth and death rates, making the scale of the problems our planet is facing instantly more tangible.

Then there are sites like Social Weather Mapping, Informapping or Ushahidi, which take online and user-generated content and place it in context on a map. Each of these sites demonstrates an exciting new way of displaying data, as well as innovating in how that data is collected.

This sort of interactive data visualisation may still be a long way off for us, but it’s something we’re excited about exploring. I’d love to hear what you think of our map, any other examples you know of, or just where you think we should be taking these ideas next…

Comments Off

So, how did it go?

11th March 2009 by Fiona McLaren 9 Comments »

Tags:
Categories: Social Media & Campaigns violence against women

Friday morning, waiting for 1:10, was nerve-racking;  When we asked all of you to change your status updates or tweet simultaneously, we really had no idea how it would go. As the time came however, it became apparent that it would all be okay, as the tweets started to mount up.

As we sat and relentlessly clicked refresh on  our Twitter search screens, we were astonished by just how many of you chose to take part. We’ve been busy crunching some numbers since then, trying to find ways to quantify this online action and see its real world results. We’re not quite finished yet, but here are just a few things we’ve already discovered.

Twitter

The effect of our action was most apparent on Twitter. Using data from sites like TwitScoop, we think people mentioned ‘oneten’ around 3000 times over the course of the day. We quite liked this graph that demonstrates the bubbling activity and peak in the hours surrounding 1:10.

It was fascinating to watch as the message spread and how it was amplified when Twitterers such as @Dave_Gorman and @JemimaKiss with larger followings than our own picked the message up.

Blogs

We also owe quite a few bloggers a big thank you as they were instrumental in helping us get the message out.  It was also on the blogs that we saw the most heated debate. Our own blog has received over 75 comments  debating the ins and outs of the campaign or just pledging support. The fiercest debate however took place on BoingBoing and Liberal Conspiracy and it was great to see such an engagement with the campaign.

Results

I’m also thrilled to be able to say that this campaign didn’t just create a noticeable moment online, it also referred over 8,500 to oneten.org.uk to learn about the issue and how they could make a difference.

We’re still waiting for final figures on how many people went on to email their MP, but will be sure to share that as soon as possible. What we do know is that the amount of actions taken via ProtectTheHuman.com trebled from its usual weekly average and a vast majority of the actions being taken were part of our Stop Violence Against Women campaign.

This is a fantastic result so far, and all of us at Amnesty UK would like to say an enormous thank you to everyone that took part, who spread the word, or who debated the issue. Hopefully we’ll be able to tell you even more about how your actions have helped over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

What next?

Right now there a few things you can do to help this campaign further:

  • Did you email your MP? Have they replied to you? Let us know in the comments on this blog.
  • Let us know how you think the campaign went, what could be done better next time?
  • To take further action on our Stop Violence Against Women campaign, or any of our other campaigns, then sign up to ProtectTheHuman.com and add your voice to an active online human rights community

Thanks again to all of you who have taken part already. We’re putting together a case study of what we did, why and how so keep posted for more news, stats and updates soon.

Comment on this post