So what exactly is online advocacy? Online advocates amplify their voices using two key components of the Internet: email campaigns or e-campaigns, and social media. To understand social media it’s best to focus on the “4 C’s”, where the strength of social media is harvested:

• Content, the notion that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, even Grandma.
• Collaboration, the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results, happens at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action.
• Community, the suggestion that social media allows sustained collaboration around a shared idea over time and across space.
• Collective Intelligence, which enables not only the collection of individual actions, but also the ability to run sophisticated algorithms on them ─ like using Google search ─ and extract meaning from them.

Below are the top 5 ways organizations and advocates are using Web-based technologies to reach their goals.

5. E-Advocacy/Email Campaigns

Email campaigns are a series of email letters that are usually written in the first person from an organization leader to its online constituents. Nonprofit organizations with a mission that includes social justice are frequently involved in promoting or opposing state and federal legislation. The widespread use of e-mail by supporters of these organizations, plus the adoption of Internet connectivity by legislators, means that many are using e-mail as an advocacy tool.

4. Blogs & Bloggers

A blog (short for weblog) is a type of website usually maintained by an individual (or blogger) that contains regular entries of commentary; often includes images, video, and external links. By appealing to bloggers organizations can create a buzz around their advocacy work. Blogs can also connect staff and volunteers, coordinate efforts, educate, provide resources to constituents, gain media attention, and reach prospective donors.

3. Micro Blogging/Twitter

Twitter is a free micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others’ updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters. Twitter can be a great tool for advocacy organizations to create community and provide useful information to those they serve, volunteers, donors and other supporters. Twitter’s ability to connect people with similar interests can be harnessed for the greater social good.

2. Go Viral with Social News/Digg/Stumble Upon

Article aggregators like Digg allow anyone to submit a web link with a headline and short description. People with an account on sites like Digg can vote to move the headline up or down and leave comments. The headlines that receive the most positive votes are featured more prominently on the site. When users click on the headline to read the article an organization’s website can receive significant web traffic, making participation with social news a relatively simple way of generating attention to a specific cause.

1. Target-Specific Social Networks/Facebook/YouTube/Change.org

Facebook is the world’s largest social networking platform with over 300 million active users. Using a social network to support a cause humanizes issues, serves as a soapbox, and gives an arena to display accomplishments. Organizations are able to easily and rapidly expand the reach of a cause by exponential numbers ─ from individuals, to grassroots movements, to large corporate interests alike ─  by using social networks to connect with, inform and influence millions of people each day.

This list was compiled with citations from a Hatcher Group study released September 28, 2009.  It reveals how nonprofits are using new media technologies to advance social change. Based on interviews and a 70-question online survey of 30 nonprofits working on state-level advocacy issues, “New Media & Social Change: How Nonprofits are Using Web-based Technologies to Reach Their Goals” shows what new media tools are being used and how.

By Seth Pinckney, Media Play Nice Consultant 2009