Beth Kanter, Beth's Blog

There's something different about these campaigns. Take a closer look. You'll notice that marketing staff and professional graphics designers didn't create the content - the organizations' supporters did. All of these campaigns use Web 2.0 tools like tagging and social media websites to reach out beyond their known constituent base to raise awareness and in some cases dollars for their causes.

• To mark premature birth awareness month in November the March of Dimes launched a photo contest in the popular photo sharing site Flickr. The campaign urged supporters to photograph where they kept their spare change to call attention to the fact that premature babies weigh less than a handful of change. Be A Coin Star attracted more than 100 participants and 200 photo entries. The March of Dimes online community is currently voting on the winners.

• Minnesota E-Democracy's Voter Voices campaign raised awareness of citizen access to election information by asking supporters to tag resources, videos, and images with a unique campaign tag and aggregating the results on its site.
• The Nature Conservancy will showcase nature photographs on its website that are collected from supporters via a Flickr photo contest. The photo stream currently has over 7,000 photos with more than 1,500 photographers.
• Fight Hunger is using user-generated video to spread the word about ending child hunger by 2015.
• Creative Commons is calling attention to its programs and at the same time raising a few extra dollars through a Flickr photo contest. Supporters can purchase Creative Commons "swag" and take a photo of themselves with the items. Winners receive the founder's voice on their answering machine and two photographs will be used on a promotional postcard.
• The Children At Risk Foundation launched its annual fundraising campaign entirely in Flickr. The campaign asks supporters to donate $10 per person to support its street kids programs and contribute their own photos. The photos and the conversations they generate show how a small donation of $10 can make a dramatic difference.

Encouraging members and potential supporters to create content allows your organization to take advantage of the creativity of many people as well as engage them in your cause or issue. They are no longer passive consumers of your campaign message but in fact become the messengers and ambassadors of your cause. Since they are not creating content in isolation, but in a social context, they may also feel a greater sense of belonging to your cause.

It is important to keep a few things in mind as you design your campaign strategy and metrics for success. While participatory media tools may be new, you are using them for community building, which isn't. It doesn't magically happen. The rule of thumb in most online communities is 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. If you want to build it, you must find and cultivate the builders!

Steve Cliff of Voter's Voices offers some pointers on how to get your community members to become content creators or taggers. He suggests that you seed your project with a few passionate people who are already creating content or tagging items related to your campaign. He also suggests picking a broad and compelling theme that will interest many people.

Once you've established some "there, there," you are ready to encourage others to start contributing content. This is an important point because like the buffet table, no one wants to be the first one. Steve also recommends preaching beyond the choir, particularly using the social networking features that many tools provide to find like-minded people who may not be part of your efforts but are already tagging or creating content related to your cause.

In several of the campaigns above, organizations offer incentives for participation, usually in the form of recognition for contest winner(s) on the organization's website or blog. The Creative Commons photo contest takes it a step further by awarding fun prizes, like the founder's voice on their answering machine.

Whether your campaign invites people to create their own content in a single media like photographs, or it asks people to tag content located on different sites, it's important to display or publish the aggregated collection on your main website. Presenting the communal voices of people participating in your campaign adds to the sense of community belonging and can inspire others to participate.

These campaigns all more or less rely on using RSS feeds to publish their shared content. The Voter Voice project is perhaps the most ambitious, publishing tagged items from three or four different media sources onto a single site using RSS feeds. No matter how you decide to publish, you'll need to select your campaign tag very carefully. Pick something that is unique, not already used, and cannot be easily misspelled. That way you be sure to present the items you intended to publish.

Most of the Flickr photo contests use the group feature, which gives them the ability to moderate content (for example, to remove inappropriate photographs or duplicates). Participatory tools encourage rugged individualism so be prepared with a user contribution policy that lets you reserve the right to remove content if necessary and directly communicate with the users about why you did to avoid any ill will.

The above campaigns use only a handful of the different participatory media tools available. Read the following articles in the NTEN newsletter, which are all posted here on the blog, to learn about other participatory tools.