Will’s posterous

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Vision of Hope Appeal.pdf (180 KB)

As well as doing my day job at ZARAN I've been on the look out for some other smaller projects to support while I'm here in Zambia. I've been incredibly fortunate to meet with the guys who run Vision of Hope, a small Zambian charity that works with girls who live and work on the streets of the capital Lusaka. They're just starting out but having visited the project it is already clear what a huge difference Vision of Hope are making to the lives of the girls they support.

Poverty and HIV are the major driving forces behind girls as young as 12 ending up on the street. Once there they will often turn to sex work to make money and be exposed to violence and sexual abuse. Most of the girls Vision of Hope is working with are addicted to glue. Some of them already have children of their own.

The weekly drop-in centre run by the very wonderful Chitalu and Meg gives the girls a safe place to bathe, wash their clothes, get checked out by a nurse, eat a couple of square meals and most importantly spend time socialising in a safe, secure environment. In the afternoons a trained youth worker runs sessions on hygiene, sexually transmitted diseases and other vital life skills.

I've offered up some of my time to help them with logo design, web design and communications more generally and it's been a hugely rewarding experience. I'll post again once the website's live but in the meantime have a look at our appeal (attached as a pdf to this post) or just jump right in and donate.

Okay, so it's probably not really a 'battle', more a comparison really. Twitter's one of those online tools that everyone (well, except commenters on guardian.co.uk) loves but isn't entirely sure what to do with yet. I think this is especially true in the not-for-profit/NGO sector where it's becoming increasingly popular. One of the things I think people would like to do with it is gather support and push particular agendas but until now it hasn't been that easy. Just following someone isn't really showing support and it's a very passive way to interact with a not-for-profit.

Luckily two new petition sites that should make campaigning and advocacy on Twitter a whole lot more effective have just been launched. Act.ly and Twitition are both pretty new but are already gaining in popularity. Here's a quick rundown of their features.

Before I start it's only fair to mention that Twitition was created 'for fun' whereas Act.ly seems to have been built far more as an advocacy tool with some serious thought put in to its functionality.

Act.ly

Petitions: 245
Tweets/signatures: 6413
Petition to Signature ratio: 1:26

Best feature: Retweet to sign
Worst feature: You can only petition Twitter users

Act.ly's lets users petition existing Twitter account holders to take action by sending them an @username message every time the petition is signed. So if your petition is signed by enough people your 'target' is definitely going to notice.

Act.ly is fully integrated with Twitter's API so you just sign in using your Twitter details and either sign existing petitions or create your own. Every time you sign a petition your Twitter feed is updated with a message that follows this pattern: "petition @personyou'repetitioning Petition Title http://bit.ly/xx http://act.ly/xx retweet to sign". Very nice.

I especially like the retweet to sign feature, it should give petition's a lot of 'viral' potential especially if you can recruit popular/influential Twitter users to your cause.

If you're creating a petition you get to give it a title and provide a bit more information about why you're doing it. You can also optionally let signatories follow you for updates - a real bonus for not-for-profits who should be entering into conversation with their campaigners. The person/organisation being petitioned also gets the right-to-reply which is great. Because of the Twitter integration only the genuine user should be able to do this - let's just hope Obama created a secure password.

The downside for Act.ly is that you can only petition people who are already on Twitter. Not much use here in Zambia where virtually nobody with power is Tweeting (but then there's probably not enough Zambian users to make it worthwhile yet anyway) or where you know/think that the person controlling the Twittter account doesn't have much influence in their organisation.

Twitition

Petitions (or Twititions if you will): 1581
Tweets/signatures: 79986
Petition to Signature ration: 1:50

Best feature: You can petition anyone
Worst feature: Too many spurious petitions rising to the top

Much bigger than Act.ly at the moment Twitition is a slightly more basic option. It offers similar functionality in that users can either create of sign petitions using their exisiting Twitter account and their feed will be updated with a Tweet that looks something like this: "#Twitition Petition Title http://twitition.com/xx @petitioncreator". I think that tagging with petition (like on Act.ly) would have been better here but basically it all works. The retweet functionality isn't there which is a shame but obviously that hasn't stopped Twitition becoming very popular very quickly (and there's always an argument for saying that people should read the full details before signing anyway).

Unfortunately its popularity seems to be driven by quite a lot of ridiculous petitions about McFly or members of McFly. Fair enough if that's what people are into I suppose but it doesn't look great for people who are trying to use it for serious advocacy, especially if the sensible stuff gets completely drowned out. I fear this might also happen to Act.ly when it gets bigger but maybe the direct nature of it will avoid this problem.

The big bonus of Twitition is that you can petition about anything to anyone. They don't need to be on Twitter so you can just gather a load of signatures and then send a link to the relevant person (NB: you might want to do something a bit better than just sending a link if you want to have any impact...).

Which one should I use?

As you've probably guessed if your 'target' is on Twitter then Act.ly wins hands down - it's got a lot more interaction, greater viral potential and should have an immediate and direct impact on the person being petitioned. If not, and you feel you must use Twitter, then Twitition is your best bet but in this case I'd be tempted to look at other options.

One issue for both these sites is geographical relevance. A lot of petitions are location specific (e.g. UK or US only) but anyone can sign them on Act.ly or Twitition. This might be good news for getting numbers up but when someone asks you how many of them are British are you going to know? Analytics are in the pipeline for Act.ly and hopefully some location data will be included but until then it's something to bear in mind.

Oh and I'm sure there are other Twitter petition sites out there too. Would love to hear about them or your experiences of these two.

If you work in charity communications you probably already know about the joys of creative commons licensing. It's the quickest and cheapest way to legally obtain quality photography (and increasingly other media) and disseminate your own to the wider world, allowing others to remix and share as they go.

The only problem is that searching for the good stuff usually takes a lot longer than your average bit of online research. The Creative Commons search is a bit clunky and Flickr (which probably has the best selection of CC licensed material out there) is kind of slow.

Now Google have announced that they are supporting Creative Commons searches in their image search which until now has been useful only to the lazy and quality-averse. As you'd expect from Google it's fast and simple, which is just what you need. Just do an advanced image search and select your chosen license from the drop down 'usage' options and away you go.

I'm a fan of cloud computing and in an ideal world I'd use a web interface for pretty much everything (even graphic design) but when you're working in a country with universally slow internet connectivity it's about as much use as a 56k modem (i.e. not very useful at all).

Here's a few tips for people who want/need to communicate online but don't have the connection speed. Don't forget - just because you don't have a fast internet connection doesn't mean your audience is in the same situation. If you work for a non-profit you might need to communicate work in the field back to donors in the West. Even if you can't watch the video or read the Tweet other people can.

Use Posterous

The reason I'm using Posterous for this blog is the exact same reason I'm recommending it. I think it has the best email-to-web functionality of any blogging system and it has a ton of other nice features. One of the things you can generally rely on when you have slow (or almost no) internet connectivity is email. Before I had regular internet access in the office I was strictly an internet cafe man. I would download my email quickly(ish) to Thunderbird (you could use Outlook or whatever else), disconnect, write my replies and then reconect to send. Simple and cheap. If I had used Gmail's web interface (even in HTML mode) this would have been an expensive and deeply irritating process. I tried to update a Wordpress blog online for a while. It was a nightmare.

What's great about Posterous is that you barely need to go online to set it up. Sure, to get some of the extra features (which are well worth having) you'll have to go online to do a bit of set up but essentially you can have a blog without ever using a web browser. Just email anything to post@posterous.com and you're up and running. Pretty cool. You can attach pretty much every useful file type to your email and it will display them nicely - photos in galleries, video and audio in sleek players etc. You can even attach pdfs which I think is a great feature for not-for-profits and NGOs who publish research, press releases etc. I don't think other blogging platforms let you do this but I'm willing to be corrected.

The best feature for those with slow connections however is the integration with sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. You can upload once to Posterous and it will update all your other sites with the relevant media and text automatically. Photos go to Flickr, videos to YouTube and blog subject and shortened url to Twitter and/or Facebook for example. For anyone who has spent a day trying to upload the same information or media to multiple sites you'll know how much time this can save. And that's if you have a good connection. If you're on a slow connection you might as well forget about it.

...or another blog site or CMS

I'm banging on about Posterous as if it was the only option but for a lot of bloggers it won't have all the features you need. Categories will be the biggest omission for most. Luckily most of the big blogging platforms will let you email posts. I think Wordpress' functionality is the best - you can drop posts into categories, images are automatically displayed as a simgle image or gallery for multiple images, you can upload video and audio (though only if you've upgraded) and there's plenty of other useful stuff.

Since Wordpress is generally a good option for small NGOs who are just starting out online this email functionality should make it an attractive option for people taking their first steps into digital in the developing world. This assumes of course that you can get online for long enough to do the initial set up. I've found Wordpress pretty slow going in Zambia but with a bit of patience it should be do-able.

You can also set up the Wordpress CMS to receive email updates which is pretty cool but like Drupal (below) it requires a bit of technical know-how.

Blogger has fewer features for emailers but it still works and I certainly wouldn't recommend switching to another one unless you have a) extremely slow connectivity and b) need the full blown features of Wordpress or Posterous.

For Drupalistas (that's people who love the Drupal CMS to you and I) there's a module called Mailhandler that does a similar job to Wordpress but you'll probably want to get someone technical to install and set it up. Hopefully you have access to such a person if you're using Drupal already. This looks like a good option for NGOs/not-for-profits who have multiple bloggers across the world who are likely to have very different internet connection speeds but I haven't tried it out so there's every chance it could be a disaster...

Use TubeMogul (or similar)

If you're thinking about using video then posting on your blog is a good start. For real impact though you'll want to get content on all the big video sites. Sadly, when your connection is crawling this just isn't possible. That's where TubeMogul comes in. You upload to them and they distibute to about 25 different video sites including YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, imeem, MetaCafe etc. etc. That's a lot of time saved for you and a lot of eyes on your video.

Get stats mailed to you

This seems simple but if you have a site that's using Google Analytics (and indeed, many other analytics packages) you can get stats mailed to you rather than using the web interface. It's going to save you a lot of time and actually I think this is sensible anyway because you get into the habit of analysing at regular intervals rather than ad hoc.

If you only do one thing use Twitter

Until recently my Zambian mobile didn't want to update my Twitter profile by SMS. Pretty rude I thought. But that now seems to be resolved and I can text away to my heart's content. Sadly receiving updates to a Zambian cell is still out of the question so the two-way conversation that Twitter is so good at falls down a bit. Still, as a broadcast tool (maybe having Tweets displayed on your brand new Wordpress site?) it's still great and you can usually rely on the mobile networks much more than the internet out here so if you really need to let people know about something it's a great option.

This is just a quick overview off the top of my head. I'm sure there's hundreds more useful tools out there. If you've seen (or used) any of them I'd love to hear about your experience, especially if you used them in the non-profit context.

There's a million-and-one online quizzes out there and they're a firm favourite of those looking to add a bit of 'interaction' to their site. But usually they don't get thought through very well and end up being a bit one-size-fits-none. Answering a few simple questions beforehand should avoid this: Why should people do the quiz? What will they actually learn? What if they know quite a lot already? What happens when they finish?

International AIDS charity Avert (www.avert.org) have obviously answered just these questions. They have quizzes for people of varying levels of knowledge in various topics and some of the questions do actually make you think (embarrasingly I got a question about HIV in Zambia wrong...). But the best part is the follow up. For every question you got wrong Avert provides a link to the relevant article on their site where you would have found the answer. Really simple (and on the face of it obvious) but it so rarely happens. It's a shame there's only one set of questions for each level but it's good nonetheless. Check 'em out here: http://www.avert.org/hivquiz.htm

You can also create your own quiz or get print ready versions that can be used offline (in a classroom perhaps). Nice.

I've just returned from a fascinating, if frustrating, workshop on HIV and AIDS prevention in prisons run by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC). One of the big areas of debate was around the legality of condom distribution to prisoners. The law is actually pretty clear on this. Prisoners have a right to health protection and treatment no matter what their HIV status or sexual behaviour. New prison policies back this up and explicitly mention the provision of condoms, post exposure prophylaxis and morning after pills. But many people at the prison service were uncomfortable with the idea of providing condoms because 'sodomy' and 'unnatural sexual acts' (and indeed all sexual activity in a prison context) are illegal in Zambia. They saw provision of condoms as tacit acceptance of homosexuality, something which is definitely unacceptable in Zambia society.

There were passionate calls for further research to be conducted into the the prevalence (and even reality) of men having sex with men in Zambian prisons despite agreement from all (and evidence from almost every other country in the world) that this is definitely happening. There is a huge evidence base to suggest that men who have sex with men are at higher risk of HIV infection than any other group of individuals. In a country where HIV is endemic this individuals are at particular risk. There is also a huge evidence base showing that condoms are the most effective way (after abstinence) of preventing HIV transmission. And there's loads of evidence to suggest that ignoring small high-risk populations (like prisoners, sex workers and injecting drug users) can quickly lead to HIV spreading into the general population (through sex work clients, prisoners returning to their communities etc.).

Surely then as a quick, cheap and easy intervention Zambian prisons could at least pilot a scheme of condom distribution in prison. There are no legal implications for prison guards or managers and at worst the condoms will have no effect. The likely outcome however will be a significant improvement in the sexual health of prisoners (see HIV and AIDS in places of detention).

The biggest challenge to this scheme will be the social/moral implications. But if the idea of men having sex with men is too uncomfortable for Zambian society then they can at at least view this as a public health move. Healthy prisoners lead to a healthy society and there can be no moral objection that.

Just discovered this rather cool open source tool for sending and receiving SMS messages. All it costs you is the the price of the texts you send so if you can get a contract with unlimited (or 1000s of inclusive) texts then it could become a very cheap communication tool. You can set up keywords for petitions, competitions and campaigns etc so that texts sent to you are quickly organised and can be output for further campaigning and/or advocacy activities.

www.frontlinesms.com is the place to go to find out more and generally be in awe of the niceness of the people who made this.

I'm going to see if I can try it out with ZARAN here in Zambia for some of our advocacy and education programmes.