Let’s face it. In the world of online campaigning, petitions are becoming less useful.

As petitions become increasingly ubiquitous, fewer stand out and decision makers pay each one less attention. Take the White House’s own “We the People” petitioning site: when it first launched in late 2011 the threshold required to receive an official response from the administration was set at 5,000 signers; within days, the bar was raised to 25,000 signatures, and now the requirement stands at 100,000 within 30 days -- twentyfold the original threshold just four years ago.

Don’t get me wrong; petitions can be great for a whole array of things: to harvest supporter emails or serve as an onramp to higher-bar actions online and off. And in many cases, particularly on the local level or when challenging corporate policies, they remain quite effective.

But the issue remains: decision makers don’t bat an eye at your petition because there are so many others out there, and they know that your petition doesn’t reflect broad public opinion, rather the ability of your organization to galvanize a narrow segment of the population. Moreover, most petitions exist in silos, off on pages buried in the ether that the broader public will never see.

So what’s an activist to do? Rethink online advocacy... in a more creative, social, and public way.

SOCIAL ADVOCACY

Online advocacy strategies don’t have to rely on hackneyed methods alone, and can be much more effective when they convey public sentiment in ways that are harder to dismiss through mere quantitative comparison to what’s already been done. And of course, when the objective is to create public visibility, or attract media, there are alternative -- less used -- ways to get noticed.

“Social advocacy” as I’ll call it, is a term I first heard from Alan Rosenblatt in the context of a campaign in 2010 by the Enough Project to enact a law regulating the supply chains of US companies implicated in the trade of conflict minerals. The Enough Project recognized that in order to get key members of Congress on board, they would have to create the impression of a public groundswell of support for their bill. Their approach: email their supporters and call on them to “politely hijack” the Facebook pages of key Congressional committee members. The result: hundreds of highly visible Facebook posts blanketing Congressional pages, media coverage of the tactic in outlets like The Hill, and ultimately a bill passed out of committee that has been signed into law. Studies show that 63 percent of Congressional staff expect communications with constituents over social media to increase over other methods in the next five to ten years.

While Facebook has obscured page comments over the years, making it more difficult for activists to hijack the Facebook pages of public figures (or corporate entities), advocacy on Twitter is in its early stages and can be quite effective.  

Social advocacy, in a sense, is about doing advocacy in a highly public way -- and holding decision makers accountable in the virtual public square, where activist tactics and the reactions they elicit are there for the world to see.

No doubt citizen activists have been tweeting at politicians and corporations for years, some of whom wield huge followings (like the former blogger Pam Spaulding), it’s not until recently that organizations have figured out how to fully tap the potential of social advocacy.

For most digitally-minded organizations, the email list is the biggest asset. Via email, campaigns are able to drive thousands of people to sign petitions -- and take action in other ways. So why not ask supporters via email to tweet at a particular target directly with an embedded prepopulated tweet? The rationale, seemingly, is that such an ask would be irrelevant to the vast majority, since Twitter is used by a small segment of the population. And until recently, it was nearly impossible to segment a list to only target Twitter users.

Attentive.ly has changed the game. With it’s email-to-social matching service, allowing organizations to easily segment their list subscribers into those who use Twitter and those who do not, campaigns with mass-scale Twitter components are now simple to pull off. And when you suddenly know which of you supporters use Twitter -- and better yet, those who are influential and engaged -- you no longer have to shy away from all the possibility that social advocacy allows.

NEW TACTICS

So what’s possible once you’ve got the ability to email thousands of Twitter users who support your cause? At 38 Degrees, a campaigning group of 3,000,000 members in the UK, we were able to:

• Generate nearly 10,000 tweets with a single email blast;

• Instantaneously make a hashtag trend in towns across the UK;

• Create media moments to raise the profile of campaigns;

• Wreak havoc on image-conscious, consumer-facing brands;

• Hijack political party conference hashtags as well as those of shareholder meetings;

• And directly engage constituents with their member of parliament (MP).

At 38 Degrees, we took the principle a step further. We didn’t want to generate 10,000 of the same tweet, and when targeting MPs, we wanted to link up constituents with their representative, so we personalized the prepopulated tweet that each member would receive, based on their constituency. We also added variation to the recommended tweets, to mix things up:

The result is a new method for thousands upon thousands of supporters to engage in advocacy.

Fundamentally, this start of the art approach moves advocacy actions to influence policymakers from behind closed doors (e.g. emails, faxes, and calls) to virtual public forums (e.g. wall posts on Facebook Pages and public mentions on Twitter). By taking grassroots action to the virtual public square, online campaigning becomes a collective and open endeavor that creates a far more powerful impetus for image-conscious policy makers (and brand-conscious corporations) to respond.