Tactic 6 - Manage your contacts

This tactic is good for understanding your connections and relationships so you can make the most of your networks. This tactics card includes:

• video stories
• a case study
• suggestions for the different ways you could use this tactic
• a featured tool
• tips

To download this card click here.

VIDEO STORIES

Tactic 6 - Manage your contacts from Tactical Technology Collective on Vimeo.

Examples from this video:

• Organise and mobilise your contacts (with CiviCRM) - Open source software advocates and programmers
• Providing targeted reconstruction information - Mercy Corps and FrontlineSMS

CASE STUDY

 Kleercut is a campaign implemented by Greenpeace to end the use of virgin wood fibre in Kimberly-Clark products. CiviCRM was used to collect contact information from people who visited the Kleercut website and to send them email alerts once or twice a month. In these alerts, people were asked to take an action, for example, to return to the Kleercut website to send a targeted email to Kimberly-Clark shareholders, or to attend a direct action near them. Kleercut also connected advocates to one another, allowing them to create regional and city-based email lists that they managed themselves. Richard Brooks who worked on the campaign says, “We couldn’t organise every protest in every town and city, so it was important to give people tools to self-organise. Instead of five campaigners, we had 10,000 people able to do things in the physical world because of tools we made available: a Kleercut action pack, a toolbook, posters, media releases.” CiviCRM was used to track people’s engagement and Kleercut could see that 15-20% of the people it emailed took a follow-up action – “a higher response rate than the general Greenpeace list,” says Richard. In August 2009, the Kleercut campaign ended successfully when Kimberly-Clark agreed to introduce standards for fibre content in its products.

Tools used: Drupal for the website and CiviCRM to manage contacts. Richard says: “As more tools became available, like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter, we started using those as well.”

Reach: Over five years of the campaign, 30,000 people signed up, with most in North America. Website was available in English and French.

Cost: Several thousand US dollars for outside contractors to create the website, integrate Drupal and CiviCRM, and design logo. Web hosting cost USD$50-$60 per month. Plus ongoing staff costs to manage and implement the project.

Resources: Once publishing and contact management tools were launched, there was no additional significant cost to support the technology behind the campaign. “A lot of the web content, stories, blogs, and action items – 80% of that was done by campaigners” says Richard.

Time: 4 to 5 months to implement and customise website and constituent management systems. Campaign launched November 2004, ended August 2009.

Level of difficulty: 3 out of 5.

Links to learn more:

• Kleercut’s open source campaigning

DIFFERENT WAYS YOU CAN DO THIS

1. In addition to tracking your supporters, organise the contact information for those who have the power to make the change you want to see – even if these people are opposed to your campaign. You will then have this information on hand when you need to send (or get your supporters to send) these people targeted campaign emails and you can find ways to track their responses.

2. Recruit people to sign up for mobile alerts from your campaign by conducting a poll on your issue that they can respond to with a text message.

3. Create a support-base map, of where your supporters are most concentrated, based on information they provided you with consent.

4. Help supporters to organise their own campaign events by offering to connect them with other people in your campaign near to them. By using contact management tools, you can do this without revealing people’s contact information to others.

5. At a live event related to your campaign, ask people to sign up to receive targeted text message or email alerts that provide live reports or relay information you have already prepared.

TIPS

RICHARD BROOKS, FROM KLEERCUT AND GREENPEACE, ON CAPACITY:

“If organising people online is an important tool for your campaign, make sure you have the capacity to continue. We expected the campaign to finish earlier than it did, and when we had to shift our focus to include other tactics, we didn’t have the capacity to continue the online organising as much as we had when we began.”

KEN BANKS, FROM FRONTLINESMS, ON TARGETING YOUR MESSAGE:

“In terms of building relationships with people it is clearly important that you do not upset them, annoy them or antagonise them by sending information to them that they do not actually want. From the operational side, to make sure that doesn’t happen, it’s important that you group people. Depending on what software or system you are using, you can very easily identify and target specific people depending on what specific message you are planning to send.”

MICHAL MACH, OF CIVICRM, ON GETTING SUPPORT WHEN USING OPEN SOURCE TOOLS:

“Online communities exist around many tools, especially open source software tools, and these communities play an important role by helping people to customise software to meet their own needs and contexts. So when you do use a particular tool for managing your contacts, my advice would be to share your experiences with others so they can also benefit.”

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