ZeroDivide Strategic eAdvocacy Trainings, Spring 2008 - Materials

Aspiration and Radical Designs enjoyed another California-wide road trip to offer one-day trainings on “eAdvocacy: Basics, Best Practices and New Tools.” Trainings were held in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. The trainings were offered to help members of the ZeroDivide community understand how to use email and the internet more effectively for advocacy, while also raising awareness about emerging technologies.

Below are links to the training materials used for these sessions. The slide sets linked below are in PDF format, which requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

ZeroDivide funded Aspiration to develop and deliver these one-day trainings, which covered the following major topic areas:

Best Practices in Online Campaign Design: The first portion of the training addressed the essentials of online campaign success. Key topics in this discussion included:

  • Training Overview: A summary of the training, including key concepts and definitions, issues including digital divide, and time for initial questions.
  • Online Campaign design: Framing your efforts, with a focus on audience definition and online campaign goals
  • Online Campaign calendaring: Planning out time lines for communications and related milestones
  • Email best practices: how to effectively establish, build and sustain mailing lists with your online audiences, and how to write effective campaign messages. Using email open rates, web site traffic and other indicators to understand successes and areas for improvement in online communications.

Using New Web Tools to Extend Your Reach: The second part of the training considered how emerging technologies such as blogs and social networks can support and augment core online and email advocacy efforts. Key topics in this discussion included:

  • Blogging essentials: Basic and strategic skills and tactics for effective blogging.
  • Introduction to social networks: Overview of how Facebook, Myspace, Change.org and other sites can play a role in campaigning and advocacy.
  • Sustainable innovation: How to experiment and adopt new technologies while minimizing risk and distraction from core campaign efforts, and retaining control over essential data.
  • ”Web 2.0” Tools and Tactics: The notion of “web 2.0” is introduced in terms of essential traits and characteristics. Motivations for employing “2.0” tactics are considered, and contrasted with trade-offs of user-driven content. Blogging is discussed in the context of campaigning, and social network tools are presented with pros and cons. Tagging strategies and best practices are explained, and the concepts of “badge” and “widget” are defined and demonstrated. Essential “2.0” sites are enumerated and described, and a case study focusing on www.greenmyapple.com ties essential lesson threads together.

Overall, the trainings utilized a participant-driven dialog format that prioritizes answering questions and addressing the real-world situations of participating organizations.

We welcome comments, suggestions and any other feedback. Please address all correspondence to training@aspirationtech.org.

"Thank you for bringing together these incredible people, modelling a welcoming stance, and empowering us to develop real relationships!"

Participant, Dev Summit
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