| | 28 November 2006 - Free campaign advice |
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In this issue
Google's $1.65 billion buyout of video site YouTube showed the wild popularity of the web startup and is a sign that web video has finally arrived as a mainstream medium. In this issue we look at how Greenpeace is using web video to promote its campaigns and give a list of tips for effective use of this exciting new campaign opportunity. We also take a look at the Elgg social networking application and what it gets right.
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Web video has arrived
The long promised convergence between television and the Internet is finally starting to happen. Cheap video cameras, widespread broadband access and improved Internet technologies have made web video clips commonplace.
How can NGOs take advantage of this new campaign opportunity?
Greenpeace Netherland's Emile Poelman is taking the lead inside the media-savvy international NGO with Greenpeace.TV. Greenpeace does not produce enough material to build the following of a weekly television show and sometimes has difficulty appealing to an uncommitted and youthful audience. Poelman has worked hard to overcome these problems by building up a 70 thousand supporter email list to promote new clips as they become available and by using celebrities and humourous angles in his video clips to communicate Greenpeace's sometimes overwhelmingly serious campaigns.
Poelman's success is spreading into other Greenpeace web video projects and creates a model for other NGOs to examine carefully.
Read the full article and ten top tips for effective web video
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What Elgg gets right
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The open source social networking application Elgg has been around for a while now. Many schools and other groups have taken advantage of the free showcase Elgg.net site while others have set up their own Elgg sites over at Elgg Spaces. I've looked at many different social networking applications, both proprietory and open source, but I keep coming back to Elgg because of the number of things Elgg gets right.
Among these are:
- A user-centric rather than content-centric approach, which distinguishes it from run-of-the-mill discussion forums,
- well implemented tags, which provides a flexible and effective way to categorise and search for content,
- fine tuned access control so users can decide exactly who gets to see what content
- straight forward content aggregation so users can showcase content they have on other sites
- a solid theming system based on the popular WordPress standard that gives users a lot of control over the look and feel of their own spaces or group spaces they control
Read the full article
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In the next issue
Creating a good campaign site is not just about content and design. Other key components are promotion, ecards, games, community moderation, email lists, real world activities and post-campaign follow through.
In our next issue we'll look at the full lifecycle of a campaign site from planning and soft launch all the way through the final post-campaign follow through event.
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| CAMPAIGN SOLUTIONS |
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| SELECTED LINKS |
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German Chancellor's Video Blog
Her popularity may be dropping, but Angela Merkel still takes time out every week for her video "podcast"
Widget Box
Cool catalog of interactive widgets for your website.
Digg
This wildly popular site does not even need an editor
JQuery
Small, powerful, cross-browser and Drupal's new official Javascript library
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| FUN FACT |
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