PDF Live-Blogging: Converting Online "Friends" to Offline Activists

I'm sitting in on a panel entitled "Making Onffline Magic: Converting Online Friends to Activists on the Ground." The Panelists are:

• Joe Green - Facebook Causes
• Austin Walne - Fred Thompson Campaign
• Cyrus Krohn - RNC eCampaigns
• Matt Ewing - MoveOn

I'm running a similar panel at Netroots Nation, so I'm here taking notes (aka stealing good ideas for Austin).

Joe Green says - Social Networks are important because there is "peer-verified identity." Took away the anonymity of traditional internet interaction. The social graph, and how social networks like Facebook map the social graph, is the catalyst for moving online action offline and vice versa.

Austin Walne says - On campaigns, you always need to be giving volunteers new things to do otherwise they will lose interest. Like offline, must have a way to keep the hard core activists busy and find way to move the casual supporter into the network. Online work makes it easier to find that casual supporter and engage them. Power of Facebook is in 1-1 interaction, not mass communication. Need to recognize and work within those bounds.

Cyrus Krohn says - Started Slate.com and founded The Well. Saw the power of communities to self organize online.

Matt Ewing says - Trying to scale "tried and true" tactics online. Trained activists to do press-conferences on the release of an Iraq report. What are the ways that you can take advantage of traditional tactics and use the internet to take them to scale. Must view this as you providing people a service. Learn to let go - with scale organizations must also lose control.
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Q&A:

Joe Green - Online activism can remove some of the social pressures associated with activism (phone banking in which the user enters their own number into a website which then auto-dials people on their behalf).

Cyrus Krohn - offline impact of online delivery of materials is underestimated. If you are putting out flyers via PDF, you are pushing costs out to those supporters. At scale, that is a huge money saver. Old school but effective.

Matt Ewing - MoveOn's model is more sustainable than a campaign and flexible. They are not trying to force anything on their members, they are trying to find out what their members already want to do and then facilitate that action on a mass scale.

Matt Ewing - MoveOn has on-the-ground councils. They invest in those people and then can leverage them to increase energy and interest to kick-start the online components. Old school but effective.

Matt Ewing - How do you bring people up from casual participants to hardcore activists? It's just good organizing. Providing a wide leadership ladder to move up. Make it easy/efficient/engaging to move people up.

Joe Green - Key to "moving people up" online is the friendship networks - giving them someone to be accountable to. That shows them that there time is valued and valuable. Show them how and why what they are doing is important and have both campaign higher-ups and friends express that to them. Online doesn't yet have as good a way to do this as offline organizing.

Cyrus Krohn - good testing to tell you who is doing what to create a model for "what the next step is" for any given level of activists.

Matt Ewing - agrees wth Cyrus. That kind of database knowledge is key.

Austin Walne and Joe Green - The internet is not magic (damn!). It takes work and smart organizing.

Audience - great question about how we can overcome over-saturation in the online activism market (eg. Facebook Causes/Groups).

Joe Green - Exploring slightly higher barriers to entry or ways to promote more action. His example is requiring members to do a specific action (donate, write a letter, etc.) or risk being thrown out the group.

Matt Ewing - the power of online isn't in getting the apathetic to care it's in getting the people who care, but don't know what to do, an avenue for participation.

Joe Green - total apathy is a myth. You just need to ask someone to participate enough times. Example - Plaxo and Facebook growth: if enough people ask, critical mass gets high enough that everyone starts to participate.

Cyrus Krohn - Open question not addressed here is Mobile, where you are totally merging the online and offline. Getting that to work is the next big thing.