Posts Tagged ‘Ed Miliband’

Technology has changed the face of campaigning over the past years and every month we witness a novel digital campaign. Gone are the days where I sit down with my pen and paper and write a letter to my local MP, as the internet comes up with increasingly innovative ways of connecting a cause to its supporters.

Before Christmas I sat on a conference call with Gordon Brown to hear about his hopes for the Copenhagen summit. Impressive, you may think, but in fact this was a new ‘community engagement’ tactic hosted by Avaaz, allowing hundreds of people across the globe to dial into a conference call and pose questions to the PM. As the conference organisers said, this was an example of technology bringing citizens together like never before.

Although the format was innovative, the content of the call itself was quite unremarkable. One thing that caught my attention however was when someone posed the question “What do you need us, the citizens, to do about climate change”. Mr Brown’s reply was surprising. “Visit the Ed’s Pledge website,” he said “and register your support”. This website is dedicated to Ed Miliband Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and his ambition for greater ambition on climate change.

A few days later Ed Miliband sent me an email, offering me a whole raft of ways that I could “take action”. Take action, to me means getting a compost bin to reduce the amount of organic waste we throw into landfill sites, or getting on your bike to reduce the amount of harmful emissions we are pumping into the atmosphere. Ed’s definition was somewhat different; none of these actions were tangible ‘actions’ in the truest sense of the word. All did, however, include the prefix ‘click to’. Click to sign a petition, click to write to your newspaper, the list goes on.

This has made me think about the true effect technology is having on ‘taking action’. It seems to me that whilst online tools have become invaluable in bringing citizens together, we are in danger of changing the definition of ‘action’ among audiences. You would be forgiven for thinking from listening to Gordon Brown, that by signing a pledge, sending on a message of support to a friend or  re-tweeting a post then we’ve done enough, we can sit back in our armchairs because climate change will be halted.

Not only that but, before long, we are in danger of creating a kind of ‘take action’ fatigue among the general public. Before long people will undoubtedly start to question the true value of online pledge signing and wish to do something more meaningful in supporting a cause.

What lesson can we take for online communicators? Whilst increasingly novel community engagement tools can be useful in recruiting support and connecting people, we must not lose sight of the end goal. We need to dedicate as much creative thought to meaningful calls to action as the tools we use to communicate these.