Campaigning with social mediaCase study: Amnesty UK's online

Campaign to Stop Violence Against Women

New ProtectTheHuman.com design - coming soon

This short case study summarises how we recently used it to support our campaign to stop violence against women in March 2009.

Amnesty UK launched ProtectTheHuman.com in September 2008 to create a community platform for its digital activists.

ProtectTheHuman.com ProtectTheHuman.com is Amnesty UK’ssocial media campaigning platform{ }

With ProtectTheHuman.com , Amnesty International UK aims to increase awareness of human rights across the globe and create a community of digital activists.

Amnesty UK and its supporters are active across a 'cloud' of hundreds of social spaces, networks and websites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, as well as blogs.

In order to understand how to use this network as an effective campaigning tool we we had to audit our networks, groups and pages and create a map of our social universe.

We also started building our Twitter network, as we knew this would be a vital piece of our social platform. We grew our Twitter followers from around 300 in December 2008 to just over 3,000 by mid-March 2009. (You’ve been brilliant, thank you!)

Twitter @amnestyUK

And we held a brainstorm one evening at our London HQ with a group of digital savvy supporters.

This generated a whole bunch of ideas and allowed us to bounce some of our thinking about the campaign around with some experts.

With everything in place,we were ready to start campaigning...

As a member of the End Violence Against Women coalition, Amnesty used the opportunity of International Women’s Day to campaign with the message

March 2009

women in the UK experience rape or other violence

Amnesty is campaigning for better support for women at a local level. Currently 1 in 4 local authorities leave female victims of violence without the specialised support they need.

Get as many people as possible to email their MPs through mapofgaps.org

Key online actions:

Get as many people as possible to change their Twitter and/or Facebook avatars to the 1:10 logo

Key online actions:

Get as many people as possible to tweet the message ‘Each year, around one in ten women in Britain will experience rape or other violence. Act now http://oneten.org.uk’ at 1.10 pm on6th March 2009

Key online actions:

We launched the campaign with a post on the blog which explained how people could help - this was intended to be the landing page.

1. Protect the Human blog

2. PledgeBank

Amnesty created a pledge that people could take on PledgeBank.com, with the aim of people motivating each other to take this action.

3. Social network outreach

We reached out to our networks on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and to individual and group blogs that showed an interest in women’s rights. We asked them the reach out to their networks, to spread the message. On Twitter, we encouraged people to use the hashtag #oneten to mark all Women’s Day-related tweets.

Impact: Twitter

Approx. 3000 mentions of #oneten on Twitter, 6th March(SourceTwitScoop)

oneten.org.uk = most tweeted link, 6th March(Source Retweetradar)

@amnestyuk = 3rd most retweeted user, 6th March(Source Retweetradar)

#oneten in Top 10 trending topics, 6th March(Source Twitter search)

Around 600 new Twitter followers for @amnestyuk over the course of the week

Impact: Twitter

SourceTwitscoop

Impact: Protect the Human blog

Impact: www.protectthehuman.com

March 9th2nd

Nearly 2,000 referred from oneten.org.uk

215 emailed their MP on 6th March

In total 2,273 emails have been sent so far across the country since launching the campaign. This pressure will hopefully translate into real change, in the form of more services, for the women that need it the most.

Impact: MapOfGaps.org

Thanks to your participation, hundreds of you took action and 6 times as many as usual took action on 6th March

We are amazed and humbled at the rate at which people have shown their support for our Stop Violence Against Women campaign, and the extensive debate we witnessed on various blogs, including our own.

Clearly, people have opinions on the issue and they are not afraid to show their support or make their voices heard. The important thing to remember is that this support translates into real change for women who are victims of violence.

There is power in numbers. The power to create lasting change.

If you'd like to support our other online campaigns or become involved in Amnesty's online activism you can do the following:

Follow @AmnestyUK on Twitter1

Become a member of Amnesty UK4

Join our Amnesty UK Facebook group2

Register at ProtectTheHuman.com and start taking online actions3

Tell your friends about all of the above5

www.twitter.com/madebymanywww.twitter.com/amnestyUK

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