Noble Arsonist

1
stoking fires and igniting movements for NGOs
(and companies that care)
The Noble
Arsonist
Brought to you by Capulet

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Authors
Darren Barefoot
Julie Szabo
Theodora Lamb
HowToBeANobleArsonist.com
The Noble Arsonist - Learn more at Capulet.com

3The Noble Arsonist - Learn more at Capulet.com
CONTENTS
What It Is, Who It’s For and What You’ll Learn 4
Why We Know What We Know 5
Acknowledgements 6
Movement Building is the New Marketing 7
Before you Begin 11
Heartbeats and Remarkables: The Gin and Tonic of
Movement Marketing Strategies 19
Doctor’s Orders for a Healthy Heartbeat 25
How to Start a Fire: A Remarkables Toolkit 36
Blending Online Activity with Offline Action 48
Are We There Yet? 53
Recommended Reading 60
About the Authors 62

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T
his is a book about using the web to build remarkable online campaigns
that excite supporters and grow your community. Practically speaking,
that means it’s full of strategies and tactics for increasing the reach
of your organization, and for shepherding your existing supporters into
doing more. We’ve included a series of case studies which illustrate some of our
ideas, and provide examples of organizations doing great movement marketing.
This book is for people like you. Well, if you’re a professional handball player or a
neurosurgeon, then you’ve probably downloaded the wrong book (The Noble Arsonist
does sound like a murder mystery, doesn’t it?). However, odds are that you work
in marketing or communications at a charity, non-profit or company. Maybe you’re
the Director of Marketing, the Online Campaign Coordinator or the Social Media
Manager at your organization. Or maybe you’ve started a new project, and you’re
both Executive Director and Chief Mason Jar Shiner. Ideally, you’re somebody who can
make meaningful decisions about how your organization speaks online, and can help
to determine its future.
After finishing this book, we hope that you’ll be inspired by the ideas, stories and
advice you find within it. We hope that when you put it down (metaphorically—it’s an
e-book, after all), you’ll be a little wiser, and feel ready to take more risks in your
work.
What It Is,
Who It’s For
and What You’ll Learn
T

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Why We Know
What We Know
W
hy are we qualified to write this book? Well, it’s self-published, so all
we actually need are a MacBook and opposable thumbs. But we really
do know what we’re talking about.
We’re Capulet, a web-marketing agency that promotes remarkable products, services
and ideas online. We got our start in 2003 and cut our teeth working in the technology
sector with software startups. That grounding in emerging technology and new media
positioned us well to become experts in many aspects of the web—online public
relations, social media, web strategy and so forth. Partners Darren Barefoot and Julie
Szabo have helped national brands, global businesses and not-for-profits develop their
web marketing strategies since 2003. Along with Darren and Julie, Theodora Lamb
brings expertise in social marketing and community management.
We’ve helped all kinds of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations become better at
using the web to reach their audiences and build movements. Some of our clients are
Mountain Equipment Co-op, TckTckTck, Project Aware, Global Zero and PhoneGap.
We regularly speak as experts about digital PR and social media marketing and have
been featured on the CBC, BBC and in Wired, the Wall Street Journal and dozens of
other publications. Julie and Darren are the authors of Friends with Benefits: A Social
Media Marketing Handbook, published by No Starch Press.
W

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Acknowledgements
We’re grateful to all of our clients and colleagues who, whether they
knew it or not, contributed to this book. Without them, we’d not only
be unemployed, but also clueless. We owe particular thanks to Tim
Walker, Brant Cheetham and Nicholas Klassen, who had a pivotal if
unexpected role in this work’s origin.
We wrote this book while living abroad in the south of France for a couple
of years. So, we’d be remiss if we didn’t also thank the vigneronnes and
fromagères of the Languedoc.

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What is Movement Marketing?
chapter 1
movement building is the new marketing
“Never doubt that a small group
of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the world. Indeed, it
is the only thing that ever has.”
— Margaret Mead (apparently)
I
n 1989, more than two million people
joined hands to form a nearly-continuous
human chain across three Soviet republics,
known today as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
The Baltic Chain, as it came to be called, was a
simple, elegant, non-violent protest—a tangible
illustration of unity in the age of perestroika.
Six months later, Latvia would become the first
state to declare independence from the USSR.
That protest was organized by individuals,
all part of a movement. A movement is
a passionate groundswell of support that
empowers people to unite around a common
love, cause or organization. While movements
don’t have to have a moral compass—Dead
Heads just want to have a good time—the ones
we’re most interested in talking about do.
Plans for the Baltic Chain passed from person-
to-person across three countries, through what
marketers call “word of mouth.” From Mapping
the Rural Problem in the Baltic Countryside:
“The creators of the Baltic Chain were local
people—members of different organizations
that operated at a district level.” Whether
Photo credit: R. Strikauskas

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we’re selling snow tires or stopping climate change, word of mouth is a critical
aspect of communicating not only with your current tribe of supporters, but also
for recruiting new members to your cause. That’s essentially what movement
marketing is—engaging with and encouraging a wave of passionate support for an
idea.
Movements can exist whether or not there are organizations behind them. As many
companies have learned, it’s really hard to kick-start a movement if there’s no
appetite for one. It’s like trying to light a fire without fuel. But if there’s a spark,
there are ways to stoke it. And if it spreads, you’ll find yourself at the helm of a
movement. You’ll have become a Noble Arsonist.
Movements in the Digital Age
The web is our newest, most effective and affordable tool in the quest to reach
both existing and new supporters. Embracing the web as a movement marketing
platform can transform not-for-profits into sophisticated web-thinking entities.
We’ve reached the end of a decade of technological investment and innovation.
Now, with the rise of social media and associated user-friendly and affordable (or
free) technology, we’re seeing a leveling of the online playing field.
But, that doesn’t mean the Internet will be your panacea for reaching supporters
and igniting a movement. For those who’ve tried, you know it’s more complex
than putting up a website and Facebook page. The web’s lightening-fast evolution
means web marketers need to be savvier than ever to make a real and lasting
impact. For organizations to differentiate themselves and grow, they need to
successfully inspire and lead open, interconnected movements and communicate
with those movements effectively.
Ten years ago, Darren worked in marketing at a software startup in Dublin,
Ireland. The company developed technology products with obscure names like Web
Services Engine and XML Parser. It was niche software for software developers, and

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they were some of the most ardent users and shapers of the web’s emerging culture.
At that start up he bought online ads at geeky sites like WebServices.org (remarkably,
it still exists today). He built ugly animated GIFs designed to distract a reader and
convince them to click through to landing pages. Those ads were really effective,
because they were competing against relatively few companies. In the ensuing
decade, online advertising has become an art where experts scrutinize performance
and tweak content hourly. It’s now a $35 billion industry.1
Other online communication channels have similarly matured. Any digital marketer is
familiar with the war against declining open and clickthrough rates in email, and the
ongoing skirmishes in search engine optimization and content creation. Nearly every
channel that was once a green field is now chockablock with competition. In the
three months between Q1 and Q2 of 2011, the average cost-per-click for Facebook
advertising increased by 22%.2
So, How Are Movement Marketers to Succeed?
Successful movement building happens when old-school campaigning, online advocacy
and marketing savvy work together to enable that most timeless channel—word of
mouth—that conveys the passion and power of your cause. In the chapters ahead,
we’ll share some of the industry’s best examples of movement marketing along with
our own hard-won wisdom and methodologies for effective campaigning that excites
your community and gets them talking.
1 Charlie Minato, ComScore: Here’s How Much Online Ad Spending Will Increase This Year http://www.businessin-
sider.com/online-ad-spending-will-increase-18-in-2012-2012-6 (June 2012)
2 Darren McCarra, Facebook ad prices increase by 74% as demand soars http://sociable.co/social-media/facebook-
ad-prices-increase-by-74-as-demand-soars/ (July 2011)

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Your Role as
Noble Arsonist
As leaders, we can’t simply tell movements what to do.
At best, we can hope to point our supporters in the right
direction and encourage them to work together toward
a common goal. That’s why we like the idea of the Noble
Arsonist. We can work to produce ideal environments for
stoking passion. We can manufacture ways to spread that
enthusisam, and we can motivate others to “light up” for
our cause.
This is movement marketing—motivating, delighting and
inspiring existing tribe members and recruiting new ones in
an effort to accomplish great things.

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chapter 2
before you begin
Before you get serious about becoming a noble arsonist, there are some boxes
to check. These are typical areas of discussion for us when we work with a new
organization.
Understanding Your Audience
W
hether or not you’ve already got a constituency of supporters, it’s worth
spending some time on audience analysis. That is, with whom are you
trying to engage? For some organizations, this may be extremely obvious.
We recently talked to an NGO that does atrocity prevention work, and their audience
is small—a handful of top-level activists and senior government officials. However,
most organizations, especially those interested in movement building, have broader
audiences in mind.
And yet, these same organizations fail to narrow down their target audience. There’s
an inclination to be enthusiastically broad about this question. We think, “everybody
will obviously be interested in our cause!” In reality, the more you refine who you
want to talk to, the easier it is to reach them. Consider these two sample audiences:
1. Canadian women, or
2. 18 to 30-year-old women in BC or Alberta who live in cities with more than
100,000 people
These audiences are, of course, defined by their demographic characteristics—gender,
age, location and so forth. Be sure to marry these with psychographic characteristics.
Psychographics refer to your audience’s personalities, values, interests and lifestyles.
Of course, most NGOs can’t afford to hire the kind of market researchers you’d need
to produce a sophisticated work-up of who your core audience is. You can, however,
engage in some poor man’s demographic and psychographic research.

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User Stories
In developing communications strategies around movement building, it’s useful
to picture individuals whom you’re hoping to reach. Write a short profile of
a few of your target audience members. Give them a name, find a photo of
them on a stock photography site and flesh out their biographical details. How
old are they? Where do they work? How do they spend their spare time? What
websites and blogs do they read? What other organizations do they support?
Then add information related to your organization: what are their values as
it relates to your cause? How did they discover your organization? Have they
taken action on your issue in the past?
By identifying and describing these fictional members and potential supporters,
you can achieve more clarity around your communications activities. You can
also build a consensus among your colleagues about who exactly your target
audience is. They may have very different ideas on this topic.
Facebook Advertising
It may seem odd to bring up online ads before you’ve analyzed your audience,
but we’ve found that running experimental Facebook ads can teach us a lot
about who we’re trying to reach. Facebook enables you to run hyper-targeted
ads, slicing and dicing your audience in all sorts of interesting ways. Just distill
the message you want to test down to a Facebook ad, and then run that ad
against various groups—married women over 40, students living in Washington
and Oregon, Canadian surfers and so forth. You’ll also want to set up landing
pages that reflect this message and offer a kind of simple test of visitors’
support for your cause—a petition, pledge, or something similar.

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You can then track which of these groups clicks on your ad most often, and of those
clickers, who passes the test or converts most often. You’ll quickly learn which groups
your message resonates with, and which it doesn’t. You may have discovered that this
is an excellent way to test possible messaging around a campaign as well. Naturally,
this tactic only works if your audience is on Facebook. You can’t use this tactic in
China, for example, where Facebook (and Twitter, among other social media channels)
is blocked.
This approach is an example of a conviction that effective web communicators hold
dear: test your instincts and trust the numbers. Whether you have two or 25 years of
experience in your organization, the only way to truly know how best to communicate
and who to communicate with is by testing all of your assumptions. Happily, the web
enables you to do this cheaply and effectively, and you don’t have to buy any donuts
for focus group members.

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Survey Your tribe
You don’t need a team of crack market researchers to question your supporters about
who they are and what they value. You can use a simple online survey tool like Google
Drive or SurveyMonkey to collect information about your audience. You could simply
ask one question each month in a poll widget in your monthly email newsletter. At the
end of the year, you’ll have twelve new data points about your audience.
What’s Your Engagement Tetrahedron?
Now that you’ve analyzed your audience, it’s time to organize them into your
engagement tetrahedron. Okay, we’re kidding about that. It’s just that this concept
takes on a lot of different shapes—it’s a ladder, a pyramid, a spiral, a vortex and so
forth.
The engagement ladder is a concept you’re likely familiar with. It’s been bandied
about NGO circles for the past few years. But it’s popular for a good reason. It’s an
excellent way of looking at your audiences.
We first learned about the engagement ladder from Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose
Driven Church: Growth Without Compromising Your Message & Mission. That’s a
book we highly recommend for its movement-building wisdom. If you’ve never been
to church, you may struggle with its religiosity a little—its target audience is church
leaders—but stick with it.
An example of a map that illustrates where
your supporters live.
You can even use this data to
create illustrative content for
internal stakeholders or to talk to
your supporters about themselves.
Create a heatmap to show them
where they live, or a series of
charts to breakdown their values.
After all, people love to learn
more about themselves.

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Flock
Seekers
Believers
Champions
We got a little creative
with the names for each
level. Our default ladder
has five levels, and the
names go crowd, community,
congregation, committed
and core. But, feel free to
be inventive with the names
and number of levels.
Having worked out your
levels of engagement, then
you should identify the
actions or hooks that move
a member of your community
from one level to the next.
For example, maybe a supporter moves from flock to seeker by signing a petition on
your site, or sharing a piece of your content on a social media channel. Sophisticated
organizations associate these levels with each member in their database, and use
automated hooks to promote their members from one level to another.
These are just the essential concepts behind the engagement ladder. We invite you to
check out some of the recommended readings at the end of this book to explore the
engagement ladder further.
Engagement ladder theory is based on the concept that all organizations have
audiences connected to them with different levels of awareness, passion and
commitment. This seems like common sense, but we often forget, or ignore, that
our audience is not one big mass of people. We also often overlook that audiences at
different levels of engagement need customized interactions and communications.
Here’s an example of an engagement pyramid we
created for a client.

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If we had a nickel for every time we asked a
new client this question and they answered
“nobody,” we’d have... well, a couple of
bucks. Seriously, it happens often. Nobody
likes to think they’re competing with other
organizations, but they are. Happily, NGOs
also frequently partner with their competition
to form broad coalitions around an issue. This
is obviously an essential strategy, so we’re
not here to tell you to be a cold-blooded cut
throat.
That said, you definitely want a complete
and current view of the competitive
landscape. We know, in one sense, that as
Coke competes with every other beverage
maker, you could, in theory, label every other
organization a competitor. But let’s narrow
things down to organizations working on the
same or similar issues as you.
You know what’s
a great source of
campaign ideas
and tactics?
Organizations working in
other parts of the world.
Assuming you’re not a big
international NGO yourself,
you can “borrow” ideas from
the other side of the globe
and adapt them for your local
audience. Osocio is a blog to
keep an eye on for campaign
trends around the globe.
Who is Your Competition?
Online Dials
“Every prudent man acts out of knowledge.” Proverbs 13:16
We have a saying around the Capulet bat cave (it’s neither a cave nor does it house
flying rats, but use your imagination): “If it doesn’t have a dial, it doesn’t count.”
We mean that if an online movement building activity can’t be measured, then
we shouldn’t do it. This is our way of being hyper-clinical when it comes to online
communications activities. There are exceptions to this rule, but when assessing
a campaign or marketing idea, one of the first questions we ask is, “how will we
measure the outcome of this work?”

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When we talk about measurement, we’re generally referring to quantifying our
activity in at least two different ways. First, we want to get as granular as possible
when measuring our communications activities. Here are some examples:
When we publish a photo to our Facebook page, we can ask:•
How much engagement—views, likes, shares, comments—did it receive?
How did it perform compared to other photos we’ve published, all other
content we’ve published and industry standards for NGOs posting photos on
Facebook?
When we send an email newsletter:•
Did we A/B test the subject line or the organization of the content?
How did the key metrics—open rate and clickthrough rate—compare
with other newsletters we’ve published and industry standards for similar
organizations?
When you run Google AdWords ads to promote a campaign:•
For which keywords were searchers likeliest to see our ads and click
through?
Which ad copy had the best click through rate, and why?
What demographic information can we collect about people who clicked
our ads?
You may be saying to yourself, “I didn’t get into communications to do math.” That’s
certainly true for us—none of us took a single math course at university. However,
metrics are the way you transform marketing and communications from an act of
faith into an act of reason. Your goal should be to use these granular results to
eliminate as much guesswork and instinct as possible from your work.
“On the web, there are countless marketers just standing around waiting
for someone to hand them the magic beans. And that’s the problem.
Marketing online takes too much measurement, patience, creativity,
technical knowledge, flexibility, speed and authenticity. It requires too
much thinking and not enough going out for dinner with clients.”
— Seth Godin

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Instead, develop a hypothesis and test it. For example, you might theorize that
your supporters will respond to gentle messages of hope more than to threatening
messages that inspire uncertainty and doubt. Simply craft some online assets—
social media posts, email newsletters, landing pages and so forth—that reflect
this dichotomy, and see which messages perform best. You no longer have to trust
entrenched wisdom, or your boss’s gut or what the pretentious experts at the
marketing agency tell you. You can just prove what works, and what doesn’t.
The second way to quantify your marketing activities is by figuring out how they
fit into the big picture. What are your organization’s big, audacious goals? Even
for NGOs, we refer to big picture objectives as your organization’s business goals.
Hopefully you know what these are—slow climate change, reduce homelessness,
legalize gay marriage and so forth. You need to identify practical, realistic granular
measurements that are indicators of success for your business goals. Are more
Facebook fans on your organization’s page a meaningful indicator of success? Maybe,
but you’ll need to demonstrate that an increase of fans results in movement toward
a business goal (or toward a smaller goal, like signing petitions or volunteering at
events, which is in itself a sign of progress toward big picture success).
In short, measure everything you can. If you can’t measure something, seriously
question whether you should continue investing time, effort and money in it.
Categorize your individual activities under your big picture objectives. Are you
undertaking a measurable activity that doesn’t fit into one of these business goals?
How come? We’ll talk more about measurement in chapter six, but setting goals and
determining how you’ll measure movement building success should be worked out
well ahead of any activity launch.

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I
f you’re counting on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest to grow your
movement, you’re not alone. A Google search for “social media + not for profit”
brings up dozens of case studies that position social media as the cure-all for
successful community engagement and movement building. The TckTckTck anti-
climate change campaign gathered more than 10 million petition signatures in just
five months leading up to the Copenhagen talks thanks, in part, to social media
activity. In a 2011 survey of top 200 charities, as identified by Forbes, 97% report
having a Facebook presence, 96% a Twitter account and 92% are using YouTube. But
are Facebook and Twitter the answer for growing your cause?
We don’t think so.
Here’s the problem. Today, there’s just too much
noise on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Yes,
there are 800 million active users on Facebook, but
there are also thousands of big brands and not-for-
profits competing for attention in that channel. And
hundreds more are coming online every day. So,
making a big splash simply by updating your Facebook
page or tweeting daily is no longer a sound strategy.
This problem applies not just to social media, but to all of your run-of-the-mill online
communications channels and tactics: email marketing, online advertising, search
engine optimization and so forth. Even if you’re killing it in these channels, you’re
only ever going to beat your competition by a little bit.
chapter 3
heartbeats and remarkables:
the gin and tonic of movement marketing strategies
Even if you’re killing it in
these channels, you’re
only ever going to beat
your competition by a
little bit.

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So, how can you use these tools effectively in today’s noisy online space? When
we build an online strategy, we put activities into two buckets: heartbeat
activities and remarkables. Both categories are critical, but have different
objectives. Heartbeat activities are used as a way to deepen relationships
with friends, fans and supporters while remarkable activities have a goal of
growing your fan base. Here’s how they work together for a thriving, growing
movement.
We call them the “gin and tonic” of marketing activities because they work
better together. And, you know, they’re tasty.
The Beat Goes On
Your blog and other social media channels are ideal for connecting with
fans—those who already know you and like you. A steady flow of updates,
campaign success stories and calls to action delivered via these channels keeps
your community close and your not-for-profit front of mind. Social media
architecture—comment threads, likes and retweets—makes conversations easy
and natural. There are, of course, many heartbeat activities outside of social
media. Email newsletters fall into this bucket, as do donor relations, news
releases and monthly meetups.
Connecting regularly with your tribe is the healthy heartbeat that feeds
an engaged, active and in-step community. When you deliver thoughtful,
compelling content for your supporters via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and on
your blog, you’re striving to deepen ties, not fish for new fans.

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You’re Remarkable (and Purple)!
Caring for your community is essential, but so is growing it if you’re going to drive
change. So, if Facebook and blog updates aren’t going to do it, what will?
Remarkables are campaigns that make a big splash. We’re fans of marketing guru,
Seth Godin. We’re piggybacking on his “purple cow” theory here when we talk about
remarkables. In his must-read marketing bible, The Purple Cow, Seth tells the story
of taking his family to France. At first, his kids were enchanted by cows grazing in
the picturesque countryside—that
is until they passed field after field
of cows. Then cows were boring. “A
Purple Cow, though. Now that would
be interesting!” The metaphor here
is to make your organization, or a
campaign, a purple cow so that you’ll
stand out in a field of boring brown
cows.
What does a remarkable campaign
look like? In early 2011, Greenpeace
UK launched The Dark Side, a global
Star Wars parody campaign designed
to put pressure on Volkswagen to stop
lobbying against laws that would cut
CO2 emissions in Europe. European
car manufacturers had been in
discussions about reducing greenhouse
gas emissions by 30% by 2020, but
Volkswagen was fighting these cuts.
Photo via (cc) Flickr user Mouldfish

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Greenpeace UK campaign director, James Sadri, and his team set out to create
a campaign that would mobilize consumers to apply pressure on Volkswagen to
comply with CO2 reductions. Greenpeace wanted the company to feel the heat from
consumers.
Greenpeace’s campaign idea was inspired by a Volkswagen television ad that aired
during the 2011 Super Bowl. In the commercial, a child dressed as Darth Vader
believes he’s successfully started the family car using “the force.” Of course, his
father is standing at the window, using the remote control fob to start the ignition.

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James and his team spoofed the ad by
creating their own video where a legion
of grade-schoolers dressed as Star Wars
characters go up against the pint-sized
Vader. “Using humour was seen as the vector
in which we could take a hard line against
quite a loved brand,” said Sadri in an email
conversation. “We needed to find a way to
deliver a strong message in a softer way.
That’s why we chose humour.”
Greenpeace UK went a step further and built
an entire campaign around the Star Wars
concept—supporters joined Team Jedi to sign
petitions, email Volkswagen, and promote
the campaign to friends. The Dark Side was
more than a petition site; it was a game.
In exchange for promoting the campaign to
friends, supporters could acquire enough
points to win a limited edition Dark Side
t-shirt. Ultimately, friends promoting the
campaign to their friends was what made it
successful: it was off the charts for word-of-
mouth marketing.
Pushing the
Campaign
Comfort Zone
When James Sadri first approached
colleagues about the Greenpeace
Dark Side campaign idea, they
were skeptical. “We went to a lot of
different agencies... design agencies,
ad agencies and friends of friends
to get their ideas about running
this campaign. None of them
really wanted us to do anything in
response to the Volkswagen ad. And
none of them wanted anything to do
with Star Wars,” he said.
As an organization, Greenpeace
doesn’t shy away from risk. But,
according to James, The Dark
Side campaign even pushed the
boundaries of this progressive
organization known for bold real-
world activity: “People like doing
things that they know will work, like
dropping banners off buildings. If
you take them out of their comfort
zone, organizationally, you often get
a bit of pushback,” said Sadri.

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The remarkable paid off. According to James, the average Greenpeace campaign in
the UK can mobilize between 5000 and 10,000 actions over a few days. As of December
2012, The Dark Side has engaged more than 520,000 supporters. The Dark Side
launched in over a dozen countries during the first half of 2011 and continues to garner
support from around the world. When we talked to James earlier this year, China’s
website was ramping up and the Turkish site had just gone live. “It’s bigger than any
of us ever expected,” he said. The Dark Side movement continues to evolve as ongoing
conversations between Greenpeace and Volkswagen take place. Sadri says, “dialogue
[with all the automotive companies involved] continues, which is really positive.”
We hope this Greenpeace
remarkable gets you
thinking about creative
online campaigns your
organization can launch
to activate supporters
and attract others to
your cause. We’ll share
the tactics we use for
creating remarkables in
Chapter 5.
We believe the two-
pronged heartbeats and
remarkables approach is a solid strategy for using social media more effectively. While
heartbeat activities can go a long way to deepen ties within your tribe, flexing your
creative muscle with remarkable campaigns can help you get noticed in an increasingly
noisy online world. Together, these activities can help to both grow and feed your
movement. Heartbeats and remarkables are key pillars of our movement marketing
strategies, so we’ll explore specific tactics for effectively employing them in the next
two chapters.

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chapter 4
doctor’s orders for a healthy heartbeat
H
eartbeats are, of course, the communications activities we do daily, or at
least on a regular basis. They include things like Facebook, Twitter, updating
your website and monthly newsletters. They can also be in-person events
where members and supporters meet face-to-face. Heartbeats are the steady rhythm
of outreach that keeps marketing programs alive and your constituents engaged.
With the introduction of social media, we’ve seen
growing interest in the idea of “engagement.”
Not only do not-for-profits and charities want
supporters to volunteer and donate, we want
them to be more engaged in the work we do and
with the causes we believe in, in the hope that
increased engagement will lead to behaviour
change. In broad terms, we think of heartbeats
as activities that move supporters up the
engagement ladder, while remarkables feed the
sales funnel with new members.
Facebook, Twitter and blogs make it easier
for fans and followers to participate in your
organization by commenting on, liking and
sharing content. These online channels make low-
level engagement possible, and measurable. Granular open and clickthrough statistics
on monthly communications demonstrate levels of engagement within your tribe. This
kind of online social media interaction is just the beginning and represents a basic
level of engagement, but it’s a starting place at the bottom of any engagement ladder.
By working to deepen engagement, we’re building relationships and increasing the
likelihood that supporters will take action when we ask them to.

26
A Daily Dose of Social Media
There are lots of ways to keep a heartbeats program healthy and to deepen
audience engagement and relationship building. As you get to know your own
online audiences better you’ll find ways that work for you. These are best
practices we put in place to get programs off to a smooth start.
Make a Plan
Strategic editorial calendar planning is a critical ingredient for successfully
delivering meaningful messages that engage audiences, encourage action and
complement offline programs. Too often, status updates and shared links are
randomly posted simply to feed insatiable social media channels. A strategic
editorial calendar ensures that you have:
Agreed upon messages well ahead of your publishing date, rather than on•
an ad hoc basis.
Considered your organization’s big-picture fundraising and campaigning•
schedule and how social media and online activities can amplify that
work.
Identified who will write and/or design upcoming content within your•
organization.

27
When we work with organizations to develop editorial calendars, we encourage
quarterly content scheduling. This long term view results in a strategic, meaningful
approach to communications and takes the stress off social media managers to
produce engaging content on the fly, every day, without strategic guidance and
support. Of course, you can generate spontaneous posts that respond to breaking
news or a partner’s campaign, but a carefully thought out editorial calendar provides
a topical and structural framework.
Here’s an example of a shared social media editorial calendar easily created in Google
Drive. It identifies blog post topics and publishing dates, newsletter distribution dates
and weekly Facebook and Twitter themes that support an organization’s current
activities.

28
More and more organizations are sharing online outreach activities amongst staff
members. While this approach lightens the load for each staffer, knowing who is
responsible for what and when can become confusing. We recommend creating
a workflow that clearly identifies activities and authors. Workflows should also
outline expectations for heartbeat activities, such as how many Facebook updates
or tweets to produce each day.
This sample workflow identifies strategic editorial planning, as well as daily, weekly
and monthly heartbeat activities.

29
Curate Brilliantly
Generating quality content is critical, but curating brilliantly is every bit as important.
That’s because no one person knows everything! The collective intelligence that
exists on the web is beyond what all your organization’s experts and staff could ever
produce. So, share it. When a like-minded organization produces a relevant report,
link to it and retweet it. When an expert publishes a book on a topic of interest,
recommend it to your Facebook fans. When a community member posts a thought-
provoking comment, like it. The web is—of course—a web, and you’re just a small part
of the network. Take advantage of all those other nodes of information to educate,
entertain and encourage your audience.
Quality and Consistency Count
Your job is to inform your constituency about your cause, why it’s important and
what they need to know—and do—to make a difference in the world. Of course,
posting a beautiful photograph or sharing an entertaining post is entirely acceptable,
and encouraged. But, solid, quality information should be the backbone of online
communications.
Don’t Drop Email for Shiny Pennies
Email is dying. However, it’s dying very slowly. We may look back and laugh at email in
20 years the way we look back at fax machines today. Despite what your social media
marketing consultant may say, email isn’t dead. It can still be a very effective and
productive communications channel for your organization. Don’t forget that Groupon
and dozens of imitators have risen to fame in the last couple of years on the backs of
little more than email messages and coupons. So, don’t forsake your email campaigns
just because you’ve become fond of Pinterest.

30
Value Authenticity
Relationships are built on trust and online relationships are no different. Truth-
telling and straight talk has got to be at the heart of online communications if
your community is to thrive. Here’s one easy way to practice transparency and
authenticity. If you make a mistake, don’t simply edit your content once it has been
published. Make your corrections public. This can be done by striking out errors and
adding the correct information. Readers are tolerant and most errors are quickly
forgiven. This demonstrates transparency and is a standard way corrections are made
on blogs and in social media channels.
Keep Marketing Messages to a Minimum
Seems like a no-brainer, but overloading your
communications channels with marketing
messages is a major turn off. In a recent study
we completed of NGO success on Facebook,
we discovered that more than any other
action, NGOs link from Facebook back to
their own websites. In fact, of the thousand
Facebook posts we reviewed, 37% of all
posts were links back to organizations’ own
websites. Interestingly, the top performing
organizations in our study habitually linked to
other sites—mostly mainstream news articles
about their causes—as often as they linked to
their own. We’ll share more data from this
Facebook research project in the upcoming
section, “Facebook Fieldwork.”
Respect
Copyright
If you reference content
from other blogs or offline
publications, respect copyright.
Credit sources by linking to
original content or by citing the
source in your text. It works
the same way for images and
video. Want to learn more
about copyright and the web?
Check out this blog post, and
spend some time at http://www.
creativecommons.org.

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Make Friends, Supporters Are People Too
Heartbeats are all about increasing audience engagement. And so, when your
audience responds to a call to action in your newsletter, comments on your Facebook
page, sends you a direct message in Twitter or leaves a comment on your blog post,
it’s critical that you respond. That’s precisely how you build relationships and a
community that cares about your cause. Not sure how to respond? This next section
on being a great Community Manager provides some insight.
Want to know what it looks like when a great heartbeats program comes together?
PhoneGap is an open source software project that offers a simpler way for software
developers to build mobile apps for any smartphone. Open source is not-for-profit,
that is, the software is freely available for anyone to use and—if they’re so inclined—
improve upon. The community of developers using PhoneGap software is active,
engaged and about 400,000 strong.
PhoneGap expertly covers all the heartbeats. A monthly newsletter showcases great
apps built by developers in the community; an active blog is updated with hard-
hitting tips; a Twitter account gives kudos to other cool projects; presentations,
tutorials and upcoming events are posted to the Facebook page; developer questions
are promptly answered in a Google Group; and face-to-face meetups are organized by
and for developers all over the world. Why bother with all of it?
This ever-growing community of PhoneGap developers is more than the sum of its
parts. You see, when more developers use PhoneGap, more improvements are made
to the code, and more add-ons and apps are produced. As a result, PhoneGap’s
popularity and effectiveness grows. So, nurturing the community is key.
“Being active on various digital channels is really important to maintaining
relationships with PhoneGap developers. If they want to use Facebook to connect with
us and each other they can, but lots of developers will be more comfortable in Google
Groups. The more diverse your audience, the more strategic you need to be about
reaching them where they’re at. We go to the effort because we want our community

32
to feel as though they’re part of something special, which they are,” said Colene
Chow, Product Marketing Manager for PhoneGap.
Today, thousands of apps built using PhoneGap are available. In fact, if you’ve got a
smartphone we’ll bet you’ve already got a PhoneGap-built app installed. Be assured,
there are many, many more to come.
Facebook Fieldwork: How NGOs Win on
the World’s Biggest Social Network
Facebook is an important heartbeat activity for lots
of NGOs. Because we help not-for-profits improve
their heartbeats and better engage online audiences
with meaningful content, we spend a lot of time
thinking about why some organizations get more
likes, comments and shares on Facebook than
others. So, we decided to put our experience and
long-held assumptions to the test and back them up
with some real data.
Early this year, we embarked on a research project
to answer this question: What types of content
gets liked, commented upon and shared on NGO
Facebook pages?
First, we identified 20 Facebook pages run by
large and well-known environmental not-for-profit
organizations across North America. On average,
each organization had approximately 160,000 fans.
While we only researched environmental NGOs,
we’re confident our results apply to any charity or
not-for-profit organization. For-profit companies will
be interested in the results, too.

33
We evaluated the 50 most recent Facebook posts by each organization, which
gave us 1,000 posts to work with. After doing a deep data dive, we compiled the
results into five lessons on how NGOs can better succeed on Facebook.
1. Link Generously. Organizations that apply an open, networked approach to
social media channels will engage their audience more successfully than those
that only talk about themselves. In our study, the NGOs that performed poorly
published lots of links to their own sites, and few to anybody else’s. 37% of all
posts we looked at linked back to home pages and website pages while the top
performing organizations regularly linked to other sites—mostly mainstream
news articles about their causes—as often as they linked to their own websites.
2. Don’t Overwhelm Your Audience. You may think you post the perfect
content for your online community but if you post too often, you risk
alienating your supporters. Something that surprised us in our research was
how little the top tier organizations posted to Facebook. They only needed
to post once a day (including weekends). We also noticed that Thursdays had
the highest average engagement, followed by Saturday and Sunday. So, if you
haven’t been thinking about posting content on the weekend, that’s a tactic
worth considering.
3. You’re Probably Not Sharing Enough Photos and Videos. Of all the types
of content we looked at—photos, videos, photo galleries, status updates and
links—fans were likeliest to like, share or comment on a photo. Based on all
we know about Facebook and Edgerank (Facebook’s algorithm that determines
what content makes it into your newsfeed), this outcome did not surprise us.
We were interested, however, to discover 18 of the top 20 most engaging
Facebook posts were photos. In particular, our study showed climate change
campaigners 350.org performed well, sharing professionally produced and
thoughtful photos, infographics and videos. Videos also performed well but still
only accounted for 11% of all the posts we looked at while photos accounted
for 26%.

34
4. Emulate the Superstars. Two organizations that stood out for producing engaging
content were Earthjustice and the Surfrider Foundation. We highly recommend taking
a look at these two organizations and paying close attention to their Facebook posts
and social media channels as models to emulate. These two organizations do excellent
work offline. It’s great to see that their real-world success extends to their digital
channels, too.
5. Overlay Powerful Text on Evocative Photos. Of the one thousand posts we looked
at, the top 10 were all photos with some characteristics in common:
All of the photos featured emotional or provocative subject matter.•
Most included a simple, powerful message in overlying text.•
Most seemed to be taken, or touched up, by professionals.•
Only one of the photos’ captions included an “ask” that users like or share the•
photo.
There was one infographic among these popular images, and it was very simple.•
Surfrider excels on Facebook
engagement with provocative images.
350.org tells a compelling story using
just a few facts and numbers in this
graphic they shared on Facebook.

35
Using the web to extend the ways in which you communicate with your constituency
and call them to action sounds like a great idea. It can be! But, only if you put a
strategic framework and best practices in place that will support what may be a time
consuming—though rewarding—heartbeats program.
Jodi Stark, Healthy Oceans campaigner for the David Suzuki Foundation, took our
research to heart and produced an image of oily seawater, and overlaid it with a
powerful message about oil spills. Jodi writes:
“We posted this on Saturday [David Suzuki’s page had roughly 200,000 likes at the time] and in short
order, we got 1,000 shares, 180 comments and 342 likes. The page was also liked by 1,000 more
people this weekend. We can’t attribute this to the image, but we do know that with 1,000 shares, we
got huge exposure to lots of new Facebook friends. We also got 3050 visits to the blog from Facebook
(out of 4500 total visits) and 560 people who followed up and signed our action. In Facebook Insights,
the post is currently second (out of 158) post for ‘engaged users’ and ‘most talked about’ for 2012.”

36
chapter 5
how to start a fire: a remarkables toolkit
I
f we’ve succeeded in convincing you that remarkables can be effective for
fueling a movement, initiating word-of-mouth and energizing an organization’s
membership, then you’re ready to start making your own remarkables.
Unfortunately, there are few hard and fast rules for creating remarkables—there’s no
formula that guarantees success. However, there are guidelines and best practices we
rely on when designing remarkable campaign ideas.
Change the Medium of the Message
If you think you get a lot of email (and we’re sure you do!), then consider how many
email pitches flood into journalists and influencers’ inboxes every day. A reporter at
Vancouver BC’s daily newspaper says she gets about 150 emails a day, most of them
from marketers asking her to write about their products, services or campaigns. That’s
a lot of email, which translates into a lot of competition. Even a clever email or great
campaign premise is in danger of being skimmed or skipped. That’s why we increasingly
look for new ways to deliver campaign messages.
Sometimes a “new” way to send your message is actually an old way. We occasionally
use snail mail to get our stories into the hands of influencers. That’s because receiving
a letter in the post has become unusual, even charming. Plus, the signal-to-noise ratio
is much better. So few of us are sending mail that the US Postal Service is in serious
danger of going out of business. The snail mail approach can help you cut through
today’s digital noise.

37
A number of years ago we ran a launch campaign for DreamBank, a socially-
conscious online gift registry where members posted requests for meaningful
gifts, like a portion of college tuition or a flight home to see family over
Christmas. The website’s philosophy is that contributing to a meaningful gift is
better than giving Christmas sweaters and other unwanted “stuff” that no one
uses or wants.
Inspired by the company name, we built a campaign on the concept of
“fairytale.” With this in mind we sent inﬂuential bloggers packages in the
post complete with a letter granting each of them fairy godmother status; a
tiara; a wand and a $20 voucher to be used to “top up” any active account
on the DreamBank site. Our fairy godmother kits got noticed. Importantly,
they prompted the bloggers to poke around the site and ﬁnd a dream gift to
contribute their $20 toward.
A fun and light-hearted pitch like this one requires compromise. The approach
meant we couldn’t cover all the angles in one shot. We didn’t lead with stats
about the negative impact manufacturing waste, packaging, transporting and
the eventual disposal of unwanted gifts has on the planet. Nor did we hang
our pitch on rethinking consumerism. We included background materials that
Blogger Kate Trgovac
photographs her fairy kit and
blogs about it on her popular
blog, My Name is Kate.

38
covered these issues, but the campaign objective was to get bloggers’ attention. We
made contact with many of our A-list online influencers and convinced them to check
out DreamBank.org, which fits the mandate for a successful remarkable. With that
successful introduction under our belt, building deeper, more meaningful relationships
and introducing hard-hitting issues is the next step.
Say it Visually
When it comes to a campaign pitch, a picture can certainly be worth a thousand
words. This is the story of an image pitch we created while doing some outreach many
years back for Brother Printers.
Our objective was to get product reviews from influential bloggers in Western Canada.
We identified bloggers with healthy readerships. We also found popular bloggers who
worked for small businesses or were entrepreneurs themselves, and so would have
some interest in checking out a color laser printer. Then we started writing the pitch.
No matter how we put the words together the printer pitch wouldn’t sing. Frustrated,
we began to brainstorm ways of making the pitch remarkable and came up with this
simple idea. We would send bloggers something they might like to print. Something
that would look really good if it were printed out on Brother’s new color laser printer.
We created 20 customized comic book style pitches for our top-tier bloggers. We used
the free comic builder software that came with Apple computers at the time and
pulled Creative Commons photos of the bloggers from Flickr so that we could make
them the stars of their own comic strip.

39
It took about an hour to create each comic, and the bloggers were delighted with
them. It’s worth noting here that we knew a number of these bloggers from past
outreach activities and so took the risk of pulling their personal photos into these
comics. If we’d never contacted these bloggers before there might be something a bit
creepy about doing that. The result was excellent. Of our hit list of 20 bloggers, 17 of
them reviewed the printer. Plus, they liked the pitch so much, many of them blogged
about their comic even before posting their review, giving us two posts for the price
of one. The results were proof that the time we took to craft each personalized image
was worth the effort.
The comic pitch was a fun approach to saying it visually, but there’s an entire school
of journalism devoted to telling complex, often serious stories with just one graphic.
It’s called data journalism and the images produced are called infographics. The data
journalism trend is in full swing and is popular both in print and on the web. In fact,
we see examples of data journalism in almost every newspaper these days.
Vancouver’s most popular blogger, Miss604.com, creates her own comic
of the Brother Printer unboxing and posts it on her blog and Flickr.

40
That’s good news for not-for-profits that deal with large amounts of scientific data
and want to engage the press with their research findings. If you can tell your story in
one, informative image you may have an easier time getting through to influencers.
Four years ago, web-savvy not-for-profit Charity Water started asking friends and
supporters to give up their birthdays and ask for donations instead of gifts. Here’s the
infographic they created to explain the major impact that small, selfless act would
have on people in need:
Since launching the birthday campaign, 20,000 people have
given up their birthdays for Charity Water.

41
Riff on What the Web Loves
If the Internet is crazy about something—say, lipdubs of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me
Maybe”—then consider piggybacking on that meme while it’s still running hot. A meme
is an element of culture (an idea, a video, a phrase, an image, an ad) that gets passed
from one individual to another. You’ll recognize this as word of mouth. Riding a
meme’s momentum is a classic Internet move. We’ve observed that borrowing and
remixing something the web already loves is often an effective strategy for grabbing
attention. Additionally, the original meme acts as a kind of social proof for your
campaign. If it was popular once, then your variation on the idea can be popular, too.
One of our favorite spin-offs is the New Spice: Study like a scholar, scholar video ad
created for the campus library by the students at Brigham Young University. It’s a
charming, picture-perfect replica of the wildly popular Old Spice YouTube ads and has
collected more than three million views. That’s a remarkable result for a promotion
for a campus library.

42
Make it Interactive
Before we recommend launching a campaign that calls for user-generated content
or on-site interactions, we’ll warn you that these campaigns can have a price of
admission. That means they’ve got to be exceptionally cool and the user experience
must be ﬂawless for it to work well. You may have already had the disheartening
experience of building an online community, tool or contest that sits as empty as
Coney Island in November. However, when they’re done well, interactive campaigns
can get your organization a lot of attention and inspire your existing community.
Early in 2012, Canadian outdoor clothing and gear retailer, Mountain Equipment Co-
op, partnered with Canadian singer-songwriter, Sarah Harmer, to launch a digital
campaign called Drawn to the Wild. Canadians were invited to participate in the
campaign by making artistic contributions to Sarah’s “I’m a Mountain” video. In short,
the campaign crowdsourced a re-imagined music video.
Crowdsourcing calls on people who are otherwise not connected to contribute in
a small way toward a common goal. We see this on the web all the time... think
Kickstarter and popular t-shirt manufacturer, Threadless. For Drawn to the Wild, site
visitors were asked to use web-based drawing tools to trace or enhance one of the
1200 frames that made up the original music video.
This campaign was designed to raise awareness for threatened Canadian landscapes.
For every re-envisioned frame submitted on the website, Mountain Equipment Co-op
donated funds for protecting Escarpment Rural Land (PERL), Sarah’s environmental
organization dedicated to protecting the Niagara Escarpment in southern Ontario.
Full disclosure here: Capulet works closely with MEC, leading and managing its
conservation project, TheBigWild.org. With Drawn to the Wild we created something
fresh and fun for the MEC and Big Wild audiences, who are regularly contacted via
newsletters and social media about environmental campaigns. This was a new way for
them to participate.

43
“The Niagara Escarpment’s survival as a unique natural environment is seriously
threatened. Drawn to the Wild is one way Canadians can both support its protection
and collaborate with me and each other in a fun and creative way.” — Sarah Harmer
So how did it all come together? We selected Sarah’s tour documentary, “Escarpment
Blues” as the featured music video on the microsite, www.drawntothewild.org.
Website visitors were asked to draw on, fill in or highlight a film frame using a simple
web-based drawing tool before submitting their work. This was a high-friction ask
with lots of moving parts, so we created a YouTube how-to video to walk users
through the process.
Developers and designers at Vancouver digital agency, Agentic, built a custom
interface that was both straightforward to use and enabled us to vet and organize
submissions on the website back end.

44
Frames were added to the video on the fly so that participants could click
“play” to watch the music video take shape right before their eyes.
Now, let’s crunch the numbers. We shared the project via various online
channels, including the TheBigWild.org and Mountain Equipment Co-op
newsletters. Interestingly, Facebook advertising delivered the highest
conversion rate of any source that sent significant traffic to the campaign.
Twitter also performed surprisingly well. We put that down to the fun and
unexpected nature of the project, which in many ways parallels the serendipity
of Twitter.
To complete the video, we needed a minimum of 1200 frames. In total, 1822
frames were drawn and submitted, which was above our expectations. We kept
1477 of the frames submitted and rejected 345. It’s the Internet after all, so
it’s no surprise that some rude drawings appeared in the mix, which is why each
frame needed to be vetted before being added to the video. The average visitor
submitted two frames and some keeners drew several each. Two enthusiastic
contributors drew 56 and 54 frames, respectively. It took the average visitor
about six minutes to add their frame.
Years ago while working as a technical writer, Darren’s boss encouraged him to
“disteal.” That is, to be inspired by the very best ideas from colleagues and
thought leaders and to emulate those ideas. In this case, Drawn to the Wild
was heavily inspired by the crowdsourced
Johnny Cash Project. On the website and in
our communications material, we repeatedly
acknowledged that project as an antecedent to
this one. We see ad agencies stealing ideas all
the time without doing this, and it’s not cool
(Darren feels particularly strongly about this).
Be inspired by the
very best ideas from
colleagues and thought
leaders, and emulate
those ideas.

45
If you’re considering trying an interactive campaign that relies on visitors’
participation to succeed, make sure you’ve got these things covered:
You already have a sizable, engaged audience. If you start with a very small•
audience, it’s much harder to build momentum for your remarkable. The more
people in your community that will spread and share the campaign, the better
the chance of reaching an audience that will add content to or interact with
your remarkable.
You’ve got a kick-ass idea. No one wants to spend precious time generating•
content for something that’s not cool or fun. Make your campaign irresistible
and your audience will want to be a part of it.
You’ve got the technical skills to pull it off. Without in-house technical•
expertise or a reliable development partner, the user experience can fail. In
most cases you’ve only got one shot with a visitor; make it count by ensuring all
the technical glitches are ironed out before launch.
You’ve got a clear objective in mind. Make the call to action clear and directed.•
Want people to donate? Ask them. Want them to contribute a personal story?
Make it easy for them to submit it.
You’ve got the staff resources to manage interactions. If you ask people to•
interact with you, you must be there to respond. That may mean putting a
staffer on full-time community management duty while you run an interactive
remarkable.

46
More Ways to Stand Out
There are dozens of ways to build a remarkable campaign. We’ll end this section with
a few more clever approaches to get the creative juices flowing:
Change the Scope: The University of Kentucky put giant Facebook Places markers
around campus to remind prospective students to check in and spread the University
of Kentucky brand to their friends.
Find the Funny: Regardless of your cause, there’s probably a way to occasionally treat
it with a lighter touch. That’s the approach F*** Cancer sometimes uses to engage
young people on the subject of early detection of the disease.
Exploit the First Mover Advantage: Every time a new technology starts to gain
momentum, there’s an opportunity to get in early and use it to successfully tell your
story. American Apparel probably didn’t make much money from selling virtual t-shirts
in Second Life, but they enjoyed extensive media coverage as one of the first big
corporations to sell in the virtual world. Likewise, these QR code poster campaign for
The Big Wild enjoyed plenty of press as the first Canadian environmental non-profit to
employ the technology.

47
When you’re the first to adopt a new platform or technology, you can build significant
credibility by teaching your community about it. Back when it still mattered, if you
taught somebody about RSS, then yours was the first blog they subscribed to.
As you can see from the examples above, remarkables can take many different shapes
and forms. They can be cheap and cheerful or blinged out. Whatever yours looks
like, remember that the objective should be to increase attention so that you can
recruit new members, inspire actions within your existing community and connect
with inﬂuencers. When all these things happen in tandem, you’ve got word-of-mouth
working for you!

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chapter 6
blending online activity with offline action
L
et’s talk about turning digital heartbeats and remarkables into effective change
in the real world. After all, online activities must make a positive impact on
your organization’s work. Marrying online and offline is one of the most difficult
aspects of web campaigning, but when it’s done well, it can be powerful.
So, what’s the secret to blending online and offline effectively? In this chapter we’ll
look at organizations that integrate the two kinds of campaigning successfully.
Raising the Rainbow Warrior
Offline advocacy is at the heart of most movements and we can learn a lot from
historical offline wins and losses. When it comes to environmental advocacy,
Greenpeace has a rich tradition of real-world campaigning, but also does an
exceptional job of integrating traditional work with digital thinking. This online
campaign to raise funds for a capital campaign shows just how productively online and
offline can work together.
“Just as campaigners need to understand how new digital tools and strategies work
(like social media) to be effective in designing campaign strategy, digital campaigners
need to appreciate the nuances between these types of actions to make valuable
contributions to campaign planning.” — Michael Silberman, Global Director of
Greenpeace Mobilization Lab
Real-world action has always been a priority for Greenpeace—from unfurling banners
on major landmarks to blocking whaling ships and protesting nuclear tests on the open
oceans. The Rainbow Warrior ship is a long-standing symbol of Greenpeace and has

49
played a major role in real-world protests. After years of use, a new Rainbow Warrior
was needed and Greenpeace launched an online fundraising campaign to raise money
to build a new vessel.
With help from ad agency DDB, Greenpeace built a sophisticated fundraising
microsite. But this was no run-of-the-mill online donation form. From gripping video
footage that recounts the Rainbow Warrior’s battles to sophisticated blueprints of the
new vessel—viewable from every position and angle—the highly-interactive website
was remarkable. The best part? Donors bought parts of the new ship. From windows
and GPS devices to smoke detectors and boilers, visitors browsed these items on the
site and purchased them to outfit the new ship.
Donors even got a certificate of ownership for their contributions. This approach riffs
on the growing online shopping trend and gives donors a real sense of ownership of
the new Rainbow Warrior.
The result? Greenpeace raised enough money from 100,000 donors to commission
a new Rainbow Warrior and donors who contributed to the project had their name
added to a plaque on the ship. The new Rainbow Warrior is now in action and carries
the names of all of those who helped build it.

50
Web to World, Eh!
In 2011, three weeks before a Canadian federal election, 80 groups of young
Canadians met face-to-face to talk about their leaders. It was a campaign
led by Leadnow, a political advocacy organization in the business of building
dialogue and, ultimately, movements that inform the democratic process in
Canada. The purpose of these face-to-face conversations was to capture and
collect different opinions about Canada’s political leaders before the federal
election. To facilitate the real-world meetups, Leadnow used the web as its
primary organization tool, including sites like Meetup. From these 80 real-
world conversations emerged several themes that Leadnow organizers used to
draft a declaration to Canada’s political leaders.
In another campaign, LeadNow rallied their web-savvy supporters to take
online action at the start of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York.
Brookfield Asset Management is the Canadian company that owns Zuccoti Park.
You’ll remember that Zuccoti Park was the location of Occupy Wall Street
protests in the fall of 2011. Leadnow called on Canadians to ask Brookfield
executives to refrain from immediately closing the park. More than 12,000
Leadnow supporters sent messages to Brookfield and to New York’s Mayor
Michael Bloomberg through the Leadnow platform. Combined with other global
actions, Leadnow’s online work helped to delay the eviction.
Though Leadnow was born online, its influence has been felt in the real world.

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Many Hands Make Light Work
Open data predates social media. The open data movement believes that specific
data sets should be made publicly available and used by anyone and everyone to help
solve civic, national and international problems. Open data supports crowdsourced
problem solving. In other words, many hands make light work. Once momentum for an
open data project gets rolling, topic enthusiasts work together to create something
extraordinary and meaningful.
With the help of open data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) developed this interactive map that visualized spill response during the 2010
Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The map known as the ERMA Gulf
Response (Environmental Response Management Application) pulled in freely-available
data, from tides and currents to water samples and wildlife research, and is still open
to the public. It was designed to facilitate communication and coordination among a
variety of users—from federal, state, and local responders to local community leaders
and the public.

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Data.gov, a website launched in 2009 in the United States, supports increased
public access to sets of data that can be developed and built into applications with
real-world impact. By opening up this data and encouraging citizens to engage
and interact with it, communities can come together to find real solutions that
governments haven’t had the time, resources or political will to solve.
So, how do you measure online to offline success? Start by asking yourself what
winning looks like. Is success simply a click through? Does it mobilize people to meet
face-to-face? Is it drawing attention to specific national issues, or changing policy? Set
your goals with specific outcomes in mind.
Blend well, be rigorous with your measurement and make the online count on terra
firma.

53
chapter 7
are we there yet?
W
hen we encourage not-for-profits to undertake an online approach, a first
question is almost always, “How do you measure online success?” That’s
a great question. After all, it takes time and resources to run online
movement marketing campaigns and you want to be sure you’re moving in the right
direction.
In chapter 2 we covered creating big, audacious goals for your movement. When
it comes to measuring success, these goals are critical. They’re your roadmap for
marketing activities and will determine metrics for your programs. If you don’t know
what goals you’re trying to achieve, it’s very difficult to measure impact and success.
So, if you haven’t defined goals for your organization yet, we recommend you do that
deed. Once your goals are clearly defined, you’ll be able to build a more effective
dashboard for measuring success.
What’s a Marketing Dashboard?
The concept of a marketing dashboard is not likely new to you, but it’s not always
adopted in not-for-profits. Increasingly, process and analytics are being applied to
marketers in both the enterprise and not-for-profits, which is why a dashboard can be
so helpful. To act thoughtfully and responsibly you’ll need an accurate snapshot of the
health of your online communities and you must know which marketing activities have
been successful (or not successful) in growing your movement.

54
Let’s discuss four steps for putting an effective measurement process in place.
Step 1: Match Big, Audacious Goals with Measurable Online
Actions
With goals clearly defined and front of mind, determine which online actions will
bring you closer to achieving big, audacious goals. Here’s an example. Let’s imagine
that you’re an environmental organization with a goal to protect wild spaces as
parkland. Convincing governments to conserve wild spaces is a big, audacious goal.
So, what are some online actions that will get you closer to achieving that goal? How
about these?
Petition signatures.• If collecting signatures is a way your organization can put
pressure on governments to make change, then the more signatures you collect
the more pressure you can apply. So, the number of petition signatures you
collect online moves the needle on your ultimate goal.
Events.• Perhaps rallies and protests play a role in how you can influence
This public-facing dashboard from the Indianapolis Museum of Art
displays key performance indicator results so that internal staff
and the public can determine the organization’s success.

55
political leaders. If getting supporters out to real-world events attracts greater
attention and PR for your cause, then using online tools to help get your
community out to events will impact your success.
Donations.• Maybe your strategy is to raise enough money to purchase tracts
of wilderness to ensure their protection. If so, the more funds you can raise
through online donations the more land you can protect.
These are some online performance indicators that relate directly to a big goal. Now
that you’ve aligned your goals with measurable online actions you’re ready to build a
dashboard.
Step 2: Build Your Dashboard
When it comes to constructing a dashboard, less is more. Try to keep your dashboard
to a few key metrics that will indicate whether or not you’re on the road to achieving
your goals. The tendency is to add as many metrics as possible. But to be effective, a
dashboard need only answer these three questions:
Are key performance indicators (KPIs) represented on the dashboard related to•
online activities that directly affect your ultimate goal?
Based on results and analytics, can you tell whether or not online marketing•
activities are “moving the needle” for your cause?
Can you draw actionable conclusions from the data?•
Key performance indicators should unveil specific conclusions. In other words, do the
metrics reported on your marketing dashboard bring issues to the surface that may
impact strategy and future activities? They should.
While using Google Analytics and a spreadsheet is a perfectly effective way to create
a dashboard, there are also online tools that make the process easier and display
results a little more clearly. You might want to check out Klipfolio or simplekpi.

56
Step 3: Check Your Dials
You wouldn’t set off on the freeway with the fuel gauge hovering on empty. It doesn’t
make sense to blindly sink budget and resources into online activities that aren’t
getting you anywhere. Your dashboard shows performance and will help you decide if
the time and money you’re putting into online campaigns are worth the effort.
Each month we gauge online movement health by checking the dials and either
staying the course or tweaking activities or methods accordingly. Here’s what we
mean.
We’ve run a number of online petitions at The Big Wild. The petition pictured below
is for the Yukon’s Peel River Watershed campaign. We asked the Big Wild community
to sign this petition as a way to add voices to a public consultation for the region’s
environmental action plan.
When we started running petition campaigns, landing pages looked quite different
than this one. You may have noticed that this campaign page is very stripped down—
no top or side navigation, a simple photo and only one thing for visitors to do: sign
the petition. We were prompted to tweak these landing pages because we weren’t
reaching our petition signature goals. We knew these pages could perform better.
So, we streamlined the page, removed secondary calls to action and other
distractions that we suspected were tempting visitors before they completed the
call to action. And, we were right. This bare bones landing page elicited 45% more
petition signatures than the original petition page.

57
We hope you’ll revisit your KPI dashboard on a regular basis to make sure the metrics
you are tracking are helping you ask the right questions and facilitate both small
campaign tweaks and strategic decisions.
Step 4: Changing Course
The wonderful (and terrifying) thing about measurement is that it empowers you
to act. Data gives you confidence to change course when what you’re doing isn’t
working. You simply need the courage to do so. That can be especially difficult in
an organization that typically runs on raw, emotional impulse. When an Executive
Director is married to a recurring campaign or a board member is convinced their
annual event is the bee’s knees, you may find yourself being the bearer of bad news.

58
Here’s a tip. To get a true picture of marketing health, you’ll need to find ways to
measure offline activities too. How are you measuring print advertising, radio spots
and TV ads? Measurement becomes much harder in the “real” world. But, if you don’t
try to determine offline activity value, you won’t be able to compare offline and
online impact. When you can evaluate the effectiveness of all marketing activities
you’ll be much closer to running a lean, mean movement marketing machine.
Measurement is a key part of any movement marketing program and stems from
those big, audacious goals. If you’re ready to get serious about measurement, we
recommend you consider implementing a dashboard. Thankfully, there are a variety
of inexpensive, Excel-based dashboard templates available on the web. An expert can
help you tune it up for your journey.
While we typically think of Google Analytics as an online
measurement tool, it can straddle online and offline. For instance,
if you’re launching a series of print, radio and television ads,
create a unique URL for each category of add. Track those URLs
with Google Analytics and you’ll be able to better determine
interest generated by those ads.

59
Now, Start That Fire
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this short e-book. We’ve discussed
getting to know your audience and understanding what they need
from you to get excited about your cause. We’ve talked about goal
setting and measurement for the great work you do, and why that’s an
important part of the process. We’ve recommended tactics for healthy
heartbeats, and—fingers crossed—got you thinking about wild and
wonderful campaign ideas with examples of inspirational remarkables
from your peers.
If there’s a single idea we want you to take away from our musings,
it’s to embrace your role in all of this. You can execute a series of
middling heartbeats, or you can work creatively to fan the flames of
your organization’s burgeoning movement. You can advocate for your
community and design inspired ways for them to work together toward
a common and meaningful goal. Create the ideal environment for
stoking passion, devise ways to spread enthusiasm, and motivate others
to “light up” for your cause. Become a Noble Arsonist.

60
Recommended Reading
Getting excited about this movement building stuff? We’ve put together a short list
of titles and resources to inspire your digital movement building work. These are our
favourites. Enjoy!
The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries
You don’t have to be in the startup business to appreciate Eric Ries’ book The Lean
Startup. It’s a rundown of best practices organizations employ to work better and
win more often. The Lean Startup has gone on to inspire a series of conferences
under the same name.
Winning the Story Wars, by Jonah Sachs
Jonah Sachs, armed with inspiration from Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, has taken his collective experience in marketing to
bring us a book on how to build remarkable brands through epic storytelling. Jonah
is known for his video work including “The Meatrix” and “The Story of Stuff”, both
examples of video storytelling gone viral.
The Purple Cow, by Seth Godin
We often quote marketer and writer Seth Godin and refer to his marketing bible, The
Purple Cow. Our own campaign development process on remarkables and heartbeats
was originally inspired by this book. For your daily dose of smart marketing advice,
you can also visit Seth’s Blog.
Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, by Beth Kanter and Katie Delahaye
Paine
Beth Kanter is a household name in the non-profit world. Her blog remains a go-
to site on our reading list when it comes to testing new tools and best practices in
social media. Her latest book, The Networked Nonprofit is loaded with practical
advice on how to best measure your digital impact.

61
Stumbling on Happiness, by Dan Gilbert
We couldn’t resist adding a pop psychology read to this list. Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling
on Happiness discusses how we often face too much choice in our lives. Gilbert’s
research into what makes people happy offers a surprising look at human nature.
The Purpose Driven Church: Growth Without Compromising Your
Message and Mission, by Rick Warren
This book, at first glance, may appear out of place on our list. But, time and time
again we find ourselves recommending it based on the best practices it recommends
for movement building. The author, Rick Warren, is a pastor and The Purpose Driven
Church was written with an audience of church leaders in mind. The content speaks
to the core philosophy of building momentum among a community in support of a
common cause.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing with Organizations,
by Clay Shirky
In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky argues that restrictions like time and money
are no longer barriers for organizations with so many digital tools and alternatives at
their fingertips. Social media has given way to simple solutions and better organizing.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan
Heath
Switch addresses the ongoing battle between the rational and emotional mind as
it plays out in each of us. Brothers Chip and Dan Heath have done their homework
in this book about transformative change. They examine how we can better impact
outcomes and understand our own behaviour patterns.
On Writing Well, by William Zinsser
There are plenty of books on writing that are worthy of recommendation. On Writing
Well by William Zinsser has been around for 30 years and remains a favourite.
Zinsser’s clear and warm approach to good writing makes it easy to read and its
contents are applicable to both seasoned and new writers.

62
Darren Barefoot (@dbarefoot) is a writer,
technologist and marketer. He’s co-founder of
Capulet Communications where he heads a unique
movement-marketing program designed for cause-
based organizations and leaders ready to engage online
movements.
He speaks regularly as a digital strategy expert and has
been featured on the CBC, BBC and in Wired, the Wall Street Journal and dozens of
other publications. He’s also the co-author of Friends with Benefits: A Social Media
Marketing Handbook.
Darren’s tastes run to the absurd. In 2011, he only consumed products and services
made in Canada. In 2013, he lives in France amidst acres of vineyards…but doesn’t
drink wine or eat cheese.
Julie Szabo (@julieszabo) has worked as a writer and
marketer for all kinds of companies—from international
not-for-profits to bootstrapped tech start-ups. Aside
from writing, Julie’s great passions are travel and living
abroad. In the last five years, she has lived and worked
on three continents. Her previous book, Friends with
Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook, was
written in six countries.
Julie is co-founder of Capulet Communications, a digital marketing agency concerned
with how the web and social media changes the way we communicate with friends,
peers, and customers. The Noble Arsonist is a culmination of lessons learned from the
social media marketing trenches.
Theodora Lamb (@theolamb) is an online community
manager who works with non-profits and businesses to
help strengthen their online communities. She’s worked
with several organizations including the BC Children’s
Hospital Foundation as a digital producer and online
community manager as well as Mountain Equipment
Co-op’s TheBigWild.org on wilderness protection across
Canada.
Theodora currently works with Darren and Julie at Capulet helping to develop
creative content, digital marketing strategy and web marketing campaigns. Her
background in radio and television allow her to bridge her passion for storytelling,
media, and the web.
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