Social Media Have Reshaped Nonprofits’ Traditional Powers of Persuasion

[Source: The Chronicle of Philanthropy, by Vincent Stehle, March 18, 2012]

When 2012 opened, few people knew that Joseph Kony was a nefarious warlord, Susan G. Komen for the Cure was widely regarded as one of the strongest and most beloved American nonprofits, and SOPA was a confusing acronym.

But then seemingly overnight, in each of these cases, activists turned to social media, and everything changed. Millions of people responded with simple demands: Keep the Internet open, activists insisted in the case of the Stop Online Piracy Act. Restore aid to Planned Parenthood, activists told Komen when it was pulling its grants. Capture Joseph Kony and bring him to justice, a California charity’s viral video urges.

Of course, behind the scenes, it was often the work of nonprofits and foundations that produced powerful stories and organized advocacy campaigns that sparked the popular revolts.

The lessons of these campaigns are significant for everyone in the nonprofit world, because they demonstrate just how traditional ways of influencing power have been transformed by new communications tools.

When Clay Shirky, the media and technology scholar, wrote his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, predicting that mass movements would self-organize to challenge authorities and institutions, many people probably thought his forecast was for a far-distant time. News flash:

Everybody has arrived.

That couldn’t have been clearer than in the way the protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act debate erupted.

At the end of 2011, it appeared that the act would pass and the president would sign the legislation designed to attack unlawful piracy of music and movies and other digital-media content. Proponents of the legislation argued that the measure was necessary to protect American jobs.

But critics argued that it would unfairly censor a broad range of legitimate expression and that it would fundamentally alter the open architecture of the Internet.

For months, big media companies and movie studios in New York and Hollywood were dominating the debate in Washington, spending millions of dollars on lobbying expenses and political contributions.

In a post-Citizens United political environment, awash in campaign cash, it was still shocking to see the brazen threat by former Sen. Chris Dodd, who is now the head of the Motion Picture Association of America.

“Those who count on, quote, 'Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the sausage factory.

On January 18, as the legislation was quickly and quietly moving forward, Wikipedia suddenly went dark to demonstrate what could happen if the piracy act became law. Google blacked out its name on the home page of its search engine and linked to a form that enabled its users to express their concerns directly to their members of Congress.

Several other leading Internet service and online-media companies, including Reddit and the Mozilla Foundation, and thousands of smaller Web sites joined in the technology industry’s effort to educate the public about the potential dangers of SOPA.

Altogether, these efforts provoked more than 10 million voters to contact their elected representatives to complain about the legislation. Responding to the unprecedented outpouring of popular concern about media policy, Congress tabled the legislation within two days.

For months before Wikipedia and Google grabbed the attention of hundreds of millions of Internet users, media-policy groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge had been building the case to stop the legislation. And those efforts were supported by foundations associated with the Media Democracy Fund, which had provided grants to several of the leading policy activists working on the issues.

Their work got a creative and aggressive spark from Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization that also got help from the Media Democracy Fund. Fight for the Future began a campaign in October to “free” Justin Bieber, complete with manipulated pictures of the teenage idol behind bars, suggesting in a comical way that Justin Bieber would be vulnerable to prosecution under the piracy act because he got his start by singing songs written by other artists and uploading them on YouTube.

Fight for the Future has been around only six months, but it has already amassed an e-mail list with 2.8 million people who now can be enlisted to get involved in future debates.

In the case of “Kony 2012,” the online video campaign of Invisible Children, the sudden explosion of interest in the cause of child soldiers is not the result of a random or unplanned viral video.

Instead, it demonstrates the power of a professional and methodical application of expert filmmaking and storytelling skills by an organization that has been fighting to bring Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army to justice since 2004.

Invisible Children has been supported by grant makers like Humanity United and the Bridgeway Foundation, in addition to receiving contributions from individuals and proceeds from the sale of bracelets and T-shirts that are popular with the charity’s largely young supporters.
Interestingly, the video has attracted a puzzling and troubling response from nonprofit advocates, many of whom have criticized Invisible Children and the message of “Kony 2012,” saying that it does not present the complex history of conflict in northern Uganda and that it doesn’t fully reflect the views of the people on the ground.

But it is one video, telling one story. Can it really be faulted for achieving the success of reaching more than 100 million people?

Besides, Joseph Kony is a very bad man. He ought to be brought to justice.

A better response by competing advocates to “Kony 2012” might be to work with Invisible Children in a supportive and collegial way to help engage their millions of followers in other social-justice causes after Mr. Kony is captured.

And for that matter, all nonprofits and foundations should know that they are free and able to make their own case for transformative change by telling their own stories.

As they used to say about Elvis, 100 million Invisible Children fans can’t be wrong.