Why Facebook Is a Waste of Time—and Money—for Arts Nonprofits

March 3, 2018

The team from Artistic Activism takes a stand on an issue that is a major preoccupation for all non-profits. A bold move but are we ready to give up FB???

This articles appeared first on ARTNET

Steve Lambert, February 23, 2018

Why Facebook Is a Waste of Time—and Money—for Arts Nonprofits

The co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Artistic Activism explains why his company has officially de-friended Facebook.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in San Francisco, California. Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images.

Like many nonprofits, we use Facebook to connect with our audiences, and they use Facebook to stay in touch with us. It’s not our preferred way, but it’s where more than 4,000 people have chosen to stay informed about what we do at the Center for Artistic Activism. Part of our philosophy at the C4AA is to meet people where they are, and, undeniably, hundreds of millions of people (and some bots) are on Facebook. However, looking at the statistics provided by Facebook, we’ve come to realize that the connection we were after isn’t actually made.

That’s why we’ve decided to stop putting effort into Facebook. The world’s largest social network has become an increasingly inhospitable place for nonprofits.

We currently have 4,093 “fans” of our page on Facebook. For a scrappy organization focused on artistic activism, that’s not bad (especially since we never bought followers to boost our numbers). Those thousands came from years of hard work doing outreach.

From left: Steve Lambert, Rebecca Bray, and Stephen Duncombe, directors of the C4AA. Courtesy of Steve Lambert.

Stephen Duncombe and I started the organization around 2009, shortly after Facebook asked organizations to create “pages” to help differentiate from personal “profiles.” In those early years, we used our fan page to share the progress we were making to support artists and activists fighting corruption in West Africa, to help save lives in the opioid crisis, to get proper healthcare for LGBTQ people in Eastern Europe, and our work to make activism more creative, fun, and effective.

After trainings and other events, our page was especially active as new alumni from countries around the world joined to stay in touch. However, in recent years, the traffic dropped off.

Looking at the Numbers

During that time, we’ve grown significantly as an organization—adding staff positions, increasing programming—but I wouldn’t blame our Facebook followers for thinking the C4AA was dormant, if not dead.

They weren’t seeing everything we shared—and may not have been seeing anything. They’ve asked to hear from us, but Facebook decides if and when they actually do. And in reality, it’s not often. Here are the stats Facebook provides us:

Screenshot of C4AA’s Facebook analytics. Courtesy of Steve Lambert.

This shows how many people (anyone, not exclusively fans of our page) have seen our posts over the past three months. With a few exceptions, you can see most posts don’t reach more than a tenth of the number who have opted to follow our page. In recent weeks, we’ve reached an average of around 3 percent.

This is by design. People think the Facebook algorithm is complicated, and it does weigh many factors, but reaching audiences through their algorithm is driven by one thing above all others: payment. Facebook’s business model for organizations is to sell your audience back to you.

In the past, you could boost your social media reach by writing better posts and including images and video. But in recent years, targeted spending on advertising has overtaken all other tips and tricks. To reach more people who already requested to hear from the C4AA, we’d have to give our donors’ money to Facebook to “boost” our posts.

Now, are we simply against paying Facebook? Do we not want to give our donors’ money to one of the largest corporations on the planet, one that has enriched its leadership and shareholders by not paying the artists, journalists, and everyday people who give the site value? Do we want to withhold support to a company that’s barely taken responsibility for enabling Russian disinformation to reach US citizens in an effort to undermine democratic elections? Do we think that Facebook is turning the internet from an autonomous, social democratic space into an expanding, poorly managed shopping mall featuring a food court of candied garbage and Jumbotrons blasting extreme propaganda that’s built on top of the grave of the free and open web? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. That’s why we’ve never been big fans, much less paid to use Facebook.

Why Facebook Is Bad News

However, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that we accept that this is Facebook’s business model, and it is free to create its own rules on its private platform. Fine. There’s still a broader inequity to address.

Facebook’s pricing treats nonprofits and artists the same as a multinational corporation like Coca-Cola, a high-end neighborhood boutique hair salon, or a vitamin supplement scam. The advertising model makes no exceptions for nonprofits—even though we have nothing to sell and our mission, legally bound, is for the common good.

This difference in purpose is significant. It’s why the US government does not charge taxes to nonprofits, and the postal service offers reduced rates. Even other tech companies put nonprofits in a different category. Paypal charges less to process charitable donations and enables fundraising opportunities through partners like eBay.

At the C4AA, we use the messaging system Slack, and were delighted to learn it offers a significant discount to non-profits to upgrade from their free plan to the standard plan. That discount? 100 percent. To upgrade to the top plan, the Plus Plan, the discount is 85 percent. Slack partners with the non-profit TechSoup, which arranges discounted software, hardware, and support from for-profits to nonprofit organizations. One TechSoup partner, Google—yes, that Google—offers thousands of in-kind dollars for “ad grants” so nonprofits can compete to communicate alongside for-profit companies.

Facebook offers no such discount. It considers all communication from any organization to be a form of “advertising.” Facebook will take the money of anyone who pays—whether to sell products or discord.

Sure, we can keep posting there anyway for free, but less than 3 percent of our followers would know.

Meanwhile, the Facebook-using public—around two billion people—is unaware of what they are missing. My social network may consist of a mix of the causes I care about, artists who challenge my thinking, independent news organizations I trust, some friends and family, and even a few businesses I like. But what I select is not what I see—at least not entirely. And this is a system that puts artists and nonprofits at a disadvantage.

In the past two years, we’ve seen this problem get worse. After the 2016 election, the C4AA began considering this decision more seriously, and after much internal discussion among our leadership and a few board members, along with last week’s indictments, we felt it was time. As much as Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg claim to want to build community and bring the world closer together, their business decisions tell another story.

Looking Ahead

For some nonprofits, paying Facebook for access to supporters is a deal they’re willing to make. No judgment here. C4AA staff still use it to stay in touch with friends. Many organizations we work alongside use Facebook for advocacy efforts. We know for some it may not be a reasonable option to withdraw. We’re not insisting anyone needs to adhere to some arbitrary purity standard. We’ve just decided Facebook is not for us.

For now, we’ve found our email newsletters much more effective because at least we know the message reaches the subscribers’ inbox. And while we are no longer investing our time or our donors’ money into Facebook, it’s not a complete departure. We’re letting automated systems repost from our website and from other social networks.

Leaving history’s biggest social network feels risky. We don’t want to lose those 4,000-plus people—though, in a way, they’ve been lost for a long time. And we remember: It’s not that big of a deal! This makes us only slightly more radical than the Unilever Corporation.

If you’re at a nonprofit and wondering what you can do, have a conversation with your leadership and make a conscious choice. Look at your Facebook stats. Are you reaching your audience? Is paying worth it? Is the money, content, and audience you give Facebook consistent with the goals and mission of your organization?

The Center for Artistic Activism is at C4AA.org. You can sign up for the Center for Artistic Activism email newsletter here. You could also follow us on Facebook, but what would be the point?

Steve Lambert is an associate professor of new media at the State University of New York at Purchase College, a co-founder and co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism, and an artist whose work can be seen at visitsteve.com.

Campaigns shouldn’t be easy!

March 2, 2018

Campaigns shouldn’t be easy! Why difficulty and motivation matter so much in campaign design

Thoughts on Dan Ariely’s book “Payoff”

“Knowing what drives us and others is an essential step toward enhancing the inherent joy, and minimizing the confusion, in our lives” – Dan Ariely

The work of Psychology and Behavioral Economics Professor Dan Ariely focusses on the distinction between the concepts of ‘meaning’ and ‘happiness’. His work illustrates that the things in life that might give us a sense of ‘meaning’ don’t necessarily give us a sense of ‘happiness’. And yet, for so many of us, the pursuit of ‘meaning’ and ‘happiness’ is our motivation. Similarly, any successful campaign should be seeking to find the ‘bliss point’ that allies these two motivations.

The key drivers to human motivation are

Our sense of identity;
The need for recognition;
A sense of accomplishment;
A feeling of creation; and
Most importantly, a connection to others.

For Ariely, a sense of ownership greatly influences our motivation. As most of us would intuitively recognize, the more that a person feels a sense of ownership over something, a cause, the more likely they are to be motivated to achieve it. When considered in the context of campaigning, the consequences of a sense of ownership over an issue is compelling. It suggests that in order for people to be feel motivated to influence change, those who are targeted by the given campaign should be the owners of that change. This means that traditional approaches to campaign design, those that have long told us that it is important to tell people they need to change and then show them the ‘right’ model of change, might not be the most effective strategies to evoke change. So, how do we get people to feel a sense of ownership over change?

According to Ariely, campaigns should not be easy. Instead, the effort that is required for a campaign actually inspires a sense of ownership in the participants. Meaning that this effort required to cause change also, at the same time, is the very reward that people are seeking. For example, the hugely successful Ice Bucket Challenge is a good illustration of this. The Challenge asked people to set up a fundraising circle, film themselves pouring ice cold waters over themselves, and then distribute the video to their networks. Beyond the innovative and hilarious nature of the action, its sheer difficulty , when compare to changing an avatar or posting yet another selfie, for example, might have been a major driver of the campaign’s success.

So, going against traditional campaign wisdom, he argues that successful campaigns should not be easy. Instead, campaigners need to reflect on having the right balance of difficulty in a campaign, where the action stays difficult enough to be meaningful, but easy enough that people do not feel put off from participating.

In addition to this, the change at the center of the campaign needs to be meaningful so that people are prepared to engage in the ‘difficult’ asks that the campaign makes. To be meaningful, the change should be clear and long term. Nobody wants to invest in a change that will not be sustained. For example, no one wants to quit smoking for just one month. And so campaigns should not shy away from engaging people with a long term process of change, one what has multiple and complex effects. Ultimately, easy and short term asks will not result in change that is meaningful enough for people to engage or invest in supporting that change.

Another key piece of advice that Ariely’s book offers is that campaigns must acknowledge and be thankful for the effort required to participate in them. If campaigns request something that is difficult, they then need to be prepared to guide and support people through the journey, and regularly show gratitude for the road participants have travelled. Last, but not least, is the issue of ‘creation bias’ which refers to the fact that people only feel ownership over things they feel they created themselves. Successful campaigns need to target people in a way that allows for them to creatively participate. Simply liking and sharing campaign content will not be enough.

To summarize, a successful campaign requires three key actions:

1. Making participation difficult and meaningful enough for people to value the change;

2. Allowing people to participate creatively in the change journey; and

3. Acknowledging participants’ effort!

Street Action 101

March 1, 2018

This article from wikihow offers a good insight into the 101 of organising a street action.

How to Protest

Three Parts:Organizing a Protest Getting Prepared to Protest Protesting Effectively and Safely Community Q&A

When you just can’t stay silent on a particular issue, expressing your views through civil protest is a positive way to make a difference. Gathering with other people to collectively speak out against wrongdoing is a fundamental right and a powerful way to bring about change. See Step 1 and beyond to learn how to organize and execute a safe and peaceful protest.

Part 1

Organizing a Protest

Image titled Hold a Protest for Animal Rights Step 5

Set a goal. Protests can function as a way to spread awareness about an issue or put pressure on those in power to make a specific change. What do you hope to accomplish with your protest? Figure out who the audience of your protest will be and plan your strategy from there. You’re more likely to get the outcome you want if you take time to set a goal for achieving it.

For example, let’s say you want to stage a protest at a local factory farm as a way to spread awareness about how animals are treated there so people will stop buying their products. In this case your audience is the public.
You may have a more specific goal, like trying to prevent an “adult” business from moving into your neighborhood. In this case the aim of the protest might be to put pressure on the property owner to lease the building to a different business of which the community approves.
In some cases your goal might be quite large in scale, like if you’re protesting a war or a governmental policy. In this case the protest can be used as a tool to show political leaders that their constituents want a change in policy.

Image titled Be a High School Football Coach Step 2

Choose a location. Find a location that is practical, symbolic or convenient – or all three. The location you choose should be the one that helps you reach your target audience so that the protest is as effective as possible. This could be the sidewalk in front of a business, a public street corner, the courthouse, the capitol building, or a park that has historically been used for protests in your city. Just remember that in order for the protest to be legal, the site you choose must be public.

Image titled Spend More Quality Time with Your Kids During Weekdays Step 1

Pick a time to stage the protest. Protest at a time when you’ll be able to gather the largest crowd and have the greatest impact on your audience. For example, if you’re protesting a certain company’s business practices you’ll want to stage the protest when the CEO is present, which will probably be during business hours. On the other hand, if the goal of your protest is to gather as many people as possible, you might want to protest on a weekend when more people will be available to come.

Image titled Become the Executor of an Estate Step 15

Get the necessary permits. Check with your city officials about whether you need to get a permit to protest in the location you choose. Each city has its own laws regarding how many people can protest and where they can gather. Do your homework and get the permits you need so that your protest won’t get disbanded before it can gain any traction.

In some cases the permit will set limits on how many people can gather, how much noise you can make, and where protesters can move about. If you disagree with the terms, you can contact an attorney to help you try to get them altered.
Some cities don’t issue protest permits. If you’re expecting a large crowd to come to the protest, you should alert the police department anyway. If they know what to expect they can help with crowd control and there will be less chance of conflict occurring.

Image titled Update a Daycare Business Plan Step 3

Plan the sequence of events. What actions will best help you achieve your goal? It’s important to have an agenda in mind for what will happen once everyone is gathered for the protest. Do some research on other effective protests and come up with a game plan that will help you target your goal. Here are a few ideas:^[1]

Have community leaders introduce the protest and make speeches on the issue at hand.
Have an emcee who can lead protest chants and songs, and have bands play protest music.
Plan a march from one location to another. This is a classic form of protesting that helps bring widespread attention to a cause.
Implement performance art to help get your point across.^[2]
Screen an informative video or documentary on the subject you’re protesting.
Consider having a sit-in or sleep-in – occupying a space until your demands are met.

Image titled Curb Your Addiction to News Step 4

Publicize the protest. Take this important step to make sure your protest gets as much attention as possible. The aim isn’t just to encourage people to show up for the protest, but to capture that attention of the media, too. Pull out all the stops to spread the word starting a few weeks before the protest.

Post details about the protest on all your social media channels.
Make flyers about the protest and put them up around town. Target college campuses and other places where people likely to be interested in protesting your issue congregate.
Call local newspapers and radio stations and ask them to publish information about the protest and promote it on the air.

Part 2

Getting Prepared to Protest

Image titled Teach Kids How to Draw Step 13

Bring protest materials. Make posters, fliers, visual aids, or pamphlets to help spread your message and communicate your concerns to others. During the protest, you can give out information on what you’re protesting to interested parties.

You might want to put the name of the group with which you’re affiliated on your protest materials. That way people who are new to the issue will know who to contact to find out more.
Consider coming up with a catchy slogan for the materials, something people can easily memorize and communicate to others.

Image titled Hold a Protest for Animal Rights Step 7

Wear protective clothing. You can keep yourself safer at a protest by dressing appropriately for the occasion. Dress for comfort – you might be standing or walking for several hours – and for safety, just in case you get jostled by the crowd or caught in the middle of an escalating conflict.

Wear comfortable tennis shoes.
Wear several layers of thick clothing so you have extra padding on your body.
If you plan to be on the front lines of a protest that could easily escalate into conflict, wear protective eyewear.

Image titled Prepare an Emergency School Kit Step 7

Bring emergency supplies. Bring a backpack with a few supplies you might need. Bottled water and food are good to have on hand if the protest is going to last a long time. In addition to these staples, pack the following in your backpack:

A copy of the protest permit
Your identification card
A first aid kit
A bandana soaked in apple cider vinegar, stored in a plastic bag – this is said to help combat the debilitating effects of tear gas long enough for you to get to safety.

Image titled Hold a Protest for Animal Rights Step 2

Understand that protests are unpredictable. No matter what you’re protesting, there will be people who strongly disagree with your point of view. You may even encounter a separate group of protesters protesting the opposite side of the issue. At larger protests, police may be present to control the crowd and make sure things don’t get too out of hand. With all these different forces butting heads, be prepared for unpredictable things to happen.

Do research on the group you’re protesting with. If you weren’t one of the organizers, you should know the history of the group before joining the protest. If the group has every used illegal tactics or caused violence at a protest, you might want to think twice before joining them.
Most protests don’t end in violence, but it does happen sometimes. When people feel passionate about an issue, their behavior can be unpredictable. Stay alert and aware of your surroundings when you protest.

Image titled Get in the Police Force Step 8

Know how to interact with police. Make sure you know your rights as a protester and are familiar with how to deal with police in case you get stopped by an officer. If you stick to the terms outlined in the protest permit, you shouldn’t encounter problems, but you never know what could happen.

Do your best to follow the instructions given by both the protest organizers and the police.
If you believe your free speech rights are being threatened, speak to the protest organizer or call an attorney.
If a police officer asks if he or she can search you, you have the right to decline until a warrant is presented.^[3]

Part 3

Protesting Effectively and Safely

Image titled Save Dogs in Shelters Step 3

Be respectful at all times. A protest can be a very effective way to exercise free speech, make your voice heard and bring about change. However, being disrespectful to those against whom you’re protesting can undermine your group’s reputation and hurt the cause. Your arguments won’t be taken as seriously if disrespectful actions are taken. Avoid the following (and encourage fellow protesters to do the same):

Yelling insults at people who disagree with you
Vandalizing public or private property
Spitting or throwing water
Resorting to violence of any kind

Image titled Hold a Protest for Animal Rights Step 6

Decide how far you want to go. If you’re considering civil disobedience as part of your protest strategy, think carefully before taking action. Civil disobedience can be a courageous, nonviolent strategy for driving a point home, but it comes with serious consequences, like getting arrested. It’s important to know what you’re getting into before you choose to break the law in the name of your cause

Image titled Hold a Protest for Animal Rights Step 4

Gauge the effectiveness of your protest. When all is said and done, reflect back on the protest and decide what worked and what didn’t. Think about whether you reached your goal, and whether a different approach would be more effective the next time around. No matter what, be proud that you stayed true to your beliefs and exercised your right to be heard. Even if your protest didn’t bring about the change you want to see, speaking up about your cause is a step in the right direction.

It’s unlikely that a single protest is going to change everything in one blow. You’ll probably need to have follow-up protests. Consider approaching the issue from other angles as well. You could start a letter-writing campaign, lead a boycott, write a blog to voice your opinions, and take other actions to spread awareness and accomplish your goals. Don’t give up!

Getting Media Coverage for Your Campaign

February 9, 2018

Having both an online and offline presence is vital to raising awareness, garnering support, pressuring the decision makers, and pushing your campaign to the final stages of success! Getting the right message out there at the right time can be tricky and is often one marker of a successful campaign strategy. Here are some tips and resources to help you get proper media coverage for your campaign.

Fundraising

February 9, 2018

Despite the size of your campaign, there will be times when certain resources and actions will require financial support. For many, fundraising is the lifeline for their campaign. There are many methods and creative ideas to running a successful fundraising campaign for your cause or organization. Here are some suggestions and resources to keep in mind while coming up with ways to financially sustain your campaign.

Storytelling

February 9, 2018

Stories shape our world visions and they have the power to change the world. But telling a story is not as obvious as it seems. It requires a deep understanding of how we make sense of what we are told.

This section provides some insights into this hugely exciting field.

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