Taking Action Online for the Environment, Social Justice, and Sustainable Development

Copyright © 2021 Adam Rogers.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-6291-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-6292-1 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date:   02/23/2021

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword: by Helen Clark

Preface: Connecting the Dots

A bit of history

Early adopters of the new technology

What you can expect from this book

Discovering our piece of the puzzle

1     Picking Your Passion, Your Purpose, and Your Principles

The Sustainable Development Goals

Setting and achieving the Goals

Taking stock of progress

An overview of the SDGs

GOAL 1: No Poverty

GOAL 3: Good Health and Well-being

GOAL 4: Quality Education

GOAL 5: Gender Equality

GOAL 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

GOAL 7: Affordable and Clean Energy

GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth

GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

GOAL 10: Reduced Inequalities

GOAL 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

GOAL 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

GOAL 13: Climate Action

GOAL 14: Life Below Water

GOAL 15: Life on Land

GOAL 16: Peace and Justice and Strong Institutions

GOAL 17: Partnerships to Achieve the Goal

The SDGs and COVID-19

The SDGs and the Black Lives Matter movement

2     Crafting Your Online Strategy

Cause and effect

Plan your work, and then work your plan

Step 1: Be clear on your goal

Step 2: Set your social media objectives

Step 3: Know Your audience

Step 4: Have a Call-to-Action (CTA)

Building a brand

The importance of a unique and consistent identity

Track and measure your results

Tracking tools

Cyber-barricades

Getting through the firewalls

3     Home, Sweet Home

Websites 101

1) Building your website

2) Aesthetics—the look and feel

3) Information architecture

4) Clear and correct writing

5) A ‘donate now’ function

6) Contact and sign-up forms

7) A .org site extension

8) Mirrored pages in different languages

Making sure your site is accessible to the visually impaired

Allow enlarged text

Use high-contrast color schemes

Let desktop browsers see the mobile version

Promoting your site

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2. e-bulletins and newsletters

3. Feature blogs on your site

4. Harness the power of social media

5. Say it with your signature

6. Maintain quality assurance by monitoring results

Blogging platforms

Wonderful Wikipedia

4     Building a Base with Email

Choosing an e-newsletter hosting service

List management software

Writing content for your e-newsletter

Include a CTA in each issue

Edit ruthlessly

Designing your e-newsletter

Reaching your target audiences

Your email list

Before sending your e-newsletter, be sure you are legally compliant

5     The Era of Social Networking

Constant growth

A constellation of social media stars

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

SlideShare

YouTube

Pinterest

Instagram

Flickr

Reddit

Snapchat

TikTok, Triller, and Reels

Closed Messaging Apps

WhatsApp

Telegram

Tencent QQ and WeChat

Signal

LINE

6     Setting Up Your Social Media Platforms

Facebook

Facebook pages

Facebook groups

Twitter

Writing your bio

LinkedIn

YouTube

Pinterest

Instagram

Flickr

Snapchat

TikTok

Wikipedia

7     Creating Compelling Content

Creating synergy with social media channels

The power of the pen

Know your key messages

Take your time

Constructing an effective tweet, message or post

Instagram caveats when creating compelling content

Mastering the emoji

Going viral

Whenever possible, include a CTA

Content curation

Hashtag activism

How to get your hashtag to trend

Some effective examples of hashtags that trended

Hijacking hashtags

The value of good storytelling

8     Creating, Sourcing, and Using Multimedia

Where do you get your photos?

Legal ramifications of using images found online

Creative Commons licensing

Google images

Flickr

Other public domain sources of images

Transferring an image from your search to your message

Paying for images and graphic content

Tips for taking your own photos

Use clickable social media cards

Creating compelling content with video

Edited video—getting it right

Editing tools

Sourcing stock footage

Producing live video broadcasts

A few suggestions on how to use live video streaming

Keep it real and real interesting

Introduce yourself, again and again

Choosing your live broadcasting platform

Organizing webinars

9     Building and Sustaining Momentum

The 5,000 foundation

Avoid zombies

Finding the right formula

Social proof

Loyalty loop

Tried and true wisdom

Keep your fingers on the pulse

Leverage paid exposure

Timing is everything

Be social, genuine and proactive

Sharing is caring

Connect with influencers

Building momentum IRL (in real life)

Setting up your QR Code

Crafting an offline strategy to build momentum online

Tools of the trade

10   Online Fundraising

Key considerations when online fundraising for your organization

Be fully transparent

Give credit where credit is due

Provide a Q&A

Earn money on YouTube with Project for Awesome

Your donation form

P2P fundraising

Crowdfunding

Different types of crowdfunding

Crowdfunding and P2P platforms

Tips on crowdfunding

11   Online Volunteering

How to become an online volunteer

United Nations Volunteers

Grow Movement

Red Cross

Smithsonian Digital Volunteers

Amnesty Decoders

Translators Without Borders

Project Gutenberg

Distributed Proofreaders

Catchafire

VolunteerMatch

Learning Ally

Skills for Change

Managing your online volunteering

Getting online volunteers to support your cause

Organizing an employee volunteer program to contribute online

12   Forcing Social Change through Social Media

Taking action online and off

Social media for public relations

Spontaneous activism

From online engagement to offline political action

Social media caveats

13   Bridging the Digital Divide

The Information Revolution

Implications for creating a world without hunger or poverty

Online education

The last mile

The digital gender gap

How can everyone be brought online?

Epilogue

Annex I: The Sustainable Development Goals

GOAL 1: No Poverty

GOAL 2: Zero Hunger

GOAL 3: Good Health and Well-being

GOAL 4: Quality Education

GOAL 5: Gender Equality

GOAL 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

GOAL 7: Affordable and Clean Energy

GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth

GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

GOAL 10: Reduced Inequalities

GOAL 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

GOAL 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

GOAL 13: Climate Action

GOAL 14: Life Below Water

GOAL 15: Life on Land

GOAL 16: Peace and Justice and Strong Institutions

GOAL 17: Partnerships to achieve the Goal

Annex II: Glossary of Terms

Annex III: About the Author

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE been possible without the organizations—large and small—that allowed me to learn, develop, and explore ideas in projects, workshops, missions, assignments, and consulting engagements over the last thirty-plus years. These include Earth News, The Together Foundation for Global Unity, InterWorld Corporation, the UN Capital Development Fund, the UN Development Programme, the UN Office for South-South Cooperation, UN Volunteers, and Phoenix Design Aid. In light of these opportunities, I would particularly like to thank Judy Rae, Dale Hallcom, Lisa Bonet, Lenny Kravitz, Jim MacIntyre, Bob Zangrillo, Tim Berners-Lee, Ella Cisneros, Laura Kullenberg, Susanne Frueh, David Morrison, Stéphane Dujarric, Cécile Molinier, Najat Rochdi, Helen Clark, Jorge Chediek, Dennis Nielsen, and Manal Fouani.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to those who gave me detailed and constructive comments on one or more chapters in this book, including Mehmet Erdoğan and Tetyana Kononenko of the UN Development Programme, Olin Thakur of the Diplomacy & Development Review Forum (DDRF), Mithre J. Sandrasagra of the UN Office for South-South Cooperation, Gail Davis of Listen/Give, Gaëlle Mogli of ConnectAID, Johannes (JD) Drooghaag of Spearhead Management, and both Zuha al-Hammadi and Elise Bouvet of UN Volunteers. I would also like to acknowledge and express my appreciation to Sean Dennis, who provided editorial input with the final version before publication, and to both Ann Minoza and Leandra Drummy at Balboa Press for their invaluable guidance and support.

Foreword:

by Helen Clark

DESPITE ENORMOUS PROGRESS ON DEVELOPMENT issues over the past twenty years, close to ten percent of the world’s population continues to live in extreme poverty, and some 15,000 children die daily from preventable causes. Carbon is building up in Earth’s atmosphere, influencing global weather patterns with unpredictable and potentially devastating consequences. Inequality within and among countries is a persistent cause for concern, especially during a pandemic which has exposed and exacerbated deep cracks within societies.

Around the world, the pandemic has impacted on people differently depending on their gender, health, and income. Unfortunately, in many countries, ethnicity has also been a determining factor because of existing and deep-rooted inequalities. Longstanding systemic health and social inequity around the world have put many people from ethnic minority groups at increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19 because they have been excluded from quality education, jobs, and healthcare.

Women, especially those in lower-paid retail and care sector jobs, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Those in higher-paid desk jobs have been able to work remotely, while those in lower-paid, more manual types of employment have, in many cases, lost their jobs or have been laid off. Those in jobs now seen as essential (food and pharmacy retail, restaurants, drivers, and nurses) are often the people we pay the least and take for granted the most. This latter group have been most at risk of contracting the virus and then passing it on to others in crowded living arrangements or on public transportation.

The good news is that while the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly set back progress in many areas of development, it has also sparked accelerated development in others, especially in areas of digitalisation, remote work, and access to online services. Modern online technology has made it possible for many people to continue working remotely, which has lessened the economic impacts of the lockdowns and physical distancing requirements of anti-pandemic measures. People around the world are now more used to obtaining goods, services, and education online, thus opening the way for a more internet-based economy in the future.

As the world builds forward in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it will be important for people to connect and share experiences with one another, and for governments to support open dialogue in their search for improved policies that strengthen resilience. By making policies more people-centric, governments can give greater attention to reducing the inequalities which COVID-19 has exacerbated. The focus should not only be on economic recovery, but should also be on all aspects of human development, addressing issues such as wage discrepancies between men and women, disparities in digital literacy between age groups, and equal access for all social groups to quality healthcare and education. If we can do this, we will help ensure the recovery effort is both sustainable—and equitable.

I have seen much progress in the world during my four decades of public service, which included 27 years as a Member of the New Zealand Parliament, of which nine were as Prime Minister, and eight years as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, an organization which works with governments in some 170 countries and territories to plan and implement policies that improve lives and livelihoods. What I have seen over all those years is that while governments at all levels need to address the root causes of poverty and exclusion, progress is also driven by individuals and groups at the street and village levels who look around and see challenges, and then look within and see solutions. For their solutions to be successful, it is essential they be shared as widely as possible.

When confronting challenges in our communities, it helps if we do so collectively by reaching out to inspire—and to be inspired by—others facing similar problems. While in many ways the challenges before us may seem insurmountable, at the same time never before have we been so well equipped to deal with them and to connect with one another in our search for sustainable solutions.

As Adam Rogers points out in this book, there are now more than 2.3 billion active social media users worldwide—about a third of the planet’s population. This ubiquitous presence makes the internet an unavoidable part of any strategy to build a better world for everyone, everywhere, leaving no one behind. If the third of the world which is presently on social media could engage more in discourse around how to solve the problems we face, we would have a better chance of bringing the world to where we would like it to be.

Social media, like anything, can help or hinder societal progress depending on how it is used. Its negative influences are well documented. It stands accused of everything from causing anxiety and depression among teens to creating echo chambers for fake news and political bias. This book, however, presents a positive view of social media and how it can be used to support efforts to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people everywhere are able to live in peace and with shared prosperity. As Adam points out, when used with integrity, social media can be both a source of inspiration and a way of encouraging others to take action.

Never before in human history has it been so easy to reach out and connect with people and organisations from around the world, to learn from them and their unique experiences, and to help advocate for important issues. I hope that this book will inspire you to do just that—to join us and others in our global effort to create the world we want for ourselves and the one we would prefer to leave for our children.

Helen Clark is a former Prime Minister of New Zealand, serving three consecutive terms from 1999-2008. She then served two terms as the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. She now chairs and serves on the boards of a number of international organizations.

Preface:

Connecting the Dots

WITH ITS EMERGENCE IN THE 1960s as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the internet, as it is known today, was originally developed by the US military as a tool for communication with and command of its forces and weapons around the world. With the help of Tim Berners-Lee in the 1990s, it quickly expanded into a network of networks that today offers the greatest opportunity for peace this world has ever seen.

It is a beautiful irony that something that was once created for war now offers our best chance at creating everlasting peace—prospering as diverse communities in harmony with the environment and with each other. Never has it been as possible for nearly everyone, everywhere to take part in and take action for creating a better world. We can reach across oceans and connect with people we may never meet in person. We can access information and knowledge about nearly everything under the sun on our smartphones. We can and must all be aware of the problems plaguing our planet and how we each may be at least partially responsible for them. No matter where we are located, if we have a phone or a computer, we can take action online to address environmental challenges, to support social justice for all, and to advance sustainable development.

But opportunities require work to become realities, and peace is still an elusive concept for many people. Since 1945, despite a half-century of nuclear standoff and multiple smaller conflicts, big wars don’t seem to happen anymore. However, although deaths from conflict have been steadily declining since the Spanish Civil War, there is much work to do until we can finally declare Peace on Earth.

Another obstacle to peace: despite enormous progress in the last 20 years, a third of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, while more than 15,000 children die daily from preventable causes. Carbon continues to build up in the earth’s atmosphere, influencing global weather patterns with unpredictable and potentially devastating consequences for the people below. Most projections of the effects of climate change envisage intense competition for increasingly scarce resources–leading to regional instability, social unrest, and wars over water. Despite advances in modern medicine, many countries lack adequate health infrastructure or are shackled by corruption and insurance schemes that exclude massive segments of the population—making them more vulnerable when health emergencies arise. In many countries, although laws are in place to safeguard human rights and justice for all, huge gaps remain in how these laws are applied and for whom.

There are now more than 2.3 billion active social media users worldwide, about a third of the planet’s population. This ubiquitous presence makes social media an unavoidable part of any strategy to support, fundraise, and advocate for and/or contribute to the achievement of the social, environmental, and political causes like the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Unlike the past, where campaigners blindly communicated and hoped for the best, social media enables you to target and engage with potential supporters, partners, and like-minded activists in real time.

A bit of history

The insights I share in this book are based on 25 years of active online experience advocating for social and environmental causes and from research and interviews with hundreds of online activists for various projects.

In the early 1990s, when I was editor of the Los Angeles publication Earth News, I was quite active on CompuServe, the first major commercial online service provider in the United States and Canada. CompuServe was built on a client-server protocol, meaning that the client, a software package distributed on floppy disk, had to dial a phone number to connect to a server through an analog modem that screeched gutturally as if it were clearing its throat, before finally connecting with the remote server. Once connected, a graphical user interface (what we called a GUI) exchanged information with the server and enabled simple text messages to be shared among the subscribers. Message forums formed around a variety of topics (many focusing on environmental issues and concerns), and the first online games were launched. CompuServe also gave birth to a popular graphics format for animated pictures that is widespread today—the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format).

In 1993, I joined an organization led by Ella Cisneros, a philanthropist from Venezuela who had an epiphanic vision to connect environmental organizations around the world through a virtual network to share information and empower each another. The prospect seemed wonderfully exciting at the time, and in retrospect, incredibly ahead of its time. Through a partnership with the University of Vermont, this organization, the Together Foundation for Global Unity, established several servers around the world that connected their users and then mirrored each other’s content at night. The network, which Ella created with technology guru Jim MacIntyre, came to be called TogetherNet.

We were able to get all the Permanent Missions to the United Nations onto our network and then convince the UN Department of Information to provide us with access to the Daily Journal—the official calendar of events that took place at the UN each day. That way, the ambassadors would not have to send a driver down to the Secretariat each morning to pick up the paper version; they could simply fire up their computers, log into our network, and open it up.

In April 1994, TogetherNet facilitated the world’s first online broadcast of a UN conference—the Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States—through a partnership between the Together Foundation, the Governor-General of Barbados and the UN Development Programme (UNDP). This was the first big follow-up meeting after the Earth Summit in 1992, and the second in a long string of events to follow in Cairo, Copenhagen, Istanbul, and Beijing.

Today, all UN conferences are available online through a variety of channels. At the time, however, what we managed to achieve was unique and groundbreaking. We would gather up the printed version of the statements before or during delivery, have them scanned (or if possible, made available on disk), and then we would upload them to our network for users to read in real time around the world. As part of our agreement with UNDP, we would also download them to their gopher server, a now antiquated platform that was designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the internet. The gopher was mostly accessed through a command line user interface, or just CLI to the cognoscenti.

Not long after the conference in Barbados, and just following the Paris negotiations for the UN Convention on Desertification, I headed to Le Locle, Switzerland to set up the European server for TogetherNet with our partner, Luc Tissot—CEO of the watch company with the same name. While there, Luc invited me to Geneva to meet with a friend of his who worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. We arrived at CERN late in the morning on a warm summer day and, after all the requisite security clearances, proceeded to a massive, temperature-controlled room the size of an aircraft hangar. The warehouse was filled with computer servers, all presumably crunching data from the particle accelerator. In a far corner, however, sat one nondescript box out of which a few wires ran out, connecting to a mainframe somewhere. Little did I know at the time, but the bits and bytes within formed the embryo for what would later turn the entire world of communication upside down and forever transform the way humans access information and connect with one another.

While the brilliant scientists of the world remained focused on their search for the God Particle, Tim Berners-Lee was busy figuring out how simple consumer computers could access and present information to their users graphically through a system he was developing called Hypertext Transfer Protocol—or simply HTTP. Those are the first four letters in a full website address, known as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The new computer language that Tim developed became known as Hypertext Markup Language, or simply HTML.

At the time, CERN was the largest internet node in Europe, and Tim saw an opportunity to join hypertext with it. After much trial-and-error and through a collaboration he had with an American, Marc Andreessen (who developed the world’s first browser, Mosaic), Tim set up the world’s first website, info.cern.ch, running on a NeXT computer at CERN.

Tim made his idea available without charge, with no patent and no royalties. The World Wide Web Consortium, which he established in 1994, decided that its standards should be based on royalty-free technology for easy adoption by anyone.

And they were adopted, by nearly everyone on Earth—except (at least initially) by my colleagues back at TogetherNet. When I returned to Burlington with my stories from CERN and an idea to port our entire system from First Class to HTML (and to use the emerging internet for connectivity rather than having our clients dial up to distributed servers), I was met with resistance. Not knowing enough about the technology to convince them, I simply gave up and accepted a request from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to travel to their headquarters in Nairobi and to write a book which was later published as Taking Action: an environmental guide for you and your community.

Taking Action was designed as a manual for communities and individuals to help achieve the vision of Agenda 21, the landmark document that emerged from the Earth Summit in 1992 on how to save humanity from self-destruction. The book, which was published jointly in 1995 by UNEP and the UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service (UN-NGLS), described the challenges facing humanity and suggested solutions, but called upon the reader to take action in his or her daily life. After all, I wrote in the preface, the decisions we make daily as consumers, as professionals, and even as parents will shape the world our children and grandchildren will inherit.

Although I resumed my work as a researcher and writer on environmental issues, little did I know at the time that my cyber-adventure was just getting started. After I finished writing the book for UNEP, I returned to my apartment in Manhattan, where my old friend Bob Zangrillo, who had recently graduated with an MBA from Stanford, called to tell me he was playing tennis the following weekend with George Soros, and wanted my help writing a business plan. The result of that plan beefed up an ongoing initiative, led by Michael Donahue and Patrick Leung, called the InterWorld Corporation. Soros provided the first round of financing, followed by Paul Allen of Microsoft. The company went public two years later.

Although eventually we developed the server-side e-commerce architecture for many Fortune 500 firms—from Disney to Marks & Spencer, one of our first and most memorable clients was the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a nonprofit environmental advocacy group known for its work on issues including climate change, ecosystem restoration, oceans, human health, and species extinction. Since everybody and their uncle was setting up a website in those days, EDF wanted one too. To help engage visitors and keep them on the EDF site, one of our programmers came up with the brilliant idea to develop a memory game with endangered animals. There were 36 squares on the screen and when you clicked on one, it would flip over and present an animal. You had to remember where each one was so you could eventually pick a pair. When you did this, the two would disappear; make all the animals disappear, and you win the game. It was hard for the programmers to understand why this was not a great idea for an organization working to save endangered animals from disappearing forever.

Early adopters of the new technology

Everett M. Rogers was an eminent American communication theorist and sociologist who came up with the diffusion of innovations theory and introduced the term early adopter. I based my master’s thesis on his work and had the honor of interviewing him about a week before his death in October 2004. Diffusion of innovations seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread. Rogers argued that diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated over time among the participants in a social system. He proposed that four main elements influence the spread of a new idea: the innovation itself, communication channels, time, and a social system. This process relies heavily on human capital. The innovation must be widely adopted in order to self-sustain. Within the rate of adoption, there is a