#Campaigning

One of the (few) things I actually do always admire about the US around election time, is the incredible number of people and creativity willing to work on getting people out to vote. Considering the Canadian election that sadly has Harper and the Conservatives back in a minority, had historically low turnout, I do think when I get back that I need to work on something like this.

And you have to respect moveon.org . Consistently, these guys are amazing with their ability to leverage web actions to get fundraising and mobilize support.

Meant to this a while back from an email that went round at work.

Love the idea. Simply… Offer to bring in a whack of business for one day to one business if they’ll pay for environmental improvements to their business with the proceeds.

Seems like the first run went well (and you have to love the Lil Wayne video spoof). Have to see whether it’s sustainable, but it is an interesting idea in crowdsourcing.

{{ figure src="/images/farm4/3149/2934212389_9d7af9494a.jpg" title=“Things are fine. Don’t Vote.” }}

I think Don’t Vote is one of the most seriously focused and well-designed get-out-the-vote microsites I’ve seen in ages.

Check out some of the posters to download and print and downloadable banners for embedding into webpages .

And I especially like their little “Spread the Word” mouse rollover which definitely gives about every option I’ve ever seen for disseminating something on the web in a nice little compact rollover popup. Going to steal the idea for my own sites I think.

As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.

Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM, and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.

The Human Rights Action Center in NYC just put up a fantastic animation illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the observation of which being one of the cornerstones of what Amnesty works towards, for the 60th anniversary of the document on the 10th of December this year.

Utterly fantastic job in tone, animation, simplicity and even the music.

The action centre has also given over their home page to it in a full browser high fidelity version which looks amazing. Probably won’t be up forever, but looks great if you go there now.

Just a shoutout to my favourite Rails ninjas here in London, the bambinos at New Bamboo *(disclaimer: they’re working on projects with both AI UK and with us at the Secretariat right now)*a, who just launched AI UK’s new Protect the Human site after partnering up with Made by Many .

{{ figure src="/images/farm4/3272/2792698081_71d634992a.png)" title=“AI UK’s Protect the Human” }}

Very nicely executed social networking site based on activism, sharing and discussion. Just wondering what they used to get the base done. They even managed to incorporate the new visual Global Identity and reconcile it with AI UK’s current visual scheme.

{{ figure src="/images/farm3/2197/2530505174_3173eb55d1_m.png" title=“The State of the World’s Human Rights 2008” }} )

Well, couple of bumps getting it out the front door, as well as having to deal with a killer 6am launch time to coordinate the global media strategy, but the mighty mighty AI web team managed in the wee hours of the morning and well in time for the first of or media blitz interviews with CNN.

Hard to watch but important to see.

Amnesty International (disclaimer: who I work for), has just released their 2007 Annual Report which outlines the state of the world’s human rights.

Available in five languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic).

Lotta stuff going on in the world that people don’t know enough about, or even worse, are doing nothing about when they do know about it.

Just big props and a huge, hearty congratulations to my very dear friend ZA, the hottest greenpeace toxics campaigner and evil genius behind the Green My Apple campaign.

Steve Jobs’ announcement yesterday in the change in Apple policy (GPI’s take on it ) basically addresses many of the major points in the campaign and is a victory all round for the Greenpeace campaign, and most importantly, people and the planet.

Well done Ze! You kick ass!