 Hello everybody. My name is Lindsay Spector and I'm a digital media coordinator here at the U.S. Department of State. I'm coming to you live from Washington D.C. at our State Department studios where we are thrilled to host our final YSEALI Tech Tuesday series today. Every Tuesday this month we've hosted Facebook live chats with tech experts on different topics. Check the video section of the YSEALI Facebook page or the YSEALI YouTube channel to watch the previous sessions. Today I have the privilege of speaking with Arif Aziz about online advocacy and campaigns. Arif is the country director of change.org in Indonesia and is coming to us from Jakarta where he recently was a trainer for a tech camp program. He is going to talk about online advocacy and give you tips and strategies for your project or initiative. Please ask your questions for Arif in the comments section below. Also, please let us know where you're watching from. Alright Arif, before we get into the topic of digital advocacy, I want to do a speed round of quick questions to help our audience get to know you and the topic a little bit better. What kind of work do you do for change.org in Indonesia? Great. Hi Lindsay. Hi everyone. Very excited to be here. I forgot this was a season finale so I hope I don't disappoint. But basically what I do at change.org is I lead the team here and we help people start, grow and win the campaigns they start on the site in the form of a petition. And that can be within any issue, environmental, anti-corruption, animal welfare and whatever it is that people think is important to them. So you're here to talk to us about digital advocacy. How do you define digital advocacy? I basically define it as advocacy using digital tools. It's quite simple. Though I think sometimes people may think that that's all you need in advocacy, the digital tools but actually it's very much a combination of online and offline tools. What inspired you to get into the field of online campaigns? Well I think we're just in the moment where it's really possible to create a lot of changes and massive changes through the digital tools that we have right now. If you look at Indonesia for example, the history of people power has always been there. And actually if you look at ASEAN in general, people power is everywhere. And now the digital tools are catching up to the spirit that was already there otherwise. And it's really linking up quite nicely. And that's bringing about change in a faster and bigger way. What is your favorite thing about the work you do? I mean I'm sure people have mentioned this before, but working with people that are just day in, day out have the passion and dedication to create the changes they want to see. Working with them is truly where most of my energy comes from. I agree. I think that's where I get a lot of my energy from the Waicili community and they really inspire me every day. That's great. Exactly. We have a lot of questions to ask you Arif, but before we continue I want to flip things around and ask our audience a question. Which advocacy campaigns inspire you? Again, what is an organization that has done a great advocacy campaign that got your attention? Let us know in the comments. Okay, let's get to some questions now. I want to talk about your four tips for successful campaigns. Can you go over them with us? Sure, but let me first tell you a story of this guy named Trion. And Trion is a guy that wants to start a bank account. He goes to the bank and the customer service is a bit confused. And finally she said, I'm sorry, I can't help you open a bank account. And Trion discovered later that it was because he was blind. And then the customer service said, but look here, it says that you have to read and understand the terms. And in her view, if you're blind, then you can't really read, can you? We all know that's completely false, right? Blind people can read. They just have a different way of reading than us. It's a matter of whether we provide them with the access or not. So he went home feeling quite disappointed seeing that like the banking industry right now, you can transfer thousands of dollars through your phone, but it can't really serve a disabled person or the disabled community. And it's not that one specific bank, it's actually a lot of banks here. And so he complained to the customer service, to the headquarters, but he got nowhere. But at the end, we found a news article about him, and we contacted him. And we say, Trion, would you like to start a petition? And he said, yeah, I will do that. Within hours, a petition was started. He's actually very tech savvy. And then what he did was he included the emails of the directors of the bank that he found online. And he also connected the petition to the Twitter account of the bank. And so whenever people sighed, emails were sent to the directors. And whenever the petition was shared, their Twitter was mentioned. And so within days, he got thousands of support. And within days, he got a direct response from the bank. And they invited him to the headquarters to meet with senior managers. And in that meeting, they decided, okay, we're now going to make it easier for disabled people, for blind people to open a bank account. Now this might seem like a local and small victory, but it's actually quite significant and affects a significant population, which is the marginalized and the disabled. So this is one of my favorite stories. And when we look at all the campaigns that we've had, we've had a lot of success. We've also had a lot of failures. And so from that, these are the four lessons that I've learned so far after five years of doing this thing. Number one, you need to set a specific and creative goal, right? Commonly, every time maybe people start designing their campaign, their question is, how do we get this viral? And I think that's the wrong question because not every campaign needs to be seen by everyone. It just needs to be seen by the right people. The people that can create those type of changes. Here's another great example of Papa Gang and Wisnu. So Papa Gang is an elephant, and he was killed and poisoned, and his ivory was taken from him to be sold. He was actually a patrol elephant, which means he maintained peace between elephant and people, which is an amazing job, right? And so when these things happen, sometimes people call volunteers to autopsy the elephant. And Wisnu, you can see on the left there, he had the job of doing this autopsy. And after he came back from that, he said, this is, like, enough is enough. I need to do something about it. So we got in touch and we talked about it, and we said, OK, what should be the goal? What should be the ask? And the most apparent one is to ask the president to stop the killings of these elephants. But that's too vague, right? That's too generic. How will he stop these elephant killings? Is it a matter of law enforcement? Is it a matter of a new policy? If it's a new policy, does it need to come from parliament, or is it an executive order, and so on and so forth? But when we kind of like brainstorm further, we just kind of decided to Google how does one actually buy ivory products? And it turns out ivory products were sold in most big online shops in Indonesia. And so for us, at that time, it was clear. The ask was to stop selling ivory products in these big online shops. And it turns out we got, as you can see, thousands and thousands of signatures. And within days, these online shops gave a direct response, saying, yes, you're right. This is actually against our guidelines, and we will take all of them down. And they did. So simply by setting a very specific and somewhat creative goal, that makes a difference between a successful campaign and a failed campaign. So think about that. And usually when we think about that, we use this thing called the power mapping. And this is some examples of that. So when you think of one issue, let's say elephant poaching, think of all the stakeholders in that particular issues. There are the producers, there are the policymakers, the consumers, the marketplace, the law enforcers. And think about, number one, what could create the most impact? And number two, what is the likelihood of them changing? There needs to be both of this, because if there is a high impact for change, but there's no likelihood of change, then that's not going to happen. If there's a big likelihood for them to change, but the impact is not so much, then also that's not going to create significant change. Here's another example. Let's say the issue of dolphin shows. We have traveling dolphin shows in Indonesia. And when we think about the stakeholders, we see the law enforcers, we see the policymakers, the sponsors. But when we started this campaign, the biggest likelihood of change and the biggest impact was either the sponsors or the venues of the dolphin shows. So that's what the petitional starters decided to target and it was successful. Here's another quick one. Tobacco control. When you think about tobacco control, think about the companies, events, but also the athletes and musicians that have endorsements or that have events, music events that are sponsored by tobacco companies. That's usually kind of a potential for a very successful campaign. All right. Here are some bad and good examples of goals or targets or asks, right? Bad example would be, Mr. President, please save the school. First of all, the president doesn't usually focus on schools. And second of all, how would you really save the school? But if you ask Mayor, please build a bridge for students to go to school, that's much more clear and much more winnable. When you hear government increase public service in city A, it'd be more specific. Minister of Home Affairs gives sanctions to the mayor for bad public service or this one. Government stop killing the elephants. How do you do that? But if you say online shops stop letting people sell ivory in them, then that would be much more winnable. All right. The second lesson or the second tip is tell an authentic story. As a change maker, we have plenty of knowledge and information about the issue that we work on. And sometimes we forget that the reason we got into the issue was because of a single story. And then when we communicate these issues to other people, we sometimes forget that they don't have the same level of knowledge and information that we have. Here's a great example. There was a shark fin campaign early on when we started to change our organ in Indonesia. He was a starter. He was a tourist in Singapore. He was South African. He went to Bali. And then on the way back, he stopped at the international airport. He saw a shop selling shark fins. And he was outraged and he started a petition. So shark fin is very unethical, unsustainable, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the problem with the previous one is that there's nothing wrong with that. But it's not compelling. It doesn't compel people to actually take action. So we talked to him and we asked him where he was from, who he is, what he cares about. And we came up with this. They are caught. Their fins are cut, thrown back to sea. They sink. They die. It takes hours, even days. For what? A bowl of soup. I love Indonesia. I always take my kids there. I love the biodiversity. I love the people. But imagine my surprise when I went to the airport and saw this being sold at the airport. And then he asked, is this the impression that the Indonesian government wants to give at the end of a tourist's journey? And with that text, it actually got a lot more signatures and therefore it actually won. The clothes actually stopped selling shark fins. And so authentic stories is really the right content for social media. Here's another example. There's a petition about fish bombing in Mantawai Island near Sumatra. And basically, the shin only had this video. And that video resulted in the campaign going viral, even retweeted by Paul Walker, the late Paul Walker, and Sir Richard Branson. And as you can see, the video doesn't have a high value production. It doesn't have a soundtrack. It doesn't have subtitles. It doesn't have a cheesy narration over it or something like that. But it actually won and actually garnered a lot of support. Why? People see directly what fish bombs look like. And it's scary stuff. And that's enough. All right. The third tip. Have a bigger strategy. Online petitions and online strategies or social media tools is just part of your big campaign. But you have to have a bigger strategy. Here's an example of a campaign about the plastic bag diet. Basically, a group of people wanted for retail shops to charge for plastic bags when they give it to their customers. This is not uncommon in a lot of countries, but it's certainly different here. And here are the lovely people. And they actually succeeded in making the government do a pilot project. And the effects of it is amazing. From the pilot project, it was determined that consumption of plastic bags went down by half and two out of three people prefer to bring their own bags. And so they're in talks now with the government to implement this to a larger, basically across the nation. But their success is not only because of an online petition or their online social media campaigns. It's because of their offline efforts too. Here's a quick kind of like run through of their bigger strategy. So they have to pay for plastic petition for start. And then they start building a coalition. Then they had partnerships with a lot of retail shops like Body Shop or Carrefour. They had this thing called plastic bag snatching, where you would come up to people on the streets, take their plastic bag out of nowhere, and then return it to them and talk about their campaign. There's a great shock factor there, but it's a great segue to educating people about plastic bags. They also did advocacy work and public training work. They had this thing called the plastic monster, where they went to an event and then they start just picking up plastic bags that were just on the ground and attaching it to a particular person, and that person becomes a monster, a plastic monster. All of these things contribute to their success. So when you're designing your campaign, think about that online offline loop. Whatever you do online, you can bring offline, and whatever you do offline, you can then use that as a content for your online audience or viewership. All right, so this is the last tip. The last tip is basically this. You ride the wave, right? You're a surfer, and you ride the wave. Sometimes you can't create a wave that's huge, right? All you can do is wave the rides. Oh, sorry, ride the waves. So basically, here's what it means. Social media and the people in social media have very short attention span, and we're talking about all of us, right? One issue comes in this day, and two days later there's another issue, and we're completely distracted by it. But you can use this to your advantage. Whenever you start a campaign and it dies out, wait for the next moment in media, in social media, and build your agility to respond to any moment that comes up that's related to your issue, right? And so, for example, for example, if you're talking about forest, whenever a story comes out about forest fires, you jump on it, and you explain to people what the relations are, and you explain to people how important it is to protect our forest. Another news comes out about, let's say, palm oil plantation, or illegal palm oil plantations. You jump on that to explain how dangerous that could be, and how dangerous burning forests are, and how it's important, or how forest is important in your life, and so on and so forth. So sometimes a moment can come, and campaigners tend to over plan, and so days go by, weeks go by, even months go by, to get that high quality production value of a content. But when you disseminate it, people are no longer paying attention to it because you miss your moment. Whether you settle for a straightforward content, but still compelling, but use the right moment to push that content out, you will definitely gain potentially more and maybe thousands of audience or eyeballs that look at your content rather than waiting a long time for it. So that's basically my four tips. I hope that was beneficial enough for you guys. More importantly, I hope that's implementable for you guys, and if you have any questions, please let me know. Great. Let's get to some questions from our viewers now. What are simple ways that individuals can use digital campaigns to create positive change in their communities? What are simple ways that you can use digital campaigns? I mean, the simplest thing to do is to speak up, and speaking up, I understand that a lot of people have day jobs, they take care of their families, they have enough problems as it is, but if there's an issue that you really, really care about, you can just speak up on social media. And this can mean posting a Facebook post or a Facebook picture. This can mean signing and sharing a petition or tweeting about something. More effectively, this can mean reaching out to someone that you disagree with on social media and having the intention of really understanding him and then having them understand where you're coming from. Because one of the risks of speaking up on social media, which we should avoid, is creating these silos and creating these bubbles, and no one really actually listens to each other or no one with opposing views listen to each other. So I would say, start with those two things. Number one, speak up, and number two, don't filter out people that you disagree with. Even better, start a conversation with them online. Do you have any tips for free software to use as people are developing their digital campaigns? Free software? Well, okay, first, if you want to start an online petition, it's completely free. You can just go to change.org and you can click start a petition and you won't be charged. Other tools, honestly, doing digital campaigning day by day, you don't really use a lot of expensive tools. You start paying for tools, for example, if you want good graphic designs or if you want to do a survey, but even then, there's also free tools that you can use. I think Google Drive, which means Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, are a great way to organize your campaign. Not a great way to disseminate your campaigns or contents, but a great way to organize it. I think WhatsApp is great for coordination when you actually have a plan and you have to follow through and you just create groups on WhatsApp, or at least that's what we do here. The rest is just basic Facebook and Twitter and maybe Instagram, because that's where people are right now. Yeah, I can't really think of anything else. I mean, if we do, for example, surveys, we use type form and there's a free version of that. There's also a paid version of that. Yeah, so usually all the tools have kind of like a free or paid version and trust me, you can get by with using all the free stuff on the internet. Great. I would also recommend doing your own research, asking your friends if you find a free software platform that you find really helpful for your work. Share it with your fellow Ycelia members so that you can all learn from each other and share resources and share ideas so that you're working together as a team to accomplish all of your respective goals. Another app that we use is also Canva, which also has a free and paid content. And it's great when you want to design small graphics and small kind of like asks, posters for events or whatever it is. I agree. I love Canva. It's a great design tool for people who aren't designers. So definitely check that out. Arif, how can I track data and analytics for my online petition or campaign and related to that? How should they measure success? That's great. Two very good questions. Number one, how do you track? Well, we've actually just recently published a tool in which when you start a petition, you can track how many people are signing it each day. I think it goes even per hour. And so, yeah, there's a lot of there's some kind of like analysis there. If again, Facebook has insights for free. Instagram has insights for free. So you can definitely use them. If not, there are some kind of like over the counter tools that again, I think have some free and some paid kind of services. But I've used Crowd Booster in the past, which is quite good for. And that's mainly for Twitter, but you can use it for Facebook too. I've also used Tweet Reach, I think, for Twitter. In our organization, we kind of use the kind of more complicated stuff. And therefore, you'd have to pay more for that. Just because the amount of data that that we have. And as for the second question, what should be the measure of success? Like I said before, with Trion's campaign, it actually only garnered 2,000 or 3,000 support. We have petitions that are up to 100,000 or even 400,000 signatures. And does not, we do not consider it as a success. Just because what we've set as a success goal is something that is not only achievable, but it's real impactful change, right? Like when this bank provides access to the disabled, that's real change, right? And everything else is just a what we call now, I sometimes mess this up. But I think what we call a lead measure, it's measurements that leads to something else. So this, we're talking about the signatures, we're talking about engagement, right? Like how many likes, how many comments, we're talking about how many shares, right? And those are all or can be good indicators of whether or not your campaign is getting somewhere. But the ultimate measurement should be a concrete change or something that you can see the impact of. Great. So relating to that and what you were saying earlier about online and offline advocacy coming together, would you agree that sometimes an offline action or an offline impact sometimes measures the success of your online efforts and it's maybe a little bit about balancing both of those things? Absolutely. What you get with online outreach is that you get a lot of eyeballs or the potential of a lot of people seeing your content is much bigger. But when you get to an offline event, you may have less number of people engaged to it, but the quality of the engagement is quite high, right? So asking people to sign a petition, it's a very different experience from asking people to do a protest. From the other end, it's exactly the same too. One person signing a signature that's targeted to you is very different from one person holding up a sign in front of your office, right? And so there are trade-offs in both and the best way to deal with it is to create a strategy that includes both and that syncs the two events. Great. Thanks, Arif. Before we get to a few more questions from our viewers, I want to read off the results of the question we asked earlier in the program. Which advocacy campaigns inspire you and why? Natalie says World Wildlife Foundation. Phoenix says the African Wildlife Foundation has a great advocacy campaign to protect elephants and big cats. Ray says an education NGO he worked with in the Philippines that gives people English language training and helps them find jobs. Sam says the Polaris project has had a solid global anti-human trafficking campaign that has great online engagement and has been great about bringing awareness to the issue. Duck from Vietnam says I'm interested in the Earth Hour advocacy campaign. Wonderful. Great answers, everyone. Thanks for posting in the comments. Keep them coming. And now let's get to some more questions. Arif, what are some common mistakes people make when it comes to digital advocacy work? Some common mistakes. And I've probably said this before. But I think number one, the most common mistake is overplanning. With digital advocacy, sometimes the key is to just start, accept that it won't be perfect, accept that you will make mistakes, even accept that you will fail, right? But you have to build on that continuously and be relentless in improving continuously. Because when you wait too much, then you lose the momentum and change is much harder to do afterwards, after a moment is gone. So that's number one, right? Number two, common mistake, right? The most or sometimes the common mistake is this. Starting a campaign without knowing what the end game is, right? Because, and I think that's the kind of like minimum thing that you need to do before you start a campaign. What actually is it that you want to achieve? And if it's very simple like, oh, I just want 100 people to look at this Facebook post. And that's fine, right? But if it's something, like I said, much more impactful, like for example, I want 100 Filipinos to be able to teach English in six months. That's very practical, right? And that's very doable. And therefore, when you start your campaign, you can then strategize to that particular goal, right? And you don't have to bother with other initiatives that you might have or other ideas that you might have that doesn't contribute directly to that goal. So I think those two are very important. Number one, make sure that you don't move too slow. But number two, make sure you have a clear goal in your mind. Great. Our next question is about emails. Sometimes people don't use emails enough in their digital advocacy campaigns. So, Arif, can you tell us about creating compelling emails and why this is important for digital advocacy campaigns? That's a great question because we, at Chaser Work, we use everything. We use email, we use Twitter, Facebook, and sometimes Instagram. But time and time again, email has been proven, for us at least, one of the best ways of communicating to our users, one of the best ways to communicate to people that care about these type of issues. Why is that? With Facebook, it has a particular algorithm. It doesn't guarantee that if you post something, then everyone that follows your page even will see it, right? And then after a while it's gone. Twitter is the same thing, right? You post it, everyone that follows you might see it, but after five minutes or 10 minutes, that goes down from their timeline and they don't see it anymore. But with email, you have a much larger space to communicate and to have issues in their mind space. It can be quite personal and also it doesn't go away quite as fast as Twitter or Facebook. And when you send it, you can be sure that everyone that gets it in their inbox sees it. Now, there are problems like it might go to spam or stuff like that, but in the beginning, if you have, not even a small, it has small to medium list, like thousands of people, for example, the deliverability is usually pretty good, as in it doesn't usually go to spam a lot. And so that's very important. And also the one thing that I like about email is that it's quite transferable. An email can easily be transferred or easily be adjusted to a Facebook post. A Twitter feed or a Twitter, what do we call it, a Twitter Storm or Twitter lecture, sometimes we call it here. And everything else, even Instagram. But really, when you train yourself to write good emails, you train yourself to tell a complete story. And whether then you can adjust it to Facebook or Twitter or anything else, then that's up to you. But I think that's email is like a great tool to practice on your storytelling. Great. We have a lot more questions we want to get through. So, Arif, I'm going to ask you if you can keep your answers a little bit briefer just so that we can get through as much as possible. Our next question is what are different ways individuals can instill empathy and calls to action in an email or an online petition to mobilize awareness. So empathy and clear calls to action. Any tips on that? Sure. Tell a personal story. Be authentic in telling your personal story. That's the number one reason why contents go viral, because someone is authentic, someone is being personal in telling their stories. All right. Before we wrap up, I want to do another speed round of questions to pick Arif's brain one last time about digital advocacy. What are some resources you would recommend to people who want to learn more about online campaigns and petitions? That's a great question. What I would do is this. All of these campaigning organizations, there's a lot of them, right? Subscribe to every single one of them. I know it can be annoying getting all those emails, but if you're kind of like serious in honing your skills as digital campaigners, then that's a fantastic resource to learn from. That's what I do. I get emails from every single campaigning organization that there are. And sometimes even I subscribe to profit oriented or companies like, I don't know, Lazada or Zalora or whatever online shop there is, to just learn from them too because they can be quite successful in getting customers. So that's a great learning tool as well. Great. So learn from the competition, take inspiration wherever you can get it. Where do you get your inspiration from when it comes to projects you're working on? Um, I, besides, so really when I get kind of like riled up about something, it's because it's in the middle of my interview to the people that start campaigns and to the victims of particular issues. And this is, I think, very, very important. Before you start any campaign, you need to know or you need to hear the perspective from the people directly affected by the issue. If you're talking about forest fires, then talk about someone in which, in their city or in their hometown, they experience the effects of forest fire. You know, if you're talking about criminal justice or if you're talking about cyber democracy, then talk about someone that's been prosecuted for telling the truth or for protesting online. So get like the number one source is always the person that is involved directly in that issue. Other than that, I just go to Google and YouTube and find examples of creative campaigns. Sometimes within the issue I'm looking for, sometimes outside of it. Here's a question about mentorship. Do you have mentors and do you mentor others? Who are my mentors? Yeah, I'm one that believes that you can't have enough mentors. So my mentors are not just one or two or three people, but a lot of people. I try to learn from as much people as possible. And the same thing goes for me trying to share my knowledge with many one. So anyone that kind of like asked me to share what I've learned in these campaigns, I'm glad to share with them. I don't know if anyone considers me a mentor or anything, but I try to share whatever knowledge I have. So like for example, that's a mentor that I have is actually one of the co-founders of change.org in Indonesia. His name is Usman and he's a long time activist. And he's been doing this activism since the 1990s or the late 90s. So he has a really specific and a really deep perspective and deep knowledge on activism in general because he's lived it for such a long time. Another one is fellow campaigners at change.org that does really good emails, for example. And I often ask them about opinions of particular campaigns or particular emails that I've written and all that kind of stuff. Wonderful, thank you. How would you summarize your best leadership advice in one sentence? My best leadership advice, I would say, and probably I've mentioned this earlier, just start, right? Accept that you will fail. Build relentlessly on top of that to improve and listen to everyone. Sometimes people say, oh, don't listen to the haters. No, no, no, listen to the haters. You don't necessarily have to agree with them, but when you understand where they're coming from, then you have the potential to, or you can learn a lot about winning the hearts of others, maybe not them, but others. Perfect, thank you. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have today to talk about online campaigns. I want to thank Arif Aziz of change.org for joining us today from Jakarta. I learned a lot about online advocacy and I hope you did too. I want to give a big thank you to you, our online audience, for participating. This year we're celebrating the 40th anniversary of U.S.-Azian relations and the 50th anniversary of ASEAN, so we really appreciate everyone, especially you, the Waishili community, for joining us in that celebration. Today marks the end of our Tech Tuesday Facebook Live series. I hope you all enjoyed watching. You can check out previous programs in the series as well as other programs and events by liking our Waishili Facebook page. And you can also connect by visiting the Waishili website, waishili.state.gov. There you can sign up for our email newsletter and also be sure to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at Waishili. Thank you and have a great day.