The Challenge
In June 2005, Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) was in the midst of a media frenzy after publicly calling for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. One high-ranking White House official after another strongly condemned AIUSA’s position; in response, Amnesty wanted to strengthen its community by enlarging its outreach beyond e-mail, enabling them to communicate their human-rights message to more people in more places.
IDI’s Solution
IDI worked with AIUSA to formulate and execute two new communication channels – Blogs and RSS – in order to enable them to communicate more efficiently with both its constituents and its critics. IDI helped AIUSA develop an overall vision and strategy for its blog and RSS use, and the organization was able to easily incorporate the blogosphere into its communication efforts. IDI’s work also included blog training, where IDI’s expert staff advised AIUSA’s media team on the best practices for outreaching to bloggers, blog advertising, and RSS newsfeed strategic support.
The Results
With IDI’s involvement, AIUSA has launched its own series of blogs, created blogging guidelines for staff and volunteers and implemented a comprehensive RSS strategy. The blog ad used in the Guantanamo Bay campaign now appears in the “Great Advocacy Ads” section on the BlogAds.com Web Site. IDI also helped AIUSA dramatically increased the number of readers for its blog focusing on the death penalty as part of a special online campaign related to the 1,000th execution in the US. In March 2006, IDI provided AIUSA with strategic advice following an advertising campaign on the Conservative Blog Network, whose resulting blogosphere discussion was, at one point, ranked as the #1 political topic on Technorati – a top blog search engine.
The Future
Today, AIUSA has strengthened its online community by becoming fully immersed in Web 2.0 technologies. Not only do they use the internet to recruit, mobilize and sustain human rights activism, but with IDI’s assistance, they have also successfully integrated blogs and RSS into their overall Internet communications strategy increasing their visibility and influencing their online community.
Services Provided
- Blogger Relations
- Internet Communications
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“IDI’s strategic direction made our organization’s initiation into the blogosphere a smooth one,” Milo Sybrant of Amnesty International USA said. “Most importantly, IDI has assisted us in making sure that Amnesty International’s human rights perspectives are present in the blogosphere’s key human rights conversations” |
