Campaigning with social media
Case study: Amnesty UK's online
Campaign to Stop Violence Against Women

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ProtectTheHuman.com is Amnesty UK’s
ProtectTheHuman.com social media campaigning platform
Amnesty UK launched
ProtectTheHuman.com in
September 2008 to create a
community platform for its
digital activists.
This short case study
summarises how we recently
used it to support our
campaign to stop violence
against women in March
2009.
New ProtectTheHuman.com design - coming soon

With ProtectThe
Human.com ,
Amnesty Intern
ational UK aims
to increase awar
eness of human
rights across the
globe and create
a community of d
igital activists.

Amnesty UK and its supporters are active across a 'cloud' of hundreds
of social spaces, networks and websites like Facebook, MySpace,
Bebo, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, as well as blogs.

In order to understand how to use this network as an effective
campaigning tool we we had to audit our networks, groups and pages
and create a map of our social universe.

Twitter @amnestyUK
We also started building our
Twitter network, as we knew
this would be a vital piece of
our social platform. We grew
our Twitter followers from
around 300 in December
2008 to just over 3,000 by
mid-March 2009. (You’ve
been brilliant, thank you!)

And we held a brainstorm one evening at our London HQ with a
group of digital savvy supporters.
This generated a whole bunch of ideas and allowed us to bounce
some of our thinking about the campaign around with some experts.

With everything in place,
we were ready to start campaigning...

March 2009
As a member of the End Violence Against Women coalition, Amnesty
used the opportunity of International Women’s Day to campaign with
the message
women in the UK experience rape or other violence
Amnesty is campaigning for better support for women at a local level.
Currently 1 in 4 local authorities leave female victims of violence without
the specialised support they need.

Key online actions:
Get as many people as
possible to email their MPs
through mapofgaps.org

Key online actions:
Get as many people as possible to change their Twitter and/or
Facebook avatars to the 1:10 logo

Key online actions:
Get as many people as possible to tweet the message ‘Each
year, around one in ten women in Britain will experience rape or
other violence. Act now http://oneten.org.uk’ at 1.10 pm on
6th March 2009

1. Protect the Human blog
We launched the campaign
with a post on the blog
which explained how people
could help - this was
intended to be the landing
page.

2. PledgeBank
Amnesty created a pledge
that people could take on
PledgeBank.com, with the
aim of people motivating
each other to take this action.

3. Social network outreach
We reached out to our networks on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and to
individual and group blogs that showed an interest in women’s rights. We asked them
the reach out to their networks, to spread the message. On Twitter, we encouraged
people to use the hashtag #oneten to mark all Women’s Day-related tweets.

Impact: Twitter
Approx. 3000 mentions of #oneten on Twitter, 6th March
(SourceTwitScoop)
@amnestyuk = 3rd most retweeted user, 6th March
(Source Retweetradar)
Around 600 new Twitter followers for @amnestyuk over the course of the week
#oneten in Top 10 trending topics, 6th March
(Source Twitter search)
oneten.org.uk = most tweeted link, 6th March
(Source Retweetradar)

Impact: Twitter
Source
Twitscoop

Impact: Protect the Human blog
Impact: www.protectthehuman.com
2nd March 9th

Impact: MapOfGaps.org
215 emailed their MP on 6th March
Nearly 2,000 referred from oneten.org.uk
Thanks to your participation, hundreds of
you took action and 6 times as many as
usual took action on 6th March
In total 2,273 emails have been sent so far
across the country since launching the campaign.
This pressure will hopefully translate into real
change, in the form of more services, for the
women that need it the most.

We are amazed and humbled at the rate at which people have shown
their support for our Stop Violence Against Women campaign, and the
extensive debate we witnessed on various blogs, including our own.
Clearly, people have opinions on the issue and they are not afraid to
show their support or make their voices heard. The important thing to
remember is that this support translates into real change for women who
are victims of violence.
There is power in numbers. The power to create lasting change.

If you'd like to support our other online campaigns or become involved in Amnesty's
online activism you can do the following:
1
Follow @AmnestyUK on Twitter
2
Join our Amnesty UK Facebook group
3
Register at ProtectTheHuman.com and start taking online actions
4
Become a member of Amnesty UK
5
Tell your friends about all of the above

www.twitter.com/amnestyUK www.twitter.com/madebymany
UK
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