STAND Now! Through the Social Media Microscope

The American Revolution had the Boston Tea Party and anti-colonist paraphernalia like Common Sense.  The Civil Rights Movement had influential "sit-ins," marches, and heroes like MLK and Rosa Parks.  The Vietnam War Protests had iconic student demonstrations and underground music and newspapers.  All today's activists need to be heard are the following: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and access to the rest of the internet.

The iconic "Flower Power" photograph of the '60s

The organization that I chose to monitor is called STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition.  Formerly known as Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, STAND is a student-based political organization founded in 2004 with the mission to advocate genocide prevention policy and legislation.  Initially meant to spread awareness of the devastating Darfur conflict in Western Sudan, STAND's rapid growth throughout the years has led them to advocate for political action to end all genocidal violence around the world.  To this day, STAND has established over 850 college chapters in 25 countries all over the world, raised over $650,000 in funds, and has been recognized by global organizations like the United Nations and Amnesty International.  The most amazing part of all this?  It was all done by college students not so different from you and I.

I chose this organization because I wanted to see how the face of activism has evolved with the use of the internet and social media networking.  In my opinion, part of the reason why STAND has become so successful in spreading their cause is because their founders, part of the web-2.0-savvy generation, knew exactly what was occurring with these changes and rode the wave of this technological revolution.  By utilizing the proper tools, they were able to hone the power of social media to complement traditional practices of political activism such as writing petitions, holding peaceful demonstrations, organizing conferences, and approaching influential leaders for help.

The way STAND operates is that they provide local university and high school chapters the tools needed to raise awareness against genocide: fundraising, media materials, lessons about lobbying, and background information about the ongoing conflicts.  Because their various chapters are located all over the world, most of these tools are accessible online through their website, Facebook page, and YouTube.  Although the different chapters hold their own demonstrations and events, STAND also holds nation-wide conferences and lobbying events to help unite their hundreds of thousands of members from all over the world.  For example, this April STAND will be holding their Third Pledge2Protect campaign, which is an opportunity for STAND members to donate funds, upload YouTube videos which would be presented to members of Congress, as well as visit the STAND headquarters in Washington, DC for a lobbying day and march on the Washington Mall.  As it has become the largest lobbying event in genocide prevention history, what is particularly remarkable about this event is how it defines 21st century activism--the ability to mobilize and advocate through a combination of traditional tactics and social media strategy.

Worcester's own Congressman McGovern speaking
in the Pledge2Protect Campaign in 2009

Like Clark University's chapter of STAND, most STAND schools have their own social media pages to help advertise their events, organize their ideas, and increase membership.  This is a unique take on the Groundswell phenomenon, where members of an organization use social media to act on their own without the need of top-down direction from leadership.  It allows the organization to continue growing and taking on new chapters all over the world without running short on manpower and resources to handle all of its members.  For instance, through Facebook Pages individual STAND chapters can tag photos, videos, and events to the main STAND Facebook page and let everyone know what each chapter is doing.

STAND's main Facebook Page

What I also found interesting was that through a simple monitoring of their social media presence, it is immediately obvious how passionate STAND's different chapters were about organizing their events and advocating their main cause.  For example, during the Southern Sudanese independence referendum in the end of January, which was a pivotal step to ending the civil conflict in Sudan, a Social Mention search of STAND within that month led to their positive to negative mentions ratio to grow almost 4 to 1.  An IceRocket search of the last week of January, which was when the results of the referendum came out, saw an extreme peak in blog posts mentioning STAND (see graph below).

That same week also commenced STAND's official "Tweet to the White House" week, where STAND users all over the world used hashtags and RT functions to President Obama, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and Vice President Joe Biden's Facebook and Twitter pages to raise the Sudan question in the president's foreign policy agenda and hopefully include it in the latest State of the Union Address.  Although the Darfur issue was cut out of final draft, this only displayed the power Twitter has to not only allow students and ordinary people to address powerful officials, but to also get a response from them.  In @StandNOW's Twitter page, their tweets show an almost immediate reply from President Obama's account:

 

After monitoring STAND's social media presence, I believe that they are a great example of how social media is utilized in an organizational level and how the proper tools are used to empower a group's groundswell to help them achieve their goals.  Furthermore, when social media is applied to activism, it is extremely easy for an advocacy group like STAND to monitor how much they impact policy and how successfully they advocate their cause.  Although there is more they can do to increase membership, organize the social media pages of their existing chapters, and expand the reach of their social media presence, I find that the novel things that this organization has accomplished with social media shows the potential they have to really make a bottom-up political impact on a global level.  I believe this organization will continue to make headway in making activism and social media an indelible partnership.

To conclude, I wanted to show this video which shows how STAND members participated in a Tweet the White House Day (very much like the one described above) and gets President Obama to start talking about what his administration is planning to do with Sudan:

More to come!