This week I took my son to Deen City Farm. It’s one of a small number of city farms spread across London, helping little kids tell the difference between a sheep, a cow and an alpaca. I jest a little, because I’m a country girl. But I remember taking a university friend from Philadelphia up into the mountains of Tennessee and showing her some white tailed deer, beautiful creatures. But she was far more interested in the cattle and desperately wanted to get in the field with some young bullocks. Not a great idea! So city kids do need to know about farm animals, where their food comes from and so on.

Deen City Farm, like many community and voluntary sector organisations, is partly funded by the council. In this case, Merton council. They’ve already announced cuts for next year, with further cuts almost certain. Signs around the farm explained the funding situation and that they weren’t likely to be able to continue without more support.

That really would be a shame. We’ve certainly enjoyed our regular visits to the city farm. And I’ve always seen many happy families there!

There was a call to action. To sign their petition on Merton’s e-petition form. Frankly, Deen City Farm, that feels a little tame.

On that trip my son was messing about in the cafe where the staff were meeting. I couldn’t help but overhear them talking about trying to use Facebook more effectively and getting celebrities to Tweet their cause. Interesting. Intriguing actually, given what I do. Another farm visitor asked if they could take their picture to post on her own Facebook group.  I took the opportunity to give them my card and offer my help with social media. I might not have mentioned that I would do this for free. But anyway, they haven’t emailed me.    Probably because I wasn’t wearing my social media ninja shirt.

If they had called me, I would have sat down with them to talk them through their objectives, their wider communication efforts and how social media could help them galvanise a rather passionate local fan base around a really amazing community resource.

A campaign must have a call to action! Yes, they’ve asked people to sign the petition. But so what? What will that do?  Will that really save the farm?  I looked over Merton’s e-petition pages, but  it’s not clear what actually happens to petitions. Do they go in front of full council? Scrutiny? Are they sneered at by bored council officers?

Save the Farm is a brilliant call to action at the highest level. It has cultural resonance and it’s clear and emotive.  But underneath that high level call to action, you need some clear steps people can take to save the farm.  These could include signing the petition. Giving their  contact details, since email drives action at crucial points in time. Telling their story. Giving their skills to support the campaign. Giving money. And the ultimate but easy social media campaign ask – telling their friends. To do that you need to get your social media house in order.

1. Sign the petition.

Nothing wrong with that, but I’d like to see more clearly what you expect to happen as a result. If you live work or study in Merton, go on and sign the petition. It can’t hurt.

2. Get those contact details!

It’s easy to set up a Google form which can be embedded or linked from your website asking for contact details. The best social media campaigns use contact details to drive traffic and action when the time is right.

3. Help people tell their story. Can you get people to tell the story of what the farm means to them?  It only needs a few lines, exposed in the right places, and sometimes people need a few simple guidelines about what’s required like a simple question such as…”My favourite Day at Deen City Farm”  I would be happy to tell the story of how my boy took his first ever pony ride at Deen City Farm.  But there will be more powerful, more emotive stories out there.  Signatures might get you in front of the council but real stories from real people beat an electronic signature every time.

And don’t forget people are already telling their Deen City Farm story online.  Here’s a sample of Flickr pics tagged deencityfarm.

People are already sharing their experiences of the farm

Boy and chickens

And there are quite a few videos on YouTube as well, such as the one above showing my less-than-stellar parenting skills.   Curate and showcase the best examples. (There’s more here on Beth Kanter’s blog – she’s much more knowledgeable on this kind of thing than I am)

4. Ask for more.

There is a link on the Deen City Farm main website to a donations page.  And that’s awesome. But why not be a little more upfront about asking for cash? Or donations of skills. Yes, it is hard to manage volunteer effort, but the farm is already good at that when it comes to mucking out and caring for the animals. Now’s the time to call on some of the professional skills of people who live in the area. Wimbledon isn’t exactly short of communications, IT and business professionals who have kids who love Deen City Farm.  I know because I met a whole bunch of them at my first school parent evening.  Or take a look at who’s already following DCF on Twitter, like  Rob Dyson @RobMDyson who handles publicity for WhizzKids – who could probably share a tip or two from their amazing non-profit social media efforts.

Find out where people are already talking about Deen City Farm and join in the conversation and ASK FOR HELP. Kudos to DCF for joining in this MumsNet conversation. But you could have made a little more of some of the suggestions – such as a Facebook group or a Friends board. There are tons of very skilled women in Wimbledon who are taking time out to raise kids who would be thrilled to support this.

But this ‘under construction’ page on how to help the farm sort of typifies the engagement with people who want to help.  And despite the cute picture of the piggy, that’s not the right impression.

It's almost like you don't want our help

5. Get your social media house in order and get people to tell their friends

DCF is already using social media and people are really receptive to this fantastic local resource.  There’s a Facebook page and a Twitter account. But DCF have yet to claim their Facebook places page (which is what comes up first when you search in Facebook). And I don’t see much engagement in either place.  Nor do I see much cross linking between their social media and web presence and almost nothing (that I saw) in the ‘on land’ world.  And a few simple signs at the farm asking people to ‘like them’ on Facebook would be awesome.  Yes, I know all this takes time and it isn’t free in terms of people resources, but I bet there are a handful of local women with previous experience in comms and marketing who would be happy to take this over – if you can let go a little bit.

And bonus tip!  You gotta have a gimmick.

Great social media campaigns usually have some kind of eye catching gimmick.  Manchester Police’s 24 Hours on Twitter. Walsall did the same. Southampton University Hospital Trust used their Twitter feed to highlight what went on durring one shift in a ward under threat.

I don’t think a 24 hour tweet-a-thon is the thing for Deen City Farm. (1am, pigs still asleep – oink…zzzzzz) But I could be wrong.  To me it would be much more cool to look at the impact on the life of a volunteers or to set up an Twitter account for an animal and tell its story for a week. Deen City Farm is also right next to Wimbledon Studios (television and film). Maybe they could see about getting visiting celebs to pop in and spread the word. I dunno, there’s probably people out there with more gimmicky minds than me. But these can get you wider press attention and capture the imagination of potential fans.

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I’ve mostly been hanging out in my hometown.  It’s in Lawrence County, Tennessee and sits right on top of the Alabama border.  I don’t know if you’ve seen the news lately – but northern-ish Alabama and across the Tennessee border has been hit by some pretty heavy weather.  It wasn’t a great place to be on Wednesday.

We’d been up in Kentucky, visiting Mammoth Cave National Park and the roadside tourist trap Dinosaur World (see my fabulous set on flickr), but I knew a storm was on the way and we cut our visit short.  Kentucky radio was ominously full of interruptions from the weather service predicting “quarter sized hail” (that’s the size of a 10p roughly! though worth slightly more) and flash flooding.

We got back to my mom’s just before the storm hit. We would have been safer in Kentucky. Thunder, lightning, heavy rain all night.  In the morning it started to clear and then the tornado warning sirens went.  There were tornadoes on both the leading and trailing edges of the storm.  My family suffer from cabin fever, so my mom dragged me out during the middle lull to do some early voting in local elections.  We were voting for liquor by the drink – allowing you to buy a glass of wine or a mixed drink at a bar or restaurant.  Clearly, that’s something worth dying for along with the whole democratic principle.  And we went shopping.

Now some might say that shopping for shirts is a low priority when people are warning of super cells coming up from Alabama – but not for my mother.  The staff were telling us to go home.  I have a three year old son that was in my mom’s house that’s nothing but windows, so I was saying we should go home. My mom was looking at capri pants.

The tornado sirens went and the staff locked us in the store.  We had to wait it out in the back – away from any windows. But not my mom! She made them unlock the doors while she went shopping at another store.  I hung out with the staff and the one other customer.  Finally, it looked clear enough (though tornado weather is deceptive) and we went home.

Although Lawrence County was hit by tornado activity, my family and friends seem alright.

Serious stuff

But that’s a lot more than can be said for much  of the mid-South and central Alabama.  This is one of the worst series of tornadoes to ever hit the United States and is the 2nd in death toll (now standing at around 350).

Thursday dawned clear and beautiful, but as we drove across the bottom of the state of Tennessee toward Chattanooga we saw sporadic devastation.  I saw flooding across several counties that I’d never seen before, and I’ve seen some flooding – creeks swollen to rivers and lakes.  Fields, parking lots, sports fields covered in feet of water.  As we came toward Chattanooga we saw places off the Interstate where roofs had been blown away and stands of mature trees mown down.

South of Chattanooga, the town of Ringgold, Georgia was blown away.  On the right hand side of the Interstate everything looked as normal, on the left hand side it was a debris field.

Helping hand

I know what good friends and neighbors people in the South are. So it’s no surprise that the day after the storms people were taking time off work to search for survivors and to begin the clean up.

In my own hometown, not hard hit, they’re re-focusing the Lawrenceburg Green Streets festival and market down on the town square as a way to gather supplies for the hard hit in Alabama. Baby supplies, water, non-perishable food.

Cash will also be needed to help people clean up and get back on their feet.  There are many ways to donate.  I tend to use the Salvation Army (and in the UK for Gift Aid)   But the Red Cross is great, too.

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Image from the Stonybrook library campaign site on Facebook.

Over the past two weeks, people have been busy taking out books from their local library.  Really that shouldn’t be particularly noteworthy, but in this case it was to protest the closing of a local library.  And they didn’t just take some books out of the library but they took all the books out of the local library.  All 16,000 volumes in the lending stock.  Every bestseller, every travel guide and Mills and Boon, every dusty copy of local history.  The good folk of Stony Stratford in Milton Keynes came into the library and checked out their maximum allowance and got coverage in a range of national newspapers and from the BBC as part of a “Wot No Books” campaign.

My first thought was “They don’t have a very good stock management and circulation policy, do they?”  But of course, the local librarians were undoubtedly in collusion – they wouldn’t have called for more books.  They wanted all the books to go.  It was part of a campaign organised by Friends of the Stony Stratford Library and the local parish council.  As well as the attention getting Wot No Books, there’s also an e-petition, with 10,000 signatures required to raise a debate at Milton Keynes Council.  And, of course, there’s a Facebook page.  One of the campaigners said: “I put it on Facebook and emailed everyone I could think of and it’s just gone absolutely mad. I think it’s a very simple but clever idea and it’s given something that people can act on and make their voice heard.”

Quite a few libraries will be closing over the next year – and this always causes protest.  Libraries are perhaps the most notionally loved of all council services.   And although we may or may not see another Wot No Books style campaign (undoubtedly clever, but can you do it more than once?), we will see the use of social media, emails and petitioning to register protest at the closing of libraries and cuts to other services. The Twitter hashtag #savelibraries, begun with a Tweet from (apparently from) Shropshire is now trending worldwide.

But there’s something bigger to play for and a role for social media. Protest 2.0 isn’t just about using social tools for protest, it’s about what protest needs to become in this age – a search for solutions. And this should come from both protesters and from public bodies.  Big Society and a re-shaping of public services means that we’re going to need to see a lot more co-production and some radical solutions to local public services.  There are tons of opportunities in libraries to do things with the public from stocking to volunteering to co-location of services both public and private.  And there’s a massive opportunity to use new tools to debate, deliberate and convene alongside ‘traditional’ approaches.  But we need to see public bodies engaging with the tools that protesters are using online to make this work.

Social media offers a tremendous opportunity to organise solutions and new ways of delivering services, not just a way to protest cuts.

We designed Local by Social to use the power of social media and open data to help institutions and citizens work more effectively and openly together. But I’m so pleased that we’ve been able to use social media to help out a great guy,  and although it’s not what we set out today, it’s completely in the spirit of Local by Social and in the spirit of the season.  Kieran”s still raising money for Raleigh International, so if you’re so inclined here’s his JustGiving page where you can donate money online.

Want to get involve in Local by Social?  Check out our next event – Apps for Communities in Bristol on 28 and 29 January.  We’re really excited about this one working with Bristol, their data, and the great developer community of the South West.

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We had some fantastic citizens with us in Conventry, residents of Wood End, the neighbourhood which was the focus for our event.  They worked alongside officers, councillors, police, techies and social innovators to design and deliver three projects.

One of them was a young guy called Kieran.  He’s a volunteer with the Connexions service, helping other young people into work, training or developing skills through volunteering..  As I worked with him in a group looking at crime and policing, the topic inevitably strayed to the anti-social behaviour of some youth.  He mentioned that he’d been involved in some petty crime in his past, but that by working and volunteering and getting involved in community projects, he’d turned his life around.  He wanted whatever we did to celebrate and support people who wanted to change their lives for the better.

It made me reflect on my own ‘misspent’ youth.  We didn’t have a lot of money when I was a teenager, but we certainly had connections in the small town where I grew up.   A bit of youthful indiscretion would never really harm my life chances.   But for kids without connections, from neighbourhoods with bad reputations – there aren’t many second chances.  What impressed me so much about Kieran is that he was making his own chances, and doing so largely through service to others.

Part of the reason that Local by Social was in the neighbourhood of Wood End is that this an area which received significant investment through the New Deal for Communities programme.  This funding is coming to an end – we were seeking to use social media as a way to extend the social capital they’d already built up.  But it also means that kids like Kieran aren’t going to have the same funded opportunities they once had.

Kieran is still looking for opportunities to change his life for the better through service to others. He’s hooked up with Raleigh International to work in India. But he needs to raise money to cover some of the costs: In his own words:

My name is Kieran Armour. I am 19 years old and currently volunteering as a peer mentor at Connexions in Coventry.

I have been given the opportunity to go to Kerala in India for 10 weeks as part of a volunteering programme with Raleigh International. During the programme I will be teaching in the local schools and helping to re-build sections of the village.

I am required to raise £1,500 for my plane ticket and vaccinations as part of the contract I have made with Raleigh.

I am aware that times are tight at the the moment, but would really appreciate your support.

This is a chance in a life time for me so please dig deep and make a donation for my fund raising efforts.

Many thanks

Kieran

Visit Kieran’s Just Giving page: http://www.justgiving.com/kieran-armour

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It just so happens that Charlotte is running in the Brighton Marathon in aid of YouthNet - truly a social media charity.  YouthNet is the UK’s first exclusively online charity. We guide and support young people, enabling them to make educated life choices, participate in society and achieve their ambitions.  Charlotte is already a mentor to young people through the charity, but now she’s raising money, too (as well as probably wearing out a pair or two of trainers).

Charlotte’s JustGiving page is here. It would be great if we could help her in reach her fundraising goal for a great cause that not only helps the kids, but also demonstrates how social media can be used as a tool to support some of our local public service aims.   And using models we’ll all have to embrace more – individuals, communities and networks helping each other.

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via salvationarmy.org

One of the sermons that has made the biggest impression on me was delivered by a member of the Salvation Army’s Caribbean territory to the non-denominational congregation we attended when we lived in Puerto Rico. They did some amazing, innovative and often counter-intuitive work there. For instance, they ran a jail. A jail for illegal immigrants. That sounds pretty rough. But rougher still were the prisons that these illegal immigrants would have been placed in – alongside real criminals. It was truly a mission of mercy to house these non-violent breakers of civil law, economic refugees from places like the Dominican Republic or Haiti.

The Salvation Army has a history of working with people that others won’t. They already have a long term presence in Haiti, running an orphanage – among other things. They are running medical clinics, they are bringing aid to Haiti. And they have a reputation for doing a lot of the second stage disaster relief – helping people clean up and get their lives back together.

I donated money to the Salvation Army to help their relief and long term efforts in Haiti. I hope you will, too. Although there are many other places that could make good use of your money.

Read more about the work of the Salvation Army in Haiti and donate online.

Posted via web from Ingrid’s posterous

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