A digital advocacy campaign most often has to connect in certain way with a classical campaign. However, a digital campaign can be conducted as a standalone exercise -but it has to be designed to be like that.

Top Tips

First, decide on your objective, keep it realistic! Then select your team, identify the stakeholders and the decision-makers. Keep in mind that you should find a way to narrow your target, e.g., by mailing lists, otherwise the message will get lost in the cyberspace. Select internet platform and social media.

Design a feed-back channel, both for your use and to inform the participants about how works their support – plan for either a newsletter or a Twitter-like notification method.

Post the message and look for impact and outcomes, in a consistent manner, using the tools which are built in each social media.

Make sure you can benefit from side impacts of the campaign:

• Improves trust in your organization;
• Helps you interact directly with relevant EU and national officials;
• Monitors what’s happening in your field that may not be covered by the mainstream media or trade publications;
• Helps organisations become more visible;
• Gathers informal feedback from key government officials.
  Although gathering data in virtual campaigns is relatively easy, and anyway easier than in physical campaigns, but it is an illusion to believe that gathering more data means that it is easier to measure the campaign effectiveness.
  Conduct periodic team meetings to review the interim outcomes and plan for improvements. Make sure you meet always all legal requirements, both in respect to advocacy practice and in personal data protection.
  Components of the digital campaign are, most often: emails or text messages, social media campaigns or posts, holding virtual events, videos. One can implement one or more of these components.
  In a digital campaign words and statements matters even more than in the classical campaign – make sure the words have a significant impact on the readers, convert boring phrases into highly emotional ones.
  No matter the initial scale, a digital campaign is scalable and this property shall be seen as valuable opportunity to enhance the impact; time to time analyse whether there are ways to scale the campaign. This does not necessarily mean to expand the covered territory, but to increase the impact.