At the beginning of December, Aspen Baker, the executive director of Exhale, wrote me an email. “I’m looking for a social media coordinator and web person for a short-term project,” she said. “Interested?” I’ve always been a fan of Aspen’s work at Exhale — they’re a nonprofit organization which provides the first and only nonjudgmental national, multilingual after-abortion talkline. One of the things I love most about Exhale, which I learned largely through their campaign, is their advocacy of “pro-voice” in dealing with abortion. Every woman’s voice deserves to be heard; women (in numerous political contexts) don’t need to be talked at, shamed, have numbers and percentages thrown at them as much as they need to be listened to, and told that they are loved.

The project Aspen had in mind was exciting from the outset–large with names but fraught with challenges. It turns out that MTV approached them when they decided to do a special on abortion for their program “16 & Pregnant.” Now, if you’re not familiar, MTV has two reality shows about teen pregnancy running; “16 & Pregnant” is one of them, and the other is “Teen Mom.” They’ve both been running for two seasons, and up until this special, neither series showed any teen having an abortion. This is noteworthy because 37% of all teen pregnancies do end in abortion; many have criticized MTV for not showing a large portion of the teen pregnancy experience.

MTV came to Exhale originally looking for women who would be willing to go on the show and talk about their experience having an abortion. Exhale ultimately got the opportunity to help shape how the show was put together, and used this opportunity to do some pro-voice educating with the production team. They wanted to show that it was possible to have an honest, thoughtful, nuanced conversation about abortion that wouldn’t be polarizing and inflammatory. And, most importantly, they wanted MTV’s young viewers who have had abortions to personally relate to the stories shared on the special.

Aspen then wanted to create a social media campaign and website to accompany the airing of the special. It was slated to air at 11:30pm on Dec 28th, just a few days after Christmas, and there would be no commercial interruptions, and no promotions announcing that the show would be on. So, despite the bonus of having a nationwide audience, we ran the risk of no one hearing about it. The other challenge was that we weren’t allowed to announce the show ourselves until MTV was ready, which likely (given their desire to fly this under the radar) wasn’t going to be until right before the show.

HOW WE BUILT THE CAMPAIGN

I quickly enlisted the help of Sonal Bains, with whom I work often: we split client work quite nicely, with me on the strategic development and technology end of things, and Sonal on the implementation and media relation end of things. Both of us come from strong offline organizing backgrounds, and this informs our style of work and collaboration. (Plus, Sonal’s hilarious.) The takeaway here is that as you assess your campaign, it’s helpful to write down what your strong points are, what you bring to the table. I know that I don’t have the relationships with bloggers and journalists that Sonal does, for example. If you’re working within an organization, get your key players together and write down concrete skills and time availability as part of your campaign brainstorming. On Exhale’s side, their Director of Programs, Jovida Ross, played a critical role in the implementation of the campaign and was a great partner for Sonal and I. We had a small yet mighty team of high-functioning, excellent communicators.

Aspen’s campaign idea was to create a digital safe space where the women who decided to tell their stories on the show–and by extension, all women who’d had abortions–would feel loved and supported. Central to this space would be a website where anyone could submit a message of love or support. Any political messages (from any corner of the debate) would not be accepted; Aspen’s vision was a zone free of typical advocacy posturing, and wanted it only to focus on the women. Why? In Exhale’s extensive counseling experience, they have found that political rhetoric can shut down women seeking emotional support after abortion. This would be a space where we wouldn’t allow that to happen.

It was important to me to give the campaign a catchy name that had emotional resonance. I rejected our original names that were things like “Your story matters” and “You are loved.” They were all vague, emotionally absent, and just didn’t hit on the enormity of what we were trying to pull off. I asked our group to think of names that were plays on the title of the show, allowing us to capitalize on the already-popular brand; it was Aspen that landed “16 & Loved.”

ELEMENTS OF THE CAMPAIGN

• Set up metrics and analytics to track how the campaign performs
• Build a quick ‘n’ dirty website to capture submissions of love
• Rename the Twitter profile from “xhaleisprovoice” to “ExhaleProVoice” and use the hashtag #16andloved to capture the conversations about the campaign
• Build the Facebook Page for Exhale as an organization, and use it to share the love, and updates about the campaign.
• Involved the reproductive justice blogging community by organizing a private, embargoed call before the special airs, and inviting people to participate in a live blog during the show.

METRICS

I’m a big fan of Rowfeeder for my social media tracking needs. I work with individuals and small organizations, so we pretty much can’t afford tools like Radian6, which is one of the more popular services in the non-profit sphere. For $35/month, Rowfeeder lets us track up to 3 terms on both Twitter and Facebook. On top of providing interesting metrics reports that you can tweak and do fun things with in Excel (if you’re that kind of nerd; not that I know anything about that), it also dumps all the mentions/posts it finds into a Google doc for you, so that you have the raw data.

We chose to have it track #16andloved, ExhaleProVoice and xhaleprovoice (in case there were tons of people using the old Twitter handle). In retrospect, I should have chosen 16andloved without the hash sign; that would have also captured mentions of the website where neither the hashtag nor Twitter handle were used.

WEBSITE

We purchased 16andloved.com and set up hosting with LivingDot.com (their “One” plan for $10.95/month). We installed WordPress, and chose the Therapy theme from WooThemes for $75. I recreated the “16 & Pregnant” logo to read “16 & Loved” by hand using my Wacom Intuos drawing tablet.

For the submissions and posting, we used a few WordPress plugins. The submission form was created by Contact Form 7, and we had to sent to a special email address that we hooked up to Postie. Postie turned the submission emails into draft blog posts, and we checked regularly and approved/discarded the posts. We also used an extension for Contact Form 7 that captured the submissions and added all the info to a table in the database that could be exported. We also used the Really Simple CAPTCHA to keep out spam/bot submissions.

I installed the WP Supercache plugin in case the site got really popular and crashed (it did once). For social sharing, we used the Facebook Likes It plugin (this seems to have been abandoned; I can’t find its install page anymore), and the WP Tweet button plugin.

TWITTER

Before we got word we could talk about the special, we started working on building the community engagement by joining existing abortion conversations, following and engaging with influential folks that we identified, and also posting a few teasers about having Exciting News! to share very soon.

Once we got the go ahead, we launched the website and started soliciting submissions. We received several dozen on the first day, and tweeted some of our favorites. We continued to solicit, post favorites, retweet others’ Twitter posts, and respond to inquiries. Because of the short time period for the campaign, we didn’t do as much curating as I normally advocate for. That’s not to say that we used Twitter as a broadcast tool (a big no-no!); we still maintained a very conversational focus. It’s just that for this case, most of the focus was on “16 & Loved.”

We also used Twitter to promote airing of the show, watching the live blog we were putting together, and to continue to curate responses.

FACEBOOK

Prior to this campaign, Exhale had a Page that they didn’t use, but they did have a Cause with ~1,000 members. My experiences with Causes haven’t been overly fantastic; I feel like it takes a lot of time and resource investment to get minimal material return. Especially for the purposes of our campaign (promoting submissions to the site, and getting the word out about the show), I feel like a Page would serve our purposes much better. The biggest thing is that status updates and links from Pages are more likely to appear in a fan’s news feed, and that was absolutely critical for us.

I asked 25 friends quick to Like it before we even did that much with it so that we could land a username, making it easier to share the Page with the wider world. We chose http://facebook.com/ExhaleProVoice. We then started posting periodic updates to the Cause, asking people to Like the page so that they could stay in touch with Exhale and its Very Exciting News! that was coming.

After that, we used a similar posting strategy as to what we had going on at Twitter.

BLOGGER CALL AND LIVEBLOG

Sonal got to work right away on putting together a conference call for the blogging and journalist communities. She contacted about 10-12 people who write about abortion issues and women’s rights on a larger scale. The Friday before we launched, we hosted the call just using FreeConferenceCall.com. We scheduled a short talk with Aspen, a few words from a spokesperson who had had an abortion. We stressed that the information we were sharing was embargoed, and we would let them know as soon as we could when they could share with their communities. We had a few key asks: 1. to see who wanted to participate in our live blog, 2. to see who was willing to write about the show and our campaign, and 3. to stress the importance of the pro-voice angle of our movement, and ask that they respect that as much as possible. We then opened it up to Q&A, and altogether, we spent about an hour on the phone together.

Five or six of the bloggers on the call volunteered to participate in the live blog the night that the show aired. In addition, the Women’s Media Center offered to create a “watch-in,” and they shared it with their community. How that worked: They created a Facebook event in which people were invited to watch the show (in their own homes) and voice their opinions about it.

For the liveblog, we used CoverItLive. They make it very easy to get a group of approved panelists, as they’re called, to come together and chat live. You can embed the CoverItLive tool in any website very easily, and we encouraged our panelists to do so, widening our reach. I monitored the comments from the community and approved appropriate messages as the show aired. Sonal worked on monitoring the new submissions to the website. After the special was over, people could also re-read the liveblog.

RESULTS! (That’s what you’ve been waiting for, right?)

The straight-up numbers*…

• Website: ~9,000 visits, with most of those happening between Dec. 22nd and Dec. 30th. Users spent an average of 2:26 minutes on the site, and visited 2.1 pages while they stayed. 200+ submissions.
• Twitter: Followers increased from 235 to 465; 548 mentions of @ExhaleProVoice (from 12/20/10, that’s ~27/day); 1563 mentions of #16andloved (from 12/20/10, that’s ~78/day)
• Facebook: Fans went from under 25 to 616; 617 likes of posts with 1,152 active users; Dec. 29th was the most popular day for likes and comments; 86% female fans; 62% are 18-34
• Liveblog:  During the show, we maxed at ~120 viewers at once, with a total of 422 viewers. 175 panelist comments were published; 234 reader comments were sent (98 were published). Since then, the live blog has been replayed over 900 times.
• Media: About 25 blog posts and articles, including feminist strongholds of Feministing, Feministe, Jezebel; independent media such as Salon.com, Change.org, and Care2; mainstream media such as ABCNews, NY Post, Washington Post. Two weeks later, an article on the campaign appeared in the NY Times.

Were these good numbers? All told, yes! We were very happy with them. Moreover, we were even more thrilled with our qualitative metrics, which for me are the real measure of a social media campaign: The overwhelming messages of love and support often left us emotional and speechless. We received very few negative submissions (less than 5), and very few negative comments online. (There was a minor campaign by a conservative blogger, but it never caught traction.) All around, a huge, huge set of cultural wins for the pro-voice movement.

* Exhale agreed to let me publish these numbers. Normally, all quantitative and qualitative metrics are kept private as part of my contracts.

http://www.lets-panic.com/

http://www.deannazandt.com/presentations/nssr/

Since I love all-things-WordPress, I decided to use this as a test case to run all kinds of flexibility tests. People need to be able to find available dogs, for example, using loads of parameters like location, sex, whether or not they were good with dogs/cats/kids, etc.. The site also had to be easy enough for staff to post dog profiles and stories. I ended up choosing WordPress’ categories structure to handle most of the taxonomic work, with a fairly extensive set of parent & child categories. The query_post fucntion became my best friend. I tried to avoid using custom fields (I think they can be confusing to the end user making the profiles), but ultimately gave in and implemented them for the thumbnails for the Featured Dog in the sidebar, the city each dog is in, and the extra information for dogs needing sponsors.

It was a fabulous challenge that really got my gears going. But besides all that, I know it’s going to help a lot more dogs find homes, and for that I couldn’t be happier. As they say at ResQ, “To one dog, you may just be the world.”

PS– Be sure to check out the Happy Endings page for Izzy Louise’s harrowing story of near death, rescue and coming home.

Check out BettyFussell.com.

The Media Consortium was looking for a way to better highlight the projects they’re working on, and their old site solely focused on the membership community. I was happily selected to rearrange the sites and install WordPress with a couple of nifty doodads to help them show both the community and the rest of the world what’s happening. We launched yesterday, at long last! Check it out: www.themediaconsortium.org

Tired of being talked about this election season? Done with being represented by skewed polls and stereotypes?

This is your chance to cut through the spin and tell the media, the candidates and the world exactly what you want this election season, both right here online and live in cities across the country this Fall.

Oh. Freakin’. Yeah. There were a lot of interesting technical challenges for the project: how to get WordPress to take anonymous submissions, how to make the site as managable and geek-free by the end users as possible, and so much more. Can’t wait to rip this election season up!

(If I’m not on live, then it’ll just show a white screen… look at older clips here)

• Over at Hightower Lowdown, we’ve launched a new weekly video series featuring America’s #1 Populist. What more could you ask for? 2 minutes of Jim talking to you every single week! You can also watch it on YouTube, or subscribe to the show in iTunes.
• And for AlterNet.org, we relaunched the front page to be snazzier and brighter. Design was done by Design About Town, engineering by the ever-smarty Shawn and project management and OCD tweaking by me. Whee!
• I redesigned and launched the website for best-selling author Amy Bloom, who has been an absolute riot to work with. I haven’t read her newest, but Come To Me was highly recommended to me by Bitch Magazine co-founder and feminista-extraordinare, Lisa Jervis. And it rocked.
• Lots of photosets from the last couple months.
• Um, I upgraded to Leopard last night, and so far so good. One thing that I called tech support about because I couldn’t find an answer anywhere else: yes, Time Machine will wipe your external drive the first time you use it, but then you can continue putting other things on it after. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated Time Machine drive, whew.

That’s pretty much it. Holidays are a-comin’ and I’ll be up in Bingotown for a while, hanging out with the fam, and then back in NYC for New Year’s. Hope all’s well in the land of not-my-apartment!

John S. Hall — Sensitive Artist & Nancy Pelosi:

John S. Hall — Jesus Was Way Cool:

John S. Hall — About the guy from Orleans + Daily Negations:

On Monday, October 16th, he will read with musical accompaniment from Dogbowl at St. Mark’s Poetry Project; poet Aaron Kiely will also read. On Thursday, November 9th, Hall will perform with musicians Dogbowl and Sasha Forte at the Bowery Poetry Club; poet Penny Rimbaud will also take the stage that night. Full details are below.

The book is a response to vapid, feel-good self help books that offer platitudes in response to human suffering. “Daily Negations” features a negative thought for every day of the year, and is intended to be of no help whatsoever to anyone.  The performances, which will hopefully placate Hall’s publisher, promise to be spectacles of mediocrity.

SHOW DETAILS

Mon., 10/16, 8pm
John S. Hall with Dogbowl
also featuring Aaron Kiely
St. Mark’s Poetry Project
131 E. 10th St., at 2nd Avenue
http://www.poetryproject.com
$TBD

Thu., 11/9, 7pm
John S. Hall with Dogbowl, Sasha Forte
also featuring Penny Rimbaud
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, b/w Bleecker and Houston
http://www.bowerypoetry.com
$TBD

More information is available at http://www.myspace.com/johnshall.
Book information is available at http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-933368-45-4

ABOUT JOHN S. HALL

John S. Hall’s band King Missile was dropped from Atlantic Records in 1994, after having recorded 3 albums, two of which were not very successful at all. King Missile has made several independent records that are widely unknown, and toured the country several times to nearly empty nightclubs. This is John’s second book with Soft Skull, because he couldn’t get a better publisher after his first book. He lives (if you can call it that) in New York.

Directed by Saint Reverend Jen Miller (www.revjen.com) and shot/edited by Kat Fitzgerald, the video — an alternative version commissioned by Moby on a well-spent shoestring budget — features cameos from downtown Art Stars and their cohorts, as well as reenactments of classic debauchery at favorite venues. The director will be in attendance at the premiere.

Details:
Sunday, Sept. 24th @ 9pm
Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction
34 Avenue A, between 2nd & 3rd Sts.
www.faceboy.com
www.mopitkins.com
$4 admission; no drink minimum (as always!)
Sign-up for open mike is by lottery and begins promptly at 9pm; 8 minutes per performer

ABOUT FACEBOY

A lifelong New Yorker, Francis “Faceboy” Hall is a talented actor, producer and activist who has been participating in the New York City arts community for over twenty years. He has appeared in hundreds of original stage productions and several films, including Robert Downey Sr.’s “Too Much Sun.” In addition to his performance talents, he has taught at the Judson Memorial Church and spent twelve years developing statewide standards for preventing abuse and neglect of people with mental retardation and developmental disabilities. He strongly believes that the vitality of New York rests on the strength of its arts community and counter-culture.

ABOUT MO PITKIN’S

Mo Pitkin’s is a local joint that showcases the East Village at its best–with four different rooms on two floors, there’s a spot at Mo’s for everyone. Curl up in the dining room’s plush banquettes for Judeo-Latino cooking (like Paella Maranno or the Cuban Reuben), plus steaks, burgers, and the EV’s best rotisserie chicken; or sidle up to the century-old bar for tap beer, deep shots and special drinks like the Absolute Egg Cream and the Orange Gin Julius. Upstairs at Mo’s, check out an amazing array of performers in the 65 seat cabaret, or use Sadie’s Hideaway to either book a private party, or relax with a bird’s eye view of Avenue A. Wherever you go at Mo’s, you’ll find the same neighborhood-friendly vibe as the owners’ previous places, the Great Jones CafÆ’© and Two Boots Restaurant and Pizzerias. East Village-owned and operated, and named for an eclectic cousin who tried to assassinate Hitler (says he!), Mo Pitkin’s aims to carry on the neighborhood’s great tradition of artists and immigrants, rebels and dreamers, all living, working and eating together in a gritty, asphalt paradise that we call home.

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