February 26th, 2009 Topic: Using Facebook.com for Social Change
[Below is a snippet of a conversation via Meebo.com, in text chat format. It is an entertaining story of how one nonprofit and it's activist members lobbied a US Senator to favor passing a piece of legislation. Special thanks to Ivan Boothe of Rootwork.og for sharing his story.. Enjoy!]
12:14Ivan Boothe, Rootwork.org So my first experience using Facebook in that way was in 2005
12:15Ivan Boothe, Rootwork.org Our network of activists was trying to move a particular bill on Darfur through Congress. We knew we had the votes in the full Senate, but one particular senator was holding it up in committee
12:15Ivan Boothe, Rootwork.org So we used Facebook to identify Darfur activists in that senator's home state
12:16Ivan Boothe, Rootwork.org Then, we gave them all a training on how to use the website OpenSecrets.org, which lists publicly available campaign contribution information
12:16Ivan Boothe, Rootwork.org And we had them contact that senator's highest donors
12:16Ivan Boothe, Rootwork.org And ask *them* to contact the senator and request that the Darfur bill be moved through the committee
12:17Ivan Boothe, Rootwork.org We had a few dozen students participate, and while it's hard to measure reliably, two weeks later the senator did indeed move the bill, after several months of not doing anything
A typical Senate desk. Image via Wikipedia. ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=67f9a4b0-5ad1-47c5-971b-038fa4f8fed5)
