Supervisor

I think I now have a supervisor for my project, Rachel Wilson. I met with Rachel yesterday and I think we're both on the same page about how to approach the project and what difficulties we might face. What's more, we've got friends in common! That's always a good sign! I think her background will be very helpful for me and she has already come up with some good ideas about who I can talk to and issues I should consider.

What question is my research project answering?

I hope to answer the question: "How can not-for-profit organisations use new media and the internet to raise the public's awareness about human rights issues?"

I mentioned the draft script, well here it is. Comments welcome.

Rendition Short Script - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: Rendition Short Script

The idea behind the script is that it is based on a section from the AFHR show "Rendition", which uses transcripts and real testimony from three guys who experienced the process of extraordinary rendition. I thought it would be best to make the campaign somehow in the style of AFHR, in order to raise awareness not only of the issue, but of how AFHR works as an organisation.

Dangers of Wikipedia

We were speaking in Comm Rev about Wikipedia and Google and the dangers involved in people taking what they're told for gospel without considering how and why the information is chosen. I mentioned a sketch by American satirist Stephen Colbert. See below:

http://spring.newsvine.com/_news/2006/08/01/307864-stephen-colbert-causes-chaos-on-wikipedia-gets-blocked-from-site

Unfortunately, the YouTube clip is being contested by Comedy Central for breach of copyright. Fair enough I suppose (but disappointing for this blog post!)

Potential challenges and problems

There are a number of challenges I can foresee with regards to my campaign for AFHR.

First of all, there's the target audience. Deciding on who the target audience is is bound up also with what we want to get out of the campaign. Do we want to convert people to the AFHR cause? Encourage donations? Or motivate existing supporters? Of course, if a campaign could do all three that would be ideal, but I'm not expecting to create the perfect awareness campaign, so we might have to be more specific! From my readings and research so far, I would expect that our best chance of success will be if we target people who are already sympathetic to the issues that AFHR engages in, but who either don't understand the Extraordinary Rendition issue or who don't know about AFHR's work. The aim of the campaign is therefore to direct people to the website where they can find out more about the issue and organisation (and even donate if they choose!)

It is here that we also start to discover the limitations of a viral campaign. Although cheap and with a potentially large audience, viral campaigns will target a younger market. There is nothing wrong with this per se, and it could be great for AFHR, but it has occurred to me previously that a potential audience for AFHR is the niche market known in political circles as "the doctors wives". This rather patronising term refers to middle aged, middle class women who are conservative politically but who are also kind and concerned with human rights. Their politics generally stems from their wealth and social circles, but they do not condone inhumane behaviour. This is a powerful group because, as the name suggests, they are connected to powerful people (or may be in positions of power themselves) and have previously been the turning point on issues such as the Vietnam War and refugees in Australia. AFHR should definitely consider targeting this group, but I don't think that viral marketing is the way to do it.

However, having said that, if we shoot our viral campaign on broadcast-quality high-definition video (I'll have to do some research into the best camera to use) then we can hope that, if the viral campaign achieves some success, we can then venture out into television. TV would be the best way to reach the middle aged women group, along with features in magazines and radio.

The other issue with viral marketing is that you have to give a reason for the receiver to pass it on. This will partly be helped by targeting already sympathetic viewers, who are more likely to want to share our campaign with their friends as a way of expressing their own views. However, if the 90 second ad engages people well enough, even those who were previously unsympathetic could be encouraged to pass it on. Engagement often comes down to an issue of emotion. Most virals are funny for this reason, engaging people's sense of humour. It would be a huge challenge to create a funny campaign around state-sanctioned torture, but I won't rule out the possibility just yet! We are more likely to engage with people with either shock value or a very moving piece.

These are the main challenges at the moment, in terms of creating the concept for our campaign. There will also be technical decisions to make (as touched upon above)... but those can wait for another month or so!

Long break

There has been quite a delay since my last post, but I have a good excuse, I was in the UK. Sure, they have computers and internet over there, so I could have still contributed to my blog, but I was super busy on a whirlwind tour, which was partly about my Hons research project.

I met up with Christine of the newly-named Actors for Human Rights. We discussed what issue she would like to focus on in a campaign and she resolutely said extraordinary rendition. Extraordinary rendition is the name given to the kidnapping of suspected terrorists by the CIA around the world, who are then held in secret prisons and are not allowed to contact their families, their embassies or legal representation. According to many accounts, they are also tortured. The practice gets a mention in Wikipedia and there is a fact sheet about it on the American Civil Liberties Union website. There was also a film about this released last year (starring Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal).

AFHR has a script about rendition which uses the testimony of three guys who each experienced rendition and were then released. They all claim torture and that the governments of their respective countries didn't help (one is British, one Canadian and one German). This will be used as the basis of our viral campaign.

We also talked about what we want the campaign to achieve. Essentially it will be about raising awareness of the issue as well as the profile of AFHR. We want to direct people to the website, where they will then be offered ideas about what they can do, which organisations are working in this area, booking a show by AFHR and how they can find out more information. Our target audience will probably already be left-leaning and sympathetic to human rights issues, but maybe they are unaware of the extent of the rendition problem and/or have never heard of Actors for Human Rights. Directing people to the website will also provide a way for us to track the success of our campaign to some extent, by keeping an eye on website hits etc.

More to come.