About this Guide

The Info-Activism How-To Guide is a new guide for activists, advocates, NGOs and community based organisations who want to use technology tools and practices in their campaigning. This guide assembles, strategies, digital tools and case studies from around the world with a critical focus on the intended strategic impact of digital campaigns.

This guide is an updated version of two earlier toolkits: Message in a Box and Mobiles in a Box and also features content from our 10 Tactics suite of materials.

The Info-Activism How-To Guide is structured around three levels of outcomes that campaigners intend for campaigns: to raise awareness about an issue with an audience, to get an audience more deeply engaged in an issue and to move an audience towards a specific action. We've called these levels 'Make your issue their interest', 'Make your issue their issue' and 'Make your issue their action' respectively.

With the proliferation of digital tools and platforms available to activists, it can sometimes be difficult to know where to start and which tools are best suited (or not) for different kinds of campaign and global contexts. So, the guide also features campaigning basics, a selection of reviewed digital tools that info-activists find useful in their work and numerous inspirational examples of how other groups have used information and digital technologies in their campaigns.

 

Who can benefit from this guide?

 

The Info-Activism How-To guide is for you if you are an activist, advocate, NGO or community worker anywhere in the world who:

 

  • is launching or thinking of launching a campaign online and/or offline using digital tools
  • would like to learn more about the digital tools that are the most used and useful from an activist perspective
  • is looking for inspiration or an idea of how others have used digital tools in innovative ways and with limited means to pass a strong message
  • wants to focus more on applying tools and strategies rather than on abstract theories; wants a guide that is practical without necessarily being technical