Today, we had a great workshop/meeting to review potential online widgets to help facilitate the goals of the RIP campaign. Those widgets included online tools that allow for campaign donations, event facilitation or tools such as Tumblr that are more to get individuals to come to the RIP – site. This workshop was a follow through from Sumona’s meeting last week with Cara in which they brainstormed popular widgets (Gigya, Tumblr, Meetup, etc.,) used in other social outreach campaigns, such as Colorlines. The widgets we went over today included:
1. Mobile Access for WordPress – Song made a PowerPoint (WordPressTools) reviewing how it works and the different features available when WordPress is accessed via mobile. In particular, he showed how donations could be accessed through some of these features – one of these fundraising tools is more text based and the other more visual (an hour glass type depiction). Cara said currently PressPassTV has been using ‘Network for Good’ but that this may be a more flexible tool if not for RIP for other campaigns conducted by PPTV.
2. Tumblr – per our discussion and brainstorm activity we felt that this online tool would be useful particularly to pull in the youth (adolescent) population – an online claw if you will to pull users of different sites back to the RIP-site. (Tumblr insta-1). The issue of humor also came up and how Tumblr is often used as a tool of humor. (Ryan Gosling – Hey Girl pictures, Arrested Development characters depicted with quotes from Mitt Romney, etc.,). In light of that discussion, we briefly discussed how humor could be used in the RIP campaign. Ultimately, while Cara did not see Tumblr as a central tool for RIP, she saw it as another avenue for getting people’s interest sparked in the campaign.
3. Meetup – Could be a useful way to set up meetings for the immediate campaign but also a good way to spread the tools of the campaign to other communities but in a way that aggregates the use of those tools under a central event-organizing tool. A potential negative of the tool is that as it is open source. Anyone could organize a meeting under the RIP or PPTV banner but not truly represent the views and actions of the organization or the campaign. If Cara does decide to use it for the campaign, we suggested she include a disclaimer, letting others know that PPTV is not liable for misreporting under its name or activities that do not align with the organization. Meetup
4. Multilingual Plug-ins: This was a quick discussion but Rogelio mentioned to Cara that there were multi-lingual plug-ins available for the website, and he also offered to translate anything into Spanish if Cara so desired.