TWINTEL Solutions

Flickr photo: KayCey97007

I find it highly ironic that so much energy has been spent debating slacktivism. Dozens of articles, a slew of conference sessions, all devoted to a discussion of, essentially, laziness.

The best part is, we're not just talking about this in our little corner of the universe. The debate has hit the mainstream media. I was tickled to see Nancy Lublin -- author of "Zilch", and a person with whom I would really like to have a cocktail -- take up the topic in Fast Company last month. Lublin sums up the debate in her usual straight-to-the-point style:

"The problem many people have with slacktivism is that low input frequently means low impact." 

We see this all the time in the nonprofit sector. Every marketing, fundraising, and volunteer management tome out there will tell you to find your evangelists and then cultivate the heck out of them -- great advice, by the way. For a very long time, getting that 1 percent of your audience who is very active with you to participate deeply was the very best way to leverage your supporters. Why? Because there was no efficient alternative. We had no easy means to get the other 99% to contribute.

Of course, now we do. As Clay Shirky famously points out in "Here Comes Everybody", there used to be no way to share silly mermaid parade photos, but now it's so easy, they get shared quite readily. So we have a long, long tail (to now grab from Chris Anderson) of supporters who can take these kinds of easy shallow actions, like uploading a photo of a community event.

Don't you think the shallow actions of 99 of your supporters might be just as important as that one deep action by your biggest fan? I do. But then again, I've clearly been reading a lot of business books lately.  

If slacktivism actually does matter, what does that mean for how you engage your supporters to meet your mission? What turns upside or inside out in your organization to do this work differently?

Here are a couple of resources on the topic:

• 10NTC Session: the Trouble with Slacktivism
• Slacktivism: Why Snopes Got it Wrong About Internet Petitions
• Foreign Policy: Brave New World of Slacktivism