MySociety success

Following my analysis of the MySociety / MPs expenses campaign, I wanted to post some of the feedback from their email group.

1. According to Francis Irving and there were somewhere between 4000 and 5000 messages sent to MPs from the MySociety site, writetothem.

2. Matt Wardman drew attention to the credibility of the MySociety brand, the use of existing networks and pushing with the grain of public opinion:

"A couple of thoughts as to other key aspects that I think you underemphasise.

Use of existing platforms and profiles. Applies to MySociety, Stephen Fry and also those who posted in advance of MS last week (Guardian, Guido).

I'd suggest the key MS contribution was as a respected non-partisan brand with a track record making a stand on a broadly non-partisan issue. Imho that cleared the way for it to become a mainstream issue.

MS legitimised a specialised groundswell and made it a general groundswell that already and triggered others to get involved who would not from the previous posters"

MySociety and MPs expenses: how they won

MySociety is claiming victory in their battle over the transparency of Members' of Parliament expenses - rightly so. The Prime Minister declared at PMQs today that the motion to conceal the expenses would be withdrawn - when only hours later journalists thought that Labour MPs would have a three line whip to vote in favour. The campaign took about five days.

What the campaign involved

The campaign had all the essential ingredients of an online campaign: a blog, an email group, a Facebook group, a shared database, easy individual action backed up by some entrepreneurial moves on Twitter and on their own sites. Each of these elements were successful in their own right.

The blog was successful with 1829 links to it and 53 comments - even though there was 2 days before the second comment was posted

The email group was lively - I think I counted more than 100 emails over the last five days, focussed on producing and logging activity but allowing people to post ideas as well.

The Facebook Group recruited over 7000 members

The coverage on Twitter reached over 50,000 people - thanks in part to Stephen Fry's intervention and the core message was re-tweated over 25 times.

Why it was successful

1. There was a clear community of people, used to taking action
The MySociety email group is significant. I've no idea of its size but know that there are more than 30 active contributors and many people on the list are used to taking action as a result of emails they receive.

2. The campaign was timely, with a clear call to action
The campaign only had 6 days to succeed so there was little opportunity for possible activists to think 'I will do that next week'.

3. The call to action was clear
MySociety repeated the three point call to action in all of the communication. It was clear and easy to achieve.

4. It was high profile but only dependent on their own profile
That's a clumsy way of saying that the message reached thousands of people - thanks also to the popup boxes on the MySociety websites. But that it didn't depend on others (like newspapers) to spread the story. They could do it themselves.

5. They knew their audience - and knew who to motivate
The audience was clear - MPs - and there is already an established community of interest in political blogs that could help spread the message. This would have been hard to build from scratch and impossible in just 6 days. Using well established blogs like Iain Dale's certainly got the message out to a wider group of people.

I hope that people more closely involved in the campaign will also record their thoughts (and we'll keep an index of those) so that critical lessons can be learned by others who also want to run successful campaigns online.

Fixmystreet - it works!

I always thought that Fixmystreet was a great idea. I think I was one of an early group to use it BITD when it was called something else. But I worried that the inflexibility of local authorities would mean that it would only work where the council was flexible enough to handle enquiries that came outside of their own systems.

I recently reported a problem in my local community and had a call back from my council within 24 hours. The problem was sorted by the end of the week. My council, Hackney, isn't famed for being at the forefront of public service innovation.

The site is so great because it provides a complete solution to an individual, without needing mass participation to succeed. That is, if Fixmystreet was like Digg, I would need to make thousands of people support my complaint for the local authority to notice it. That would be undemocratic, particularly in areas of low broadband penetration. Instead, Fixmystreet works beautifully. Give it a go next time you're unhappy with your local council and tell someone else about it.

Why is this so important? Because:

• so many new startups are dependent on building a mass audience to deliver a good user experience. And that's getting harder and more costly.
• it shows the internet doesn't have to be trendy or catchy or need marketing expertise to deliver social benefits. In short, value over volume
• the many to one relationship of Fixmystreet means that lots of people can put pressure on a single organisation which (may) have to change or act accordingly - whereas a many to one relationship (think, local petition) would be a classic excuse for inertia.