Page 5 - Tina Morlock - How to Avoid Slacktivism

Fig. 1: Lewis, Gray, Meierhenrich share the number of members and donations received between 2007 and 2010 (screenshot).

You can see clearly from the above graph that despite having over one million individuals in
their organization, they received less than $100,000 in donations.

Our analysis reveals an inverse relationship between broad online social movement
mobilization and deep participation. Despite the chorus of voices touting the
transformative (and even democratizing) potential of social media, when it came to
recruiting for – and donating to – the Save Darfur cause, the most popular social
network site in the world appears to have hardly mattered. (Lewis et al. 6)

But, what’s important to realize is that these researchers looked at Facebook and only Facebook.
They stated in the article that their results here are affected by the fact that they were only
looking at one small piece of the picture.

Results of this analysis should be kept in perspective. The exceptional precision of our
behavioral data (on recruitment relations, donation amounts, and accompanying time
stamps for both) was offset by the complete absence of demographic information on
Cause participants or even their geographic locations. Importantly, our findings also
pertain to only a single movement using a single platform. (Lewis et al. 5-6)
And, from my perspective, another thing they didn’t look at is what tools these activists used for
recruitment, donations, and other participation. Were they using everything at their fingertips?