Tactics

Whether you are an individual rights advocate, a group or an organisation, this section will take you through the steps involved in creating a strategic plan for making any kind of media as part of a campaign or project. Before beginning, there are three key questions that you need to ask:

1. Do you need to make media to achieve your goals?

Although political cartoons have offered a powerful form of social satire and comment for centuries,the use of comics as a campaigning tool for grassroots organisations is a more recent success story. This section outlines how and why you might use grassroots comics, how to get started, and some ideas for distributing them.

Guerrilla marketing means making unconventional interventions in public or commercial space in order to spread your message to an extended audience. This section will present you with basic principles and provide you with some ideas and examples to consider when using this medium.

Animation can be a great tool for advocacy communications, bringing life to your story and presenting your ideas quickly and attractively. Animation is a huge subject; this guide only touches on the ways in which very basic computer animations can support your advocacy campaign – it does not cover sophisticated flash or computer animation.

The information in this section and the print tools provided on this website (Click here for more information) will help you plan, develop and publish a large-scale print project, such as a newspaper or book, or a one-off or smaller-scale project such as a poster, factsheet or brochure.

Putting together recordings of sounds to make audio content is no longer the preserve of experts. The use of audio for campaigning and advocacy is a growing phenomenon. In this chapter you will find out how anyone with a plan, an idea, some basic equipment and a little background knowledge can create and distribute engaging and good quality audio. This section will enable you to create audio content that is powerful and relevant, and to distribute it to audiences using radio, CDs, public spaces and the internet.

Once you've made your video you need to make sure it's seen. This section will take you through how to prepare your video for both online and offline distribution, how to license it, where you can publish it and how to distribute your video online and offline.

Production and distribution need to work hand-in-hand. The type of film you make, its length, subject matter and style, will influence how you distribute it. The type of distribution you are planning can also affect how you make your film.

Once you've made your video you need to get it out there and make sure it's seen. This section will take you through how to prepare your video for both online and offline distribution, how to license it, where you
can publish it and how to distribute your video online and offline.

Some of the most powerful advocacy videos that have been created in recent years have been made without a camera. Short three and four minute videos such as those made by Avaaz have reached enormous audiences around the globe through dissemination on video sharing sites such as Youtube.

WITNESS is a USA-based NGO that uses video and online technologies to expose human rights violations. WITNESS aims to empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, public engagement and policy change. Some of the information in this chapter is based on the work and experiences of WITNESS. Its Video Action Plan maps out a series of questions to consider when you are developing a plan to integrate video into human rights advocacy.

There are now many possibilities for creating and sharing multimedia content from your mobile phone to communicate and share information with people. This content can be shared phone-to-phone or via the internet

Now that you've put your content out there and told people about it they need to be able to find it and play it. In some cases this might simply be a matter of watching it embedded in your website, but they could also subscribe to your video podcast feed or use free software like VLC to play the videos downloaded. Elsewhere in this toolkit you can find out how to subscribe to video podcasts using Miro.

Video is a powerful tool for rights campaigning, but it can also introduce serious risks. Before embarking on a sensitive video project, you must consider your own safety and that of your subject/s and sources. You must be alert to potential hazards and think hard about how to minimise risks to everyone involved.

A Content Management System (CMS) is a piece of software that enables you to create dynamic websites. This can be useful if you want to create a community or be able to update your site easily. There are many different CMS systems available; we've chosen three which you can use for setting up a dynamic websites; SPIP, Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal.