Social Networking Primer for Poverty Law Advocates and Organizations
Kate and I published a primer on social networking for poverty law advocates and organizations in the July-August 2009 issue of Clearinghouse Review Journal of Poverty Law and Policy. Here’s the abstract:
The emergence of social network websites as some of the most highly visited on the Internet presents an opportunity for poverty law advocates to leverage these networks to maximize the impact of advocacy work. To accomplish this, advocates must first understand what these networks are (including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), how they function, and what they offer to support communication and collaboration around advocacy. Guidance and concrete examples of how individuals and organizations can most productively engage with social networks assist advocates in making the most of these tools.
Our thanks to Jason Vail, Ilze Hirsh, and Michelle Nicolet at the Shriver Center as well as Liz Keith and Pam Weisz at Pro Bono Net for their suggestions and support. We’re also working on putting together a webinar on social networking with the Shriver Center in October. More details on that to come. In the meantime, please share your thoughts about the article in the comments. We’d love to hear your feedback. –M&K
What about using these sites to foster communication among people who are facing similar legal problems?
While this raises many complex issues, including privacy, privilege, etc. it seems to me to have the potential to be very transformative.
Well done! I will be showing this to our Pro Bono & Legal Aid Committee soon.
One small point is the use of "post-one-publish-multiple" facilities such as http://twitterfeed.com to simplify the work of maintaining presence on multiple social networking facilities.
Richard -
A little bit of this is starting already without poverty law advocates being involved. It is interesting to watch, but it's debatable how productive it is at this stage, which makes me think that advocates or volunteers could play a vital role in facilitating.
The situations that I've found happen most often:
*A person asks for a referral to a pro bono attorney.
*A person praises or criticizes legal aid.
*A person reports that he or she has a legal problem.
*A person announces that he or she is going to call legal aid or that he or she is nervous about going to see legal aid.
*Private attorneys are providing legal information, through blog posts, tweets, and so on.
In each of these situations, people may respond with information or suggestions of variable worth and from a variety of motives.
I think that a simple first step would be to just refer people on Twitter and LinkedIn who mention needing legal assistance to LawHelp.org. Most people don't know about it, and nationally, it would take a couple of hours a week to respond to these requests. This might be a good volunteer opportunity. From that and watching the conversations, I think that we could learn more about using the tools to foster more productive substantive changes and be able to figure out the right second step. - K
Randy -
I'm glad that it will be helpful. You make an excellent point about the tools that help you post once and publish to multiple sources. (Thank you!) Matthew and I will try to include information about those tool in the webinar. - K