The Business of Advocacy

Abstract

Online advocacy is big business. Online advocacy organisations need to structure themselves along business lines for fund raising, and to strategically utilise their online and traditional resources to achieve their goals. The growing influence of civil society organisations has been fuelled largely by an increase and ubiquity of emerging technologies. There is no evidence of a detailed analysis of social media led advocacy campaigns in the literature. The global environmental justice organisation, Greenpeace is used as a case study. The rise of online social media has provided the organisation with an alternative to traditional mass media. There have been some notable successes for Greenpeace. The most recent of which has been its efforts to halt the drilling for oil in the Arctic. Equally the Greenpeace campaigns have sometimes provoked the public ire, for example in their miscalculation of the fallout over their recent Nazca plains intrusion. It is clear that to attain any level of success the organisation needs to structure itself on sound business principles and strategies.