Social media sites are being lauded as enablers and conduits of social change in revolutions across north Africa. But the picture in the US has been slightly different – following the success the 2008 Obama Campaign’s online efforts, there has been some backlash about the real impact of social networking sites for causes. Indeed, the term “slacktivism” has been coined – web-users turn their profile pictures green on Facebook and Twitter, but don’t actually do anything to support Iranian revolutionaries; they’ll “like” their friend’s status about raising money for a charity, but not actually give, and so on.
But this weekend’s Planned Parenthood campaign indicates that causes may just need to find a direct way for web-users to get involved in order to capitalize on interest. Planned Parenthood has circulated a link on Facebook for users to sign a letter to their representatives and senators in protest to the Pence Amendment.

On Tuesday, February 22nd, a second campaign launched, encouraging Facebook users to discover whether their Representative voted for or against the legislation and to take action based on that information.

As a result, the market share of visits to PlannedParenthood.org (ppaction.org is aggregated into plannedparenthood.org) increased 150% on Tuesday February 22nd as compared to the prior Tuesday.

Much of this growth can be attributed to Facebook traffic, where referrals increased to represent a high of 39% on Sunday, February 20, 2011, up from 14% on Sunday of the previous week. The campaign was very good for driving new traffic to Planned Parenthood to help awareness, for example, on Sunday, February 20th; the share of new visitors to the Planned Parenthood website from Facebook was 96%.

Perhaps “slacktivism” can be counteracted by easy and direct calls for action – giving web-users the opportunity to put the “activism” into “slacktivism”.
Thanks to Margot Bonner, an Analyst with our Custom Data & Analytics team for today’s Planned Parenthood campaign analysis.