Using digital media for campaigning: grassroots groups share their experiences

The Blue Club is an Indian grassroots media organization that
strives to ”pass the mic and amplify the voices of the suppressed who have been
deliberately silenced and muffled for generations.” NAFSO is one of the five social movements members of
ESCR-Net who are participating in community-led research on the impacts of
corporate actors on human rights and the environment. The initiative, called ‘Reclaiming our stories’, seeks to ensure communities have the
data they need to influence local decision-making and articulate their own
vision for the future.

NAFSO’s
national convener, Herman Kumara, and Priyadarshini Palaniswamy, Blue Club’s
Director, reflect on how the workshop has strengthened their work.

 Herman,
why did NAFSO want to strengthen their capacity on digital media?

NAFSO
is a social movement that tries to address people’s issues through advocacy
campaigns on a wide range of social development issues. We need support from
the public and for that we need to raise awareness in various ways. Media is
one of them. In the past when we attempted to raise awareness through
mainstream media but this was not very successful. Only a few mainstream media
stations responded positively, and their interest was limited to few events and
actions. When we tried to raise issues related to neoliberal economic policies
most of the media stations –which are owned by capitalists groups–did not
support our efforts as they are more attached to capital rather than people’s
issues and grievances. Hence we wanted to use an alternative media which we can
handle, operate, and easily access.

We
believe that social media is very appropriate for us as it can be handled
directly by our activists and members. We felt that forming our own media team
and developing a media strategy would strengthen our campaigns and visualize
the people’s issues. Since NAFSO has a vibrant youth membership who already
make use of social media – such as Whatsapp, Facebook, Youtube and in some
cases Instagram- we decided to train them on using digital and social media to
highlight people’s issues and conduct advocacy campaigns.

Herman,
what excited or encouraged you about the work of the Blue Club?

Blue
Club team was friendly, very close to the team members of NAFSO, very
generously sharing knowledge, techniques, and tips. On top of this, their staff
speaks Tamil which is the mother tongue of most of the participants. This
encouraged deeper participation and gave a better understanding about digital
campaigns.

Priya, What encouraged you to
share your experience on media campaigning with NAFSO?

We were introduced to NAFSO by Francesca Feruglio,
Coordinator of ESCR-Net’s Monitoring Working Group. We were immediately
impressed by their grassroots work as a national organization with their
presence all over Sri Lanka. We have so far done many capacity building
programs with small emerging organizations with lesser regional presence. As a
young organization ourselves we wanted to see what it takes for an organization
to build and grow for 25 years (five times our organization’s age!). But the
most important thing we wanted to get out of this workshop was to increase the
curiosity of participants about media tools and develop a thirst in them to
keep engaging with media even after the end of the workshop.

Priya, what were the most
important lessons or skills that you were hoping to share?

One of the primary skills that we wanted to share
with the participants was to think visually. We achieved this by developing
their story-telling skills, hands-on experience with applications, by creating
an  interactive environment, engaging in team work using exercises based
on theatre
workshops etc.

Secondly, we wanted to introduce multimedia content
creation using the Canva application which is a free versatile
software used by many grassroots (and big) organizations. We wanted to teach
creative tools to modify and personalize the content instead of relying on
templates in the application.

Likewise, we wanted to develop video-making skills and
made all participants produce videos in teams using simple techniques and just
their mobile phones. We also shared video editing skills using Filmora and In shot applications.