Some Metrics, Budgets, And Thoughts On My Micro Campaign Against The Immigration And Refugee Ban, Executive Order #13769

Throughout life I've found myself in more autonomous groups and roles. It's one of the reasons why I started blogging. It was a way for me to take some action and do something, but also on my own terms, on my own schedule. I love the people and groups I've gotten to know, some of the shared experiences, and I have so much respect for people that can organize on the ground level, and there are just so many ways to lend a voice, to take action, to add to the discourse.

With the immigrant and travel ban order, in addition to blogging about it I wanted to do something else, and I decided on a two-pronged approach - an informational site where some of the news and highlights of what was going on could be centralized for people searching or wanting to know about it, and displaying opposition to the order to online eyes via a campaign - in some ways (not quite though) like me waving my sign and marching in protest, and in other ways, like a targeted political add, which ended up being a Facebook campaign.

For the site, it was fairly easy, I put it up myself (Microsoft Cloud) - and I'm not a design wizard so there are some imperfections - but with so many free hosting services, or publishing services - getting a site out is fairly inexpensive. At first I was thinking about having people share their stories, do a tracker type piece, but decided to keep it informational because I didn't want to take on too much (from a moderation standpoint which would have to happen), as well thought there were better places people could perform that function. I built a quick news service to grab data and put it into a data store on keywords so it would be easier to update and less manual, and may put some other tools into it later. But for now I'm satisfied with the outcome - it's another added resource in opposition that can be managed now without too much effort.

For the FB campaign, when I think about - online campaigns (no matter where they are) are like being able to buy ads on TV in some ways - but at a price far less than even traditional print and really do help to level the playing field from an access standpoint. For this campaign I decided on around a $30 budget to place ads and tags for wearenotorder13769.org for a little over two days. My goal wasn't in engagement or click thrus but simply about putting a small message of opposition in front of the eyes of people and reaching as many as I could with my budget. Over the course of the campaign around 12,000 people were reached (multiple times) with what I'd call medium filtering on the audience being targeted (I didn't go too general, but wasn't extremely targeted either).

For a newspaper ad - maybe I pay around $300-$400 for a 1/8 black and white ad for 15,000 eyeballs. For color - maybe double. And maybe I shouldn't compare the two - but I will anyway. For that price where I can target a specific audience, get a color add, some copy, and be able to track impressions, reach, click-throughs, etc. - it's a win.

I didn't care about engagement at the outset from a goal standpoint - but my CTR was .26% which is decent with around 31 click-throughs on the ad. It doesn't sound like a lot and compared to a number like 12,000 it isn't - but what's the value of those clicks, someone finding something more out about the ban, or passing that information on to a friend, or just planting another seed of resistance into their mind? It's different from commerce conversion and closing rates, but if each customer was worth $50 it would at least be profitable even if only one person would end up purchasing. But the others would still know the brand and maybe think about going there.

There's no brand and no customers in this case, but there is a message and I think at least from my vantage point, I'm satisfied with the way it's been delivered. I think on a micro/mini level we can create these campaigns, or forces of opposition, and when combined, I think they do speak to the power that we all have as individuals within a much larger collective.

Small ripples.