Up and at them

• Tom Dawkins and Josh Mehlman
• 19 November 2008
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Photo credit: David Madden (l) and Jeremy Heimans

The 2004 United States Presidential election campaign saw the first widespread use of internet-based political activism. The most prominent and successful example was moveon.org, a progressive advocacy group founded by two technology industry entrepreneurs. Although moveon.org was not ultimately successful –
Democrat candidate John Kerry lost – it demonstrated the power of the web and email to acquire members, rally support and mobilise people to take action.

Witnessing this success, Australian activists Jeremy Heimans and David Madden started local activists site GetUp! in August 2005. By the November 2007 Federal election, it had signed up more than 230,000 members.

GetUp! executed a three-pronged strategy:

• Raising awareness of ‘progressive’ issues such as climate change, the war in Iraq, children in detention centres, David Hicks’s imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay, equality for same-sex couples, Indigenous rights and industrial relations
• Encouraging young people to enrol to vote and opposing Howard Government legislation that made it harder to enrol
• Providing tools and educational materials showing people how to vote based on issues they cared about.

Many of the country’s most respected political commentators acknowledged the success of this strategy and GetUp!’s influence in the 2007 election.

The changing role of activism

Heimans worked at international consulting firm McKinsey and Company and studied at Sydney University, the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and Oxford University. While working on a PhD in international relations at Oxford, Heimans’s ideas about political activism began to change.

“When I was younger I thought about change in very conventional, modernist terms, that you went through institutions and organisation at the global level, the United Nations or the World Bank or the government,” he says. “I still think those institutions are important, but my conception of how change happens has definitely become much less institutional, less based on formal authority and more on the ways in which you can change people at the level of ideas and building movements.

“When I was looking at the impact of the internet, I saw a huge opportunity to make progress on the issues I cared about this way, through mass mobilisation.

“I was working on a PhD and thinking about the same questions that I’m still concerned about today, but from a very academic perspective. I realised that I wanted to be engaged in mobilising people around those issues and trying to achieve change that way.”

Witnessing the success of moveon.org in the United States, Heimans and Madden saw an opportunity to do something similar in Australia.

“Australia in late 2004 was a very bad dark period for progressives,” Heimans explains. “John Howard had been in power for nine years. People who cared about issues like refugees or Aboriginal reconciliation or civil liberties [felt that] Howard had done enormous damage.

“People were despondent and didn’t have much faith in the Australian Labor Party either. We saw an opportunity to bypass all those calcified institutions and create power and influence that could help change the country in a much more organic way.”

Getting up to speed locally

However, despite the prominent role online activism had played in the United States elections, introducing the concept to Australia proved difficult.

“No-one had heard of online activism in Australia and there was a lot of fear, even among natural allies, about how this might change things,” says Heimans.

The major political parties had difficulty deciding whether to ignore, support or stick the boot into the idea. In the end, they did all three to varying degrees.

“GetUp! is a fly in the ointment of the party system,” says Heimans. “It’s a way to keep people accountable and a way that real people can advocate for progressives policies without the party system.”

Heimans says one of GetUp!’s great achievements was engaging a new constituency who were interested in social issues but not involved in the political process.

“They have gone through the experience of being incredibly empowered, and that that has gone across age ranges, across the community, across geography,” he says. “I’m proud of the stuff that GetUp! has done that’s cultural, not just political, like the Aboriginal reconciliation.”

Lessons learned

Forming and running the group was a learning experience for Heimans and the rest of GetUp!’s staff.

“We were surprised by how viciously we were attacked by the Howard Government and parts of the media,” he explains. “If we had our time again, we would have probably been more aware of how new this concept was.

“I don’t know how much of this was cynicism or genuine concern, but it took a long time for people to understand that this was not a party, it was not a stalking horse for a party, but it was a progressive movement. We wanted to pull together all progressives. That is what allowed us to work with everyone from Malcolm Fraser to Bill Shorten to Bob Brown.

“I think the other lesson is to trust your membership. You can’t force the development of an online community; growth has to happen organically.

“Some of the things GetUp! has done haven’t pleased everybody, but they have still been the right decisions. GetUp! has been very careful about who it partnered with to maintain its nimbleness and independence. We haven’t formed big, general coalitions we’ve only collaborated on specific campaigns. But I know there are some people in the non-government organisation community who wish GetUp! would act more like other NGOs.”

Heimans has parlayed the skills and lessons learned into a new venture, avaaz.org, an international online activist group which claims to have acquired more than 3.5 million members since its launch in January 2007.

The lessons Heimans learned from harnessing disengaged people into a potent political force apply to anyone looking to use the web and social communities to develop a committed and active audience.

“You have to let a thousand flowers bloom to some extent,” he says. “You learn to accept that that’s where the real power of a community is. So when you have an impulse to be controlling, you have to really let that go.”