‘Save our Scorpions’ – a successful viral campaign

A few weeks ago, I wrote about citizen activism 2.0, highlighting two civil society initiatives taking their campaigns online – one on Eskom load shedding and the other on the Scorpions. I’ve already written about our new load shedding blog, but I wanted to provide an update on how we’ve joined the conversation about the dissolution of the Scorpions (rather than just starting our own).

The online petition to stop the government from disbanding the Scorpions was started by self-proclaimed concerned citizen Hugh Glenister.

His petition details included a quote from DA leader Helen Zille, which is great for the DA. However, after three weeks, he only had a handful of signatures. We had been in touch with Hugh to thank him for using the quote, and we then approached him to assist with marketing it, and last week we introduced a viral email into our network of contacts.

Have you tried Google Docs?

A Report from the FNF’s International Academy for Leadership (IAF) in Gummersbach:

I was really blown away by some of my classmates in our New Media workshop this week. They put together some very funny ads for Google Docs as part of their group assignment to report back to the class on this topic.