Stephen Hale

Blog Action Day - climate change

I'm handing over my blog today to Charlotte Slayford, our digital campaign manager for climate change:

Today is blog action day. The theme? Climate change. As the digital campaign manager for climate change, there is no better time for me to share with Stephen’s blog readers what the Foreign Office is doing online for climate change. 

I’m responsible for bringing the offline (climate events, debates and issues) online. I help the Climate Change and Energy Group meet their climate change objectives online. I also work on the cross Whitehall campaign website Act on Copenhagen. 

On 26 June the Prime Minister launched the Road to Copenhagen manifesto. The same day we launched Act on Copenhagen. The site is run by the Road to Copenhagen teams from the Foreign Office, Department of Energy and Climate Change and Department of International Development. Its purpose? 

1) Profile the UK’s position on climate change

2) Follow the developments, positive or negative, towards negotiations

3) Explain how climate change is affecting the world domestically and internationally and offer examples of how things can change.

Because climate change is such a huge priority for every government department, it made sense for the information to be in one place. This is sounding a little like the London Summit I hear you thinking? Yes, we were influenced by the cross Whitehall collaborative working approach we took for the London Summit. 

But this campaign is very different. We’re not hosting the event. We are not the central point of the debate. Cop15 the host of the United Nations Climate Conference, is the ‘official’ website. We have a responsibility to provide an authoritative account of what the UK government is doing. We also sign post relevant debates and feature non government officials (in fact the more so the better!). We decided not to set up unique social media channels – instead we’d utilise all our existing followers, friends and subscribers through the DECC, DfID, FCO & No10 YouTube and Twitter channels. Twitter is one of our biggest referrers to the site.

The NGOs including TckTckTck, 10:10 and Oxfam do a fantastic job of lobbying individuals to take action.  Act on CO2 lets individuals know how they can personally take action to reduce their carbon footprint. Act on Copenhagen is the place to get the official policy in a digestible way. And we encourage people to show their support for an ambitious, effective and fair deal at Copenhagen with our back the bid campaign.

One of the lessons learned from the London Summit was to involve our international staff more in the actual campaign. Act on Copenhagen has been built so that our web editors around the world can update content – particularly useful for our global action channel.  

Some personal highlights:

1. Live streaming the joint press conference from David Miliband and Ed Miliband Copenhagen in the balance. It was pretty surreal to be present and know that it was simultaneously being live streamed to viewers across the world.

2. Ed Miliband dropping in to our web planning meeting to find out what we were cooking up.

3.Running a webchat with David Miliband for Guardian Online. It was fascinating to be in the room with the Foreign Secretary as he answered questions posted to him. It was a low key, low cost set up – but highly effective and attracted 5,000 unique views on the day.

4. Getting the PM to blog for Blog Action Day!

If you too are blogging for Blog Action Day, please pledge your support. You can keep up to date with activities as we head towards Copenhagen by adding us to your feeds.

Posted at 12:40 15 October 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]

eDemocracy and eEngagement

In my job I'm sometimes surprised by the expectation that I should persuade people to take web engagement seriously.

I think the argument is already won - you really don't have to look too hard to find examples of the web being used to engage, influence, and change lives around the world.

The Obama campaign showed the web playing a crucial role in the election of the most powerful man in the world. Videos delivered via the internet are being used to radicalise young men in Afghanistan. And - in our daily lives - social media is profoundly changing the way we communicate with each other. This is mainstream media now.

I was at the eDemocracy conference yesterday as part of a panel talking about government web engagement. The conference is a worthy exercise, bringing together practitioners to share ideas and experiences and learn from each other. We should spend more time talking about how - rather then whether- we do this kind of work.

Posted at 10:26 12 November 2008 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[2]