This is a guest post for my friend, Jas­min Tra­gas, at Won­der­webby. I’m pub­lish­ing it here for my records and for those of you that might like to read it and don’t know Jas.

The abil­ity to acti­vate sup­port by those in need or those want­ing to help out those in need has never been more avail­able than it is today. The con­nected cause move­ment is richly empow­ered by the Inter­net — from microlend­ing to indi­vid­u­als through sites such as Kiva to grand scale move­ments such as Product(RED), ONE and Earth Hour.

The most pop­u­lar appli­ca­tion on Face­book, the online com­mu­nity of over 100M peo­ple, is Causes — an appli­ca­tion to con­nect peo­ple to move­ments for change of all sorts and allow them to declare their affil­i­a­tion. Indeed, I have sev­eral causes I iden­tify with on my pro­file (the Causes app is proudly front and cen­ter on my pro­file), have declared them and donated to.

There are sev­eral parts to the online activism move­ment (if such a diverse col­lec­tion of activ­ity could be called a move­ment), and while not every online cause is the same, broadly, they fall into three categories:

  • advo­cacy — the rais­ing of aware­ness for a cause
  • acti­va­tion — the prompt­ing of and cre­ation of activ­ity around a cause in those inter­ested, and
  • action — the ongo­ing and fol­lowup activ­ity in rela­tion to a cause

In many cases, causes have ele­ments of all three. One need only look at the incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful move­ment to elect the new US Pres­i­dent, Barack Obama, to see just how pow­er­ful each of these com­po­nents can be. Well exe­cuted, an online cam­paign can move those inter­ested in it through each of the three phases of involvement.

For those need­ing or want­ing sup­port for their cause, whether it’s a micro loan to start a small busi­ness or some­thing much big­ger, the hyper­con­nected world offers amaz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to seek out inter­ested like minds, to gather momen­tum around a cause and to ulti­mately act on its pur­pose. Find­ing a com­mu­nity of peo­ple who share your con­cerns, col­lab­o­rat­ing with them and engag­ing in a mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tion around your cause is incred­i­bly easy.

Let’s take a quick look at one option — microphil­an­thropy.

At its sim­plest, the emer­gence of microphil­an­thropy — phil­an­thropic activ­ity on a scale of small amounts — has made engag­ing with online causes almost triv­ial. Those of us who are in a posi­tion to engage with a cause we believe in can now do so in a way that was pre­vi­ously only truly avail­able to the very wealthy. Sheer weight of num­bers — poten­tially hun­dreds or thou­sands giv­ing a lit­tle — means that the gath­er­ing com­mu­nity can pro­vide just as valu­able input as a Buf­fet or a Gates, with each giv­ing just tens or perhps a few hun­dred dollars.

For those of us, largely in the West, who would like to engage more deeply in a socially respon­si­ble way either per­son­ally or on behalf of our busi­nesses, the oppor­tu­ni­ties are equally sig­nif­i­cant and many. A sim­ple Google search offers up sev­eral poss­bil­i­ties and a wealth of sup­port­ing infor­ma­tion. Kiva is a per­fect exam­ple, and one to which I’ve con­tributed. There are many more options.

Causewired cover imageJust recently, US-​​based author and activist, Tom Wat­son pub­lished CauseWired: Plug­ging In, Get­ting Involved, Chang­ing the World. It’s a well-​​considered look at online cause activism, exam­in­ing joiner cul­ture, the step beyond to action and a fairly sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of online move­ments and how they came into being and gained trac­tion. It’s well worth your time to read it if online activism is of any inter­est to you.