Transcript

Planned Parenthood and the Web

March 29, 2012

0:00:0

MICHA SIFRY: This is Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Media. And we are here for our on-going series of Personal Democracy Plus conference calls with movers, shakers, thinkers, doers, innovators at the place where technology and politics collide.

And today we’re going to be joined by two excellent friends of Personal Democracy, Deanna Zandt, a Media Technologist and long-time troublemaker in the sphere; and Heather Holdridge, the Digital Director for Planned Parenthood.

And what we’re going to be talking about today with Heather and Deanna is this growing engagement of issues related to women’s health and online activism colliding with each other. There’s clearly been in the last few years a really gigantic internet wave of new participation across all kinds of issues so we shouldn’t be surprised to see that same kind of wave of mass participation hitting the arena of women’s health.

And I think as we all know, it is most recently crested in this kind of amazing four-day explosion of participation around the decision of the Komen Foundation to withdraw its support of Planned Parenthood and then this really very widespread response led partly by the organization and also party by activists like Deanna, free agents who feel viscerally this issue is something that matters to them.

So, we’re going to really be looking at this as a great case study both of how a big, national organization like Planned Parenthood with years and years of history has adapted and is working in this new web space, and also how this kind of rising wave of popular participation online is playing out, in particular as led by activists working on women’s health issues.

So, without any further ado, I thought I would start really by asking Heather tell us a bit about your role at Planned Parenthood and a bit of the background, the history of the organization in terms of working with new media and then bring us closer to the present where obviously this is an absolutely vital piece of the organization’s infrastructure.

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Sure, well first of all thank you very much for having me, Micah. I’m thrilled to be here with you and participating in this and of course it’s great to have my fellow upstater, Deanna with me on this. I don’t get the trouble-making title so easily.

So, you know, Planned Parenthood -- and I’m relatively new to the organization -- but the organization has been online and engaging supporters in this space for almost 10 years, if you look at the beginning of what we call PTOL, or Planned Parenthood Online Program, and that started with the insistent -- in a structured and meaningful way as opposed to just having what we all had in the late 90s, which was essentially brochure-ware, right?

So, there was sort of a placeholder or store front or whatever you want to call it on the internet. But Planned Parenthood has had a sort of thoughtful structure and strategy for the better part of 10 years, and that includes not just the Federation, so PlannedParenthood.org and PTFA, whom I work for, but also at the affiliate level because we have 82 affiliates nationwide who represent and work for our health centers and serve our patient base.

So, we are -- we serve about 3 million patients annually and our supporter base has now grown to over 6 million. And to talk a little bit about the trajectory of that, I’ll just go back and say that I think Planned Parenthood’s history is very similar to a lot of other non-profits, larger non-profits, which is to say that there was a web space that over time we figured out how to make more interactive and engaging as the user experience has changed and become more interactive.

Planned Parenthood has had a strong email presence. And I would say that email presence has historically been the anchor and the main way in which the organization has communicated with our supporters over the years whether it be an advocacy context or to educate them about women’s health issues as they arose in the public arena.

In the past five years -- well, going on six actually -- in the past five or six years with Cecile Richards as our President, she has become the voice of our organization online, or she has been I should say, the voice of our organization online. And we have moved into the social spaces, into Facebook, into Twitter, into YouTube over the course of the years.

But I would say that until last year, Planned Parenthood wasn’t engaging in an active strategy so much as making sure they were in these channels were people were. We knew people on Facebook, we knew people on Twitter and we were trying to engage with folks. But for existential huge fight that organization was engaged in this time last year, we’re coming up on a year on this, the fight over the de-funding of the organization caused us to re-think and fundamentally change how we approach the online space.

And so where that -- we of course use the power and the strength of our supporters to help win that fight among many other organizations who are also backing us on that. It also opened the organization’s eyes to the power of social media in terms of the ability of our supporters and the interest and passion of our supporters in speaking out on our behalf and doing it in their own voice.

And I know we’ll talk about this in greater depth as we move through this conversation today, and Deanna’s work on Komen is a perfect example of this, that we represent our organization and what our strategic needs are and our voice, but we have a tremendous body and breadth of support of people who want to talk about their support of us and on our issues in their own voice. And we’re learning, it’s an on-going, day-to-day process, but we’re learning how to harness that.

So, my work here in the past several months has been to sort of get my arms around what are supporter base looks like and to think about how we best reflect the community back in ways that help us achieve our advocacy goals and our political goals as those exist. And so that for me has been primarily in the social space and I’ve also been working very heavily on a project called Women Are Watching, which is essentially our brand for all of our political and electoral work this year. And we’ve launched a separate website and program around that that I’m happy to talk more about later.

MICHA SIFRY: Women are Watching. I’m glad you bring us back a year to the fight over the Pentz Amendment and the effort to cut off the funding that Planned Parenthood gets from the federal government because of the affect it had in terms of galvanizing this sort of latent layer of grassroots support.

And so one question I have for you before we turn to Deanna is how much of your work, apart from these dealings with what we’re going to get into, which is what’s the toolkit and strategy around a hot media moment like what happened with Komen.

But on a day-to-day basis, you know, if you’re talking about a support base now that’s really grown dramatically to something like 6 million people, what does that mean on a daily basis? What do you have to do in terms of listening and interacting with folks? How much of it is being in listening mode? How much of it is stirring the pot, kind of pumping out information and how do you prioritize?

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: That’s a great question and as I’m sure many people on the call know who do this work themselves, we have someone who’s dedicated full time -- actually, if you expand it beyond advocacy, my focus is on advocacy and political, but we have actually a Digital Health Content Team, that’s actually one of the changes that we’ve made internally, which is to recognize that there is an opportunity and there’s a need for us to speak with multiple voices depending on our different audiences.

And so there’s a Digital Health Team that includes someone whose job literally all day long is to be listening for people who have questions about sexual health, reproductive health in an educational context. And then I have someone on my team whose job is to be listening and paying attention to what’s happening in the social space.

And to answer your question directly, Micah, around how do you prioritize that, as everybody knows it’s a very real time and fast paced world that we currently exist in and what we try and do is ensure that early in the day that we are able to sort of put out our own marker in terms of whatever our particular communication method or strategy or priority for the day might be.

But as I led to earlier, we also recognize the power and frankly the necessity of reflecting our community back, so that people who do follow our Twitter feed, which is PPACT, P-P-A-C-T, if you do follow our Twitter feed you’ll see that multiple times a day, we’re re-Tweeting or modify Tweeting what some of our supporters say because we want them to know that we’re paying attention to them, and that their voice matters in this broader work that we’re doing.

MICHA SIFRY: And then at the same time -- so, just expand one more on that point about the day. So, you really think like a media organization also in the idea that every day you’ve got to be either proactively introducing something into the stream, or being ready to react; that there really is a kind of 24/7 quality in terms of managing your presence online that you cannot stop and relax.

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Yes, you know what? Unfortunately I think that’s the world that we live in and one thing I will say that has changed since my arrival and staff whom I work with might not love me for this, but we -- and I frankly don’t know, maybe other people are (inaudible) to this -- we post consistently on social over the weekends. To be clear, the volume isn’t the same because there’s not as much happening and Congress isn’t at work on the weekends, other people are sort of taking it slower.

But the news doesn’t stop, and the opportunities to engage on the issues that matter to us and that matter to our supporters don’t stop. So, we post at least once a day to all of our major social media channels because people are still online, and what I have found even though it loosely tracks one of the most popular times for people engaging whatnot on social media is that people are commenting, liking, sharing, re-Tweeting our stuff on the weekends if what we’re putting in front of them has value to them.

MICHA SIFRY: Do you have metrics that you’re trying to reach in terms of growing the base or deepening the level of engagement? Again, apart from the sort of rapid response, you know, deal with crises kind of mode, are you also working on general growth targets?

I mean obviously you’ve probably exceeded them. It doesn’t hurt to be in big fights, clearly. They can sometimes make you stronger if they don’t kill you. But are there also sort of an on-going series of goals in terms of expansion?

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Yeah, I mean the short answer to that is “yes,” the longer answer is I don’t think we’ve quantified it yet because when you quantify something like that, you have to then take it out to the future and say, “well, what is the qualitative piece to that and what is the value of -- let’s just say we had a million Facebook fans. Well how do we utilize that in ways that actually helps achieve our goals?’

And so while we need to get there because we want benchmarks by which we measure ourselves, I think we’re trying to treat carefully so that we’re doing it in a way that’s not just a number that we’re hitting.

MICHA SIFRY: Okay.

DEANNA ZANDT: I’m so glad to hear you say that, Heather.

MICHA SIFRY: So, Deanna, I want to pull you into the conversation now. You’ve got years of experience working on these kinds of issues though I think here -- and you’ve done it for organizations directly as well as kind of free agent. In this particular case, we wanted you on the call because of your jumping into the middle of this controversy with Komen, with the Planned Parenthood Save Me Tumbler site.

And so tell us a little bit about why you did that and what -- for argument’s sake and just to be devil’s advocate for a second -- I can say, why don’t you just trust that Planned Parenthood would take care of that kind of messaging? What was it that made you do that? What do you think the value of it was?

DEANNA ZANDT: It started out actually in a conversation thread on Facebook discussing with other sort of non-profit tech folk and other activists. But our response as individuals to this fiasco around Komen was going to be because we all felt activated by it, we all felt emotionally invested in things like breast cancer and women’s health in general, and all of us felt like there had to be some sort of big response. Not as a group, but just people were tossing out different ideas and a lot of the ideas were around fundraising. Well, let’s take the money away from Komen, let’s give money, let’s raise money for Planned Parenthood.

MICHA SIFRY: And it was raised, right?

DEANNA ZANDT: Oh, yeah, jillions of dollars were raised (laughter), which is great and which is fantastic and that’s actually -- it’s a really, really necessary component of any kind of push, hit-them-in-the-wallet kind of either direction campaign. So, that’s obviously really necessary.

But when I kept coming to the conversation with this is what about the people and specifically women who don’t have money to contribute or not contribute? And those would be the women who had the biggest impact of losing services from Planned Parenthood or low income women who need these breast cancer screenings and who needed the other myriad of services that Planned Parenthood could provide.

And I said, ‘well how do they get to contribute?’ ‘How do they get to participate in hearing what happens to them?’ And so for me, I always come back to this big thing and I know this is my schtick but I have this whole thing about you know, stories matter. Before you get to any kind of AB testing of your email campaign or your petition on Change.org or whatever it is, whatever tool you’re using, you have to start with stories. This is where change always starts.

And I said, ‘well, we need these women sharing their stories,’ and how -- let’s do something. And I actually kind of did it a little bit irritated before I was headed out to a meeting. I’m like, ‘let’s just create a Tumbler here,’ and I created Planned Parenthood and I posted the link. And I went to the meeting, I thought, ‘well, jeeze, it’s actually maybe a good idea.’

So, I sent it out to a few people and I specifically in the beginning was asking for women whose cancer had been detected by a Planned Parenthood clinic. And it just went out way further than that. Just so many women started submitting these stories of, ‘Planned Parenthood was the only place that I could go after I was assaulted where the people understood me.’ ‘Planned Parenthood taught me about sex. I had no idea even what I was doing when I went there for birth control.’

You know, just a myriad of stories about how Planned Parenthood had changed their lives.

MICHA SIFRY: Let me back up a step though; how did you -- I mean, how did you -- some of this is sort of a needle in the haystack effect of reaching those people. So, how did it --

DEANNA ZANDT: Well this is what the dirty secret of advocacy work is that it’s not just posting once to Twitter and hoping for the best. It’s choosing -- going through my address book and I chose about 20 women who either work on women’s health issues or are heavy hitter feminists or keep all that, I felt, who have influence on the topic.

And I think what Heather was just saying about why I said that was so great that she said that about having a million Facebook followers isn’t really a great qualitative metric to have because you know, I could have tried to send it to somebody at a major media outlet or somebody who has a bajillion followers and hope for the best. But what I chose instead were people that I felt would be influential on the topic so that it would spread faster through networks because that’s the key: it’s finding ways that it can spread quickly through networks and not just hoping that one, you know, that Ashton Kutcher Tweets is out and everybody’s happy, you know?

MICHA SIFRY: It worked for Kone, didn’t it?

DEANNA ZANDT: Yeah, but you know what, Kone is a totally crazy, off the charts kind of example. And it’s obviously crazy and fraught with a million other problems.

MICHA SIFRY: And they had early networks, too. I mean actually --

DEANNA ZANDT: Yes.

MICHA SIFRY: -- the closer we look it turns out that it wasn’t the celebrity push at first. But it was also the existence of already developed local networks.

DEANNA ZANDT: And so that’s actually the interesting thing when you’re talking about metrics and benchmarks since we’re all big nerds and we love data and numbers.

I went into the analytics three days after the site had launched, we had collected around 300 stories. And I wanted to see kind of where things were coming from and how this all happened because it launched on Wednesday morning. Thursday night Rachel Maddow was reading it on her show and my head sort of popped off and rolled down the hall (laughter) and I had to re-watch it again later. Like really? Did that just happen?

In any case, so I went on Saturday and looked at the metrics and analytics and in the three days that I had data for, we got 28,000 unique visits to the site, which is a nice number. But the interesting thing is that more than half of them came before any major media mention of the site, and all of the traffic came from Facebook, Twitter and Tumbler.

So, it was about sharing and specifically in this case, women sharing stories with one another and how compelling and powerful that can be when stories get spread kind of ad hoc and peer-to-peer. And that was what just like -- about the whole situation that just totally blew me away, and what I loved about it was what didn’t matter -- I didn’t get hardly any traffic when The New York Times mentioned it, Jennifer Preston mentioned it in one of her pieces. And it was on Maddow and it was on all of these things, and sure we got little bumps, but it didn’t make the site explode. It was women sharing their stories with one another that made the site explode.

MICHA SIFRY: Did Planned Parenthood -- I’m curious, Heather, if you would comment on how you guys at inside Planned Parenthood viewed something like this. Was this a problem because it was kind of like a wild card? What if something gets posted there that’s off message? How did you relate to it?

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Sure. That’s a great question and Deanna’s Tumbler was an example of something that -- you know, Deanna and I have known each other for a long time but Morgan who does our social media, saw it before I knew about it, which speaks to her point about that this kind of spread.

And that was an example of something that not only did we love it, we promoted it on our Facebook page and on Twitter because there were parameters within which we could engage and within which we wanted to talk about this situation we were in with respect to Komen but we didn’t want, nor do we want to be critical of them because we -- because this was sort of -- they were a victim of larger forces in the decision that was made.

And so there were -- I’ll put it this way, we were selective about the ancillary, whether it was a Pinterest site or a Facebook page or Tweets, there were innumerable examples of people who were engaging on this issue in their own voice and in their own way. And we were selective and tried to be strategic in about amplifying those voices that we felt told the story in a way that we wanted to make sure more people saw.

And so seeing, ‘Planned Parenthood Saved Me,’ to put that personal story and that personal imprint on who we are and what we do and how we exist and engage in communities was an important one. And I think it was more powerful because it came from the outside of the post or something that we organized.

DEANNA ZANDT: I absolutely agree with that. I mean I don’t think that Planned Parenthood could have said, ‘hey, we just started this Tumbler, can you guys all come and say how awesome we are?’

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Yeah, especially not with that -- Planned Parenthood Saved Me, I mean, that’s a little bit like, hey, you’re great and everything, but you know, you don’t need to toot your own horn in that way. And we weren’t interested in that and we’re not.

MICHA SIFRY: But Heather, I know you haven’t been there that long but one of the reasons why for me and I think for a lot of people listening this is such an interesting case, is again, we’re talking about a fairly big traditional legacy organization is the term we like to use, that for a very long time the general approach to message management is you’ve got to control how you’re being talked about as best you can.

Whereas here you’re clearly describing a mentality inside the organization of you know, that we can’t get in the way of our supporters. If anything, we want to let these flowers bloom and then maybe pour a little extra sunlight and fertilizer on the ones that are particularly good for helping you, right?

So, was there like some kind of shift inside Planned Parenthood that had to happen to get people comfortable with taking this approach? Or is it just self-evident?

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Well self-evident, I certainly wouldn’t go that far. What I would say is that the Pentz fight last spring where -- it certainly wasn’t the same and that’s a whole ‘nother conversation, right? But because that was a sort of traditional political fight in a lot of ways.

But I think the Pentz fight, and again was not personally here at the time, but the overwhelming support that happened there, I mean this happened over two months as opposed to -- this is not a four day campaign. But the Pentz fight, the organization got 850,000 signatures on the petition. This is the Congress, right, you know, not that sexy, right? But 850,000 petition signatures saying, ‘don’t defund Planned Parenthood, it’s important to me.’

And so it was that, we actually launched those ‘Raise Your Hand’ campaign which was a little more personal. But again, re-launch, but it was people raising their hands and saying, I’m one in five women, which is the statistic about how many women over the course of a lifetime will visit Planned Parenthood as a patient, one in five women. So, you know, we had people literally raise their hands, take a picture and say, ‘Raise Your Hand.’

And so I think that was the first time where we were genuinely experimenting with things outside of what I would call traditional advocacy vehicles. And so understanding and seeing the power of that, I think the evolutionary piece of it was that we understand more broadly that the traditional, you mentioned tool kits, the tool kit that is available to non-profits goes beyond the tools that say a governmental relation team might see as valuable, which is I want to be able to say we’ve sent 10,000 letters to person X or Y and we’re going to bring them up to The Hill and do that. Of course, there’s value in that.

I think the shift is that, and I think particularly true of Planned Parenthood though not exclusive of course, is that we have a supporter base because we are a health care provider, there’s a certain connection that we have with some of our supporters and activists where they want to engage with us in a more personal and intimate way, and there’s a power to that that we’re still trying to figure out how to best -- harness for lack of a better term, so that their needs continue to be served. This is we have health care available to women in this country at large, and so that’s on a micro level. On a macro level, it’s making sure that Congress is continuing to support and fund this great need in this country.

DEANNA ZANDT: I just want to add to something that Heather said that one of the things I think Planned Parenthood has done very successfully -- two things, actually that I want to comment on about changing organizational culture and it goes back to Alison Fein and Beth Cantor’s book, The Network Non-Profit and how important the executive leadership in a non-profit is committed to social media, how much that will change an organizational culture.

From what I understand of Planned Parenthood’s culture, Cecile Richards’ participation and full disclosure (inaudible) she’s awesome, you know? I totally love her, you know, whatever. But I think that makes a huge difference in how an organization’s priorities end up becoming -- because I’ve worked with organizations where the executive leadership isn’t invested, doesn’t care and just hopes for the best. And they have incredibly unsuccessful social media deployments.

And the other thing is about that emotional connection that Heather was mentioning that so many women have an emotional connection to Planned Parenthood, whether it’s through the healthcare that they receive or through the advocacy work that Planned Parenthood does. And one thing they’ve done very successfully in the last couple of years is turn that emotional connection into a relationship in the kinds of females that you get from Planned Parenthood, in the kinds of things that they put out on social media and the conversations that they’re having. They’re taking the connection and turning it into a relationship and that’s what social media is so much about when it comes to advocacy.

0:30:00

MICHA SIFRY: Great point. Let’s pause for a second. We’re at the half-way point here and I want to invite people listening if someone wants to chime in with a question or a comment, this is your first opportunity. Just hit *6 on your phone and then I’ll be able to pull you into the call. We’ll just take a pause to see if anybody wants to do that. Sometimes people are bashful, sometimes people want to jump in.

And I will keep the conversation going in the meantime. Heather, does Planned Parenthood connect its members up locally? I mean, to what degree is this a one-to-many relationship. I grant that relationships are being formed and certainly they’re active commentors on Facebook pages. You probably have a sense of who some of your super activists are.

But I’m just wondering, with a list that big, and in particular with, you know, obviously Congress is a fulcrum for you of -- you can’t avoid it, you’ve got to either play defense or play offense with Congress. So, to what degree does Planned Parenthood think about kind of Congressional district by Congressional District connecting up its supporters?

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: You know, that’s actually a really good question and frankly that’s part of my mission. So, of course Planned Parenthood has been around a long time, 95-year-old organization, and we have existing and strong political departments, field department, etcetera, and we have the affiliate structure.

So, we’re a unique animal in this way and one of my charges, if you will, in this role that I am in is to work across all of our program areas and all of our divisions to be able to integrate digital and online into everything that we do. And that doesn’t mean that you need to have a Twitter strategy for every single thing that we do, or we have a Facebook strategy for everything we do.

But that you’re thinking about how to integrate that piece into the work that we do. And so with respect to thinking about, okay, well how do we help facilitate these sort of localized connections in the context with a broader universe that we’re seeing. I would say it’s aspirational and it is part of what we’re looking to do with the Women Are Watching program in making the connections between online and offline. And actually, that goes two ways, so it’s online to offline back to online.

MICHA SIFRY: Say a bit more about Women Are Watching. That’s a new thing I hadn’t heard much about.

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Sure. Women Are Watching is our political program that I mentioned earlier, and we launched it on election day, 2011, which we were all -- a lot of the Planned Parenthood were very heavily engaged in the Mississippi (sounds like: person) ballot initiative on that day as well, which we were very thankful to be victorious on.

But the Women Are Watching campaign is our wrapper, it’s a way for us to talk about women’s health as a political issue and honestly, when we were doing the planning for this, it was aspirational that women’s health would be an issue in the campaign. I feel like we can sort of check that box that -- and not to say that Women Are Watching was a critical instrument in that, but with a lot of the broader fights that we’ve had including most recently this campaign and all the hullabaloo around birth control access, this is something that people are paying attention to.

So, it is our attempt to highlight candidates who are with us, our champions and who are not with us, our chumps.

MICHA SIFRY: This is Planned Parenthood Action Fund now, right?

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: (Overlapping remarks) Action Fund, that’s right.

MICHA SIFRY: C-4?

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: This is our C-4 work, and so we’re focusing on both candidates, we’re focusing on states and many people who do follow women’s health issues know that there has been a lot of activity at the state level --

DEANNA ZANDT: (Overlapping remarks)

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: -- I mean seriously, right? But we’ve done a lot of activity at the state level across the board and that’s been a tidal wave, and not necessarily in a good way.

And also to educate people about the issues that are at stake. But I would say the new thing -- and not new as Planned Parenthood’s never done it, but it has been for the first time in a couple years is we’ve actually started a blog on Women Are Watching, which --

MICHA SIFRY: How innovative.

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: -- I know, right? So, this is not --

DEANNA ZANDT: A web blog, that’s crazy! (Laughter)

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: -- what is new for us is -- because Planned Parenthood has a lot of layers and a lot of voices and perspectives that we’re bringing to every conversation. I’m talking about internally, I’m not talking about externally. And so the challenge for us in this is to be relevant and interesting in a -- you know, when you start talking about blogs, the expectation is that you’re in the zeitgeist of what’s happening. And we certainly have a perspective that we think is valuable in this broader conversation and the challenge for us is to figure out how to engage in that in a timely and meaningful and relevant way.

So, that’s been our sort of signature piece to it. But the other piece to it that I find exciting is our potential for being able to focus on and raise up and elevate some of the state level by what’s sort of happening in their -- obviously many people have been doing incredible work around that who are not Planned Parenthood -- but we’ve been trying to help and engage in that because we are engaged very heavily in those fights in state capitols around the country.

MICHA SIFRY: Right. But what this portal --I mean, I’m actually on the site now WomenAreWatching.org, and I can see all those features. But we’ve still got a situation here where these are -- this is a way for individual activists to sort of affiliate and get timely information obviously and maybe plug-in knowledge-wise to what’s happening at different state level kinds of battles.

But it’s not an activist platform in the way that -- I mean you can think of a (sounds like: ning) site or I’m thinking of the right wing site, Freedom Connect or MyBarackObama.com, you know as another example. All of these are places where supporters not only get to sort of give you information but they get to create their own groups, their own activities.

So, it has not yet moved to that place but is that a place, you know, with 6 million supporter base, you’re clearly at the point where even if it was just only one or two percent, that’s still a lot of people who might well want to be knitted together.

I’m curious, Deanna, if you would sort of add your perspective here on the larger picture of women’s health activism online, the degree to which you’re seeing how big a wave do you see now?

DEANNA ZANDT: It’s huge! It’s freakin’ huge.

MICHA SIFRY: Freakin’ huge -- can you quantify that? (Laughter)

DEANNA ZANDT: Well it’s been really exciting. I mean, I’ve been involved in feminist activism for, do I want to say how long? Maybe 20 years? And I haven’t seen this amount of energy from people who I wouldn’t consider kind of hard core activists in a really long time.

And I think that when you’re talking about building platforms and all this stuff, like sure, those tools are great, but I’m much more excited about the kind of fluid and ad hoc that’s happening. And that to participate in these kinds of events doesn’t mean that you get commissioned as ‘this is what a feminist looks like,’ t-shirt and then that’s it, now you’re a feminist. The identity is much more fluid now that you can kind of roll in and roll out when the moment strikes you, and I think that women have that -- having that kind of freedom to participate when they can is actually enabling a lot of people to participate more actively than they have in the past where it’s not as much of an emotional commitment perhaps, or time commitment.

And I think also that having that kind of freedom to -- going back to the peer-to-peer and the storytelling stuff, you know, we saw it when we were talking about defunding Planned Parenthood last year and as part of HR-3, which came into The House, it was this time last year, wasn’t it? It was February-ish. As part of that movement to defund Planned Parenthood, there was also language in HR-3 that would have federally redefined rape to not include incest or not -- the inability to give consent because of intoxication or (inaudible). All these things would have actually been removed from the federal definition of what rape was.

And so a couple of activists, Sadie Doyle and Amanda Marcotte, started a Twitter campaign, a hash-tag campaign called Dear John, and they had people Tweeting stories of why this was a really bad thing, often women’s own stories of their own sexual assault with the Dear John hash-tag directed at John Behner.

And ultimately that language -- so, I set up a little analytics thing to track the Tweets and the account that I had you get something like 5,000 free Tweets or something, I was like, oh, that should be plenty. And we used that in a day-and-a-half, over 5,000 in a day-and-a-half. And ultimately that language was removed from the bill.

And I don’t think it was necessarily just that a bunch of people got on Twitter, but it inspires other actions to start happening and it inspires the Change.org petition or it inspires MoveOn to get involved, or it inspires that more kind of organized platformy thing to happen. And they work in conjunction with each other.

So, I don’t know that it’s always important to talk about, ‘well what’s the next new platform?’ (Audio glitch)

MICHA SIFRY: I guess I’m not suggesting -- you know, this is where I was hoping we’d get to in the call, which is this understanding of the different moving pieces of the social media tool kit. And to what degree you know, it’s sort of like an advantage to have all this fluidity, right? So, you know, it’s incredibly quick and easy to do Tumbler -- you know, a testimonial site like the one you did or try to spread a Twitter hash-tag.

Obviously you know, something like what I’m describing, which is more of a on-going hub, like a community hub sort of site is a much more ambitious and in many ways hard to sustain model.

I think it’s interesting if you look at Freedom Connector like, leave aside the ideology of the place. It was launched as an open networking platform at CEPAC about a year ago, and in one year it’s grown to about 175,000 active participants and about 8,000 different groups and events listed through the tool.

And so if you’re a member of the Tea Party or one of those associated movements, this has become a hub for that set of identities and activists to reinforce each other for better or for worse. And at the moment it feels like the women’s health space, I mean the Planned Parenthood is kind of like the big momma here in terms of the amount of people it’s got on its list, certainly and activists affiliating through things like Women Are Watching.

And yet I’m still sort of asking would something more that enable people to carry this sense of connection and relationship even further? Would that be useful?

And Deanna, what I’m hearing from you is that the fluidity, you know, the freedom to come in and out that you don’t want to ask people for too heavy a commitment.

DEANNA ZANDT: Right.

MICHA SIFRY: Because they might not be able to give it. And that it has to be more, you know, we have to maintain this sort of nimble stance instead. Is that fair?

DEANNA ZANDT: Yeah, I do think that’s accurate because I also feel like the women who get activated by these things who want to take the next step and become a committed activist in this particular work know through that entrée, whatever they have, whether it was through Komen or whether it was through what was going on last year, you know, and on-going locally in the states, have lots of opportunities. There are lots of traditional organizations that they can participate in.

And I don’t know that it’s necessary to have a full on kind of platform and -- I mean, one, because I’m always thinking about money, you know? How can we spend that money better? Are there better ways to spend that money because that’s a lot of money to build a platform like that, you know? And is that the most useful thing that we can do with ourselves? I just don’t know that it is.

MICHA SIFRY: Heather, you’ve got a little bit of money to work with. You also got a big institution to help support infrastructure-wise, but you did say that sort of aspirationally the idea of knitting together local activists is something that you’d like to do. Did I hear you correctly on that?

0:45:00

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Yeah, I think the question becomes -- and this is where I get boring and sort of infrastructure nerdy -- is the question becomes how do we do that given who we are and how we’re structured and as a federation?

And so I think we need to think very carefully about how we do that because our affiliates also have direct relationships with some of these folks. And so this is a wild you know, sort of brave new world frontier, whatever you want to call it, where we have worked out the kinks over time in terms of what our what our relationship is to our affiliates in a website context. What our relationship to our affiliates in a Facebook / Twitter context.

But in the context which we’re discussing this, that’s a separate conversation. And I think it’s a really complicated conversation. So, we have to be careful about how we think about it and how we seek to engage and connect with activists in that localized way.

MICHA SIFRY: Right. And in a funny way, the internet is not necessarily your friend there because it’s almost too loose and in some ways confusing.

I’m going to pause again just to -- we’ve got about 10 minutes left on the call, want to make sure if anybody listening wants to pop in now with a question, here’s your best opportunity, hit *6 and I’ll get you in the queue.

Always happy to have questions and comments from our very smart listeners.

DEANNA ZANDT: Don’t be shy.

MICHA SIFRY: We’ve got one here. Okay, go ahead, tell us your name and ask your question.

PARTICIPANT 1: Hey, it’s Megan Hall and I have a question that -- it’s a little geeky but I’m going to guess this whole call kind of is (laughter).

I’m wondering how you guys are planning on tying all of this sort of fantastic energy where this much broader audience of women is kind of realizing that their voice is in the room and either at all or in any kind of real way, in a decision-making way, to the efforts -- and I’m kind of specifically asking about C-3 things happening this year -- for voter registration and updating people’s registration.

And a couple of reasons I wanted to ask is because this process tends to involve paper and the laws are different in states, I’m wondering kind of what you’re strategy is in terms of what you’re doing online kind of from a national perspective, how you’re working with affiliates and how you’re integrating that with your offline communications because I think we all know that redundant messaging tends to be the most effective, especially when with an activity voter registration that usually involves several steps and a stamp and things like that.

MICHA SIFRY: That’s a great question. Heather?

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Sure, well you know, you did really nerd out on me. (Laughter) So, I think you’ve out-nerded me!

I think the answer to the question is, as I mentioned earlier, we have a field team and they sort of oversee our work to register voters in concert with the affiliates in the various areas where we’re running those drives. So, you know, I would actually go back to the fact that what we are seeking to do and what I’m seeking to do in an online context is to make a better and a consistent connection between what people do see on the ground and what they see online, it is about that repetition, it is about the multi-channel means of engagement. And so my job and our role is to make sure that I have a -- and you’ll forgive me for using the term -- but that I have sort of a 360-degree view of what the organization’s doing so that I can advise and collaborate with my colleagues in other departments, so that we can maximize the value of the work that they are doing.

I hope that answers your question.

PARTICIPANT 1: Yeah, I just -- and I didn’t know if you had any (sounds like: offs) and sort of epiphanies about making voter registration fun and cool (laughter), that I feel like every cycle and tried to make that process seem more manageable especially for single women, these demographics tend to be the most mobile in their address changes. And so if there’s anything you had to add there, I feel like I’m having this conversation a lot, I would do that this year.

MICHA SIFRY: There’s a - if you don’t mind my jumping in -- there’s a new company called Turbo Vote.

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Oh, yeah, Turbo --

MICHA SIFRY: So, you know them?

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Definitely on the radar, but there are a few cool things happening, you’re right.

MICHA SIFRY: Yeah, and just so people listening who may have not heard of Turbo Vote, it actually comes out of a graduate student at the Kennedy School at Harvard who had the inspiration to sort of see that students in particular are a constituency that move often, fail to re-register when they get to college, you know, often forget to get their absentee ballot application in. And that if you could make it as easy as requesting a video on Netflicks, (remember back when they used to mail them to you?) that that could significantly reduce some of the obstacles to college students being registered and voting.

And so I wonder if there’s something there that could also work for in particular, young women who are in the Planned Parenthood constituency?

I’m curious actually to ask Heather -- thank you for that question, Megan -- if the new membership coming in, in particular is a much younger demographic? To what degree that understanding -- it isn’t just the leadership change at the top. I’ve certainly noticed in some of the YouTube videos that that Planned Parenthood has been making and trying to spread a real youthful style that must be deliberate in the sense that that’s the group that you really need to be connecting with.

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Well, without question, a core demographic for us of supporters is -- I think if you want to broaden it, and it depends on how people are engaging with us, but I would say bit large, our core demographic, is 18-45-year-old women.

And at the younger level, this really goes back to what I was saying a couple minutes ago, but you know, the kids these days, which I am not one of (laughter), you know, I’m firmly in the cynical gen-x-er role, but the younger generation has not just a facility with the internet, but they’re content creators in ways that consistently amaze me.

And so you’re right, we are trying to -- it is a line that you’re walking a little bit because we are a professional non-profit, we’re not some person off the street, right? And so we have a brand and we have a point of view and we have an expertise that we’re trying to communicate in everything that we do.

At the same time, we are trying to reach a constituency who doesn’t necessarily want to be engaged with in a super formal way, at least not -- actually no, I think that’s generally true. And so as with anything, these content projects are (inaudible) so you make one, you sort of figure out what is interesting to people and you make adjustments, and you change it for the next time.

But you’ve certainly tried to do that with of the Women Are Watching stuff, and it’s varied between sort of younger -- I would say younger, flashier and then the more I guess less polished, more organic kind of feel.

MICHA SIFRY: Yes, I was going to use the word ‘sexier’ actually --

HEATHER HOLDRIDGE: Whoo, I love it!

MICHA SIFRY: -- what I’ve noticed is that they try to be sex-positive, which I think is interesting also in that that could -- a more conservative organization might say, ‘we should be careful, we don’t want that.’ But you know, it seemed to be -- whatever your research is telling you about what connects with young people, that you can’t be -- oh gosh -- prissy about this.

DEANNA ZANDT: That’s the thing, I don’t think that for people under 25 you can be a reproductive health organization and not mention the sex, you know? That’s just impossible.

And I think that also works again to the advantage and when we’re talking about the dynamics of young folks’ activism, I also am not a young person anymore. And I know this actually because of (overlapping remarks) an employee of Personal Democracy Media, but that’s a separate story, that’s a funny story.

But anyway, the demographics of young folks tend to not identify with the labels that gen-x-ers and older identify with as liberal progressive feminist. You know, they have the same value sets, but they don’t necessarily want to identify as such and be stuck with this particular identity label and especially when it comes to sexuality and who they’re sleeping with and not sleeping with and what they’re doing with their bodies. They want to have absolute and complete freedom, as they should. And recognizing that and running with is a really smart move on Planned Parenthood’s part.

MICHA SIFRY: Yeah, and I think that’s a good place to end. It is to me, really one of the points I keep coming back to as I watch how social media is spreading and being used, that we under-appreciate sometimes -- it isn’t that it’s social in the sense that lots of people can use it or it’s integrated into our social lives, but that there’s something about it that has to actually reflect organically on how people actually live. And if you deny some aspect of what is I part of peoples’ authentic lives, it won’t spread as well. That in effect, we can sniff out the false notes.

So, to the degree that an organization like Planned Parenthood has gotten in deep in the pool and not just tip-toing in at the edge, it’s also inevitably -- means that it has to embrace that whole complex reality and not just act as if some of these things don’t exist and we’re not going to talk about them.

So, that is part of the nature of social media, I guess.

Well, thank you. This has been a great call. We’ve been talking with Heather Holdridge, the Digital Director of Planned Parenthood and Deanna Zandt, Media Technologist. And tell us the name of your book, Deanna?

DEANNA ZANDT: Share This!

MICHA SIFRY: Share This!

DEANNA ZANDT: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking.

HEATHER HOLDRIGE: It’s good stuff!

MICHA SIFRY: Good book, well worth getting!

You’ve been listening to Personal Democracy Media’s teleconference, Personal Democracy Plus with Heather Holdridge and Deanna Zandt.

Thanks everybody and we’ll see you all online!

[END OF AUDIO]