2nd Six, Tribe Effect, and Chris Lisi Communications recently surveyed 102 groups to find out which activist pressure groups use the most online media tools and which of 14 tools get used the most.  Here’s what they found:

• The top five organizations were left of center: Sierra Club uses 10 of the social media tools examined, SEIU uses nine, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the American Wind Energy Institute, and Human Rights Campaign all use eight
• On average, the 102 organizations utilize 3.36 of the 14 tools available.

Which tools are getting used the most for online advocacy? The most basic tools–online action centers and e-mail–are used the most. But among independent social media forums, Facebook is the most popular.

• 82 percent have online advocacy centers linked from their homepages
• 54 percent use e-mail
• 36 percent use Facebook
• 34 percent use LinkedIn
• 33 percent use Twitter
• 31 percent have a blog
• 24 percent have a YouTube channel
• 24 percent have a SlideShare account
• 9 percent have a Flickr account
• 8 percent are on MySpace asd
• 3 percent have downloadable/embeddable widgets
• 1 percent have a StumbleUpon account
• and none of them had deployable blog badges

The Energy Action Coalition recently brought 12,000 people to DC for the youth summit Power Shift 2009, in pursuit of “mass action for clean energy and climate change.”  Media watchers are already declaring the event a model for how to integrate social media into offline organizing.  Evange blog has put together some useful lessons:

Exhibit A: Multiple Social Network Strategies, Cross-promoted

• You can find Power Shift (or they can find you) on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Works especially well when targeting students, as is the case here.
• All those sites cross-promote each other and are integrated into the homepage of the Power Shift website.
• Other cool (and useful) technologies are mixed in, like a “Find a Ride” web app to help attendees carpool to the event, and a mashup map showing where folks are traveling from (and their universities).

Exhibit B: Weaving Online Actions Into the In-Person Event

• SMS provided text message updates on event panels and workshops
• Text messages were sent to legislative officials during presentations
• A Twitter board in the lobby ran a constant update of tweets related to Power Shift
• Regular reminders to tag all photos, videos and tweets with the designated hashtag (#PowerShift09) before AND during the event
• Live-streamed videos of keynotes and other important event moments
• Several educational sessions on social media geared towards activism
• Blog updates from multiple voices throughout the event
• A Media Room on the www.powershift09.orgfeaturing the latest videos, photos, podcasts, blog posts, Tweetgrid widget of latest tweets, media hits and ways people could get involved.

• 12,000 people, 350 meetings with legislators on March 2 for the biggest climate lobby day ever.
• 950 photos on Flickr, the #7 highest nonprofit channel views on YouTube, and some very seductive Twitter stats:
• Twitter drove fourth most traffic to www.powershift09.orgafter Google, Facebook and YouTube. Twitter was used “to organize hundreds of disparate campaign field organizers across the country.

Reverb hub group KFTC, who sent 150 members to the PowerShift gathering, ran their own dynamic social media operation to report and update folks back home.  Check out the results here.

Organizations are always on the search for new ways to keep their members engaged and draw new interest.  Often this means organizing around community concerns; but it can also mean tapping into members creative aspirations. One simple and free online example is the the Nature Conservancy’s Flickr photo contest where they invite anyone to post their nature photography to the Conservancy’s Flickr Groups.  The best photo will be printed in the 2010 Nature Conservancy calendar.  To date they have more than 90,000 photos posted and used the gathered contacts for membership prospecting. (Here’s basic intro guide to using Flickr.) The question for organizers, of course, is whether a successful cultural event like a photo contest can be translated into political action.