Movements, Not Campaigns
Why We’re Building whatleads.to
What do you do when you want to change the world? When you see injustice on the news and feel like you have to do something to stop it?
Maybe you’ll start a petition. Or make a donation to our favourite charity. Or maybe you’ll go on a protest march. The problem is that these actions can feel empty, or even meaningless, out of context.
There are people out there that understand this context really well though. NGOs and other charitable campaigners spend their time analysing the impact of different actions. Communicating that impact effectively though, is a constant challenge.
We think we should be working better, together. Organisations and individuals have countless shared aims, but there’s no intutitive, shared language to achieve them. That’s why we’re building whatleads.to.
On whatleads.to people start by telling us what they care about, or are working towards. From there, it’s easy to build up a visualisation of the steps needed to achieve that goal. Other people can engage with any step, give feedback and add their own alternatives. Each step even has it’s own URL so you can focus your efforts where your passions lie. It’s the first website designed to help campaigning organisations crowd-source what they call their “theory of change”.
It’s completely free for individuals to engage. To allow us to grow and have the biggest possible impact with this project, we’ll soon be charging organisations for special premium accounts. These will allow for private groups with more admin control, but more importantly we’ll be giving them something they really need right now; data.
We’re not talking abstract numbers that need to be put into a graph to make sense of. whatleads.to can tell organisations things like “2,176 people aged 16-25 believe a protest march would lead to A Ban On Fracking.” and then go even further, with the reasons people cite for their beliefs. (E.g., “Because similar action has worked in the past,” or “Because more awareness is needed around this issue.”)
This is the kind of data you’d get from a really focussed survey, if anyone actually filled them out of course. whatleads.to is a far more engaging proposition than a survey because we’re actually asking people about what they care about, giving them contextual information about what other people believe, and fostering a focussed discussion.
We think information like this will enable the third sector, which already does amazing work affecting every aspect of our lives, to make even better decisions about their actions. With the input of individuals on whatever level they care about, we can all start achieving our shared aims together — Get started now at whatleads.to.
