Posts by Zainab Chaudary
How to Submit Your Campaign for Awards Consideration
On November 15th, Muslim women from around the country attended the Shorty Social Good Awards, an annual award given to various categories of Internet ingenuity and creativity. The women in attendance were there to represent the social media campaign, #CanYouHearUsNow, which was a finalist for “best hashtag for social good” at the Shorty Awards. While…
Are You Going to Netroots This Year? Let's Meet Up!
The annual Netroots Nation conference is a great opportunity for progressives from across the country to come together and strategize for the year ahead. The conference is an opportunity to learn about new tools for organizing and advocacy, connect with other progressive organizations and media-makers, and hear about the complex problems that progressives today are…
How to Effectively Engage Your Elected Officials
Perhaps the best thing to come out of the 2016 Election is the mobilization of huge numbers of constituents motivated to demand that their elected officials actually listen to them. Civic engagement is at an all-time high. Congressional offices have been flooded with faxes, emails, and phone calls. But this flurry of activity begs the…
Prep for a Crisis Before It Hits: A Guide to Creating an Organizational Crisis Communications Plan
Let’s face it: 2016 was a train wreck. A particularly volatile and unpredictable election year was coupled with a barrage of violent domestic and international events that had multiple advocacy groups scrambling to respond in a crisis. To many, 2016 felt like a year of working from one crisis to the next, without respite. Crises…
#MuslimsReportStuff: Making a Hashtag Trend on Debate Night
Sometimes, a great hashtag campaign is born out of being in the right place at the right time. Case in point: During the second 2016 Presidential debate, one Brooklyn professor’s tweet, and a hashtag campaign that followed, won hearts and minds better than politics did. In this blog post, we’ll talk about the impetus, the…
So You Want to Go Viral: How to Build Hashtag Campaigns for Social Impact
“So how do you make things go viral?” It’s often one of the first questions we get asked when we talk about our work in using traditional and social/digital media to foster social change. Virality is a tricky concept – often a game of chance – but with a little strategizing, you can maximize the…