Campaign Strategy

Strengthen your abilities and facilitation practice to support the power of those you’ve convened. We are offering this Lab twice during the week of July 29th to accommodate a diversity of time zones During this two-day, three-hour-a-day online lab, we will explore the different power domains in which change-makers operate […]

The Facilitating Collective Power Lab

The discipline of iteration and testing have been the most important processes to our work at FabRiders. A final product is never produced, whether it’s a how-to guide or a project plan, without distributing lots of drafts and incorporating lots of feedback. All our work is a prototype, as even […]

What We’ve Learned by Prototyping Workshops

THIS WORKSHOP TOOK PLACE ON Thursday, May 4th, Check out our next workshop, Data Tactics for a Post-Fact World, or sign up for FabUpdates to get more information on upcoming workshops. Build stronger campaigns using design methodologies Learn how to design stronger campaigns that make a bigger impact sooner. You […]

Workshop: Hacking human centred design for social change

This is a day-long training that we’ve run in at least a dozen countries for a variety of individuals involved in social change at various levels of ‘data literacy.’  Big thanks to all the participants that have provided feedback, along with: School of Data for all their curriculum on data literacy, […]

A Data Strategy Workshop Curriculum

This article will help people working on social change efforts understand what they need to know before undertaking a technology project and how to communicate that to internal technology related staff or a potential external developer/consultant hire. This document was created with the input of several colleagues, including Tin Geber, […]

Tech Project Specifications and Social Change Efforts

2015 was a banner year for FabRiders. Here is what our current projects have us positioned to learn in 2016: We’ve explored hacking user centred design for social change efforts with the help of Aspiration and the International Budget Partnership.  Look for our next post in the FabBlog on designing tech projects that will engage your stakeholders. We’ve been […]

What We Will Learn in 2016

Our learnings never happen in isolation and we are always grateful to those who have helped inform us along the way. We learned a hell of a lot from Misty Avila and Allen Gunn (Gunner) at Aspiration, who shared their methodologies to get tool developers to focus on users’ needs.  We […]

Hacking user centred design for social change efforts.

Why we did it By Maya Ganesh, Beatrice Martini and Dirk Slater. If you haven’t, please read the introduction to this series. Tactical Tech’s initial goal was to learn how use of technology can impact and improve the advocacy efforts of marginalised communities.  In this section, we will define ‘marginalisation’, […]

Leave Your Potatoes at Home, Pt I

What we learned By Maya Ganesh, Beatrice Martini and Dirk Slater This series began with the post ‘Why We Did It‘, which provided background and context, including a definition of marginalisation, Tactical Tech’s objectives for the project and background on WNU and sex worker issues in Cambodia.  Our previous post […]

Leave Your Potatoes at Home, Pt. III

Or ‘how to work with marginalised communities on using data and technology in advocacy’ By Maya Ganesh, Beatrice Martini and Dirk Slater. “You are welcome anytime, you’re not like others who come with their own bag of potatoes” It’s with these words that the chair of Women’s Network for Unity (WNU), […]

Leave Your Potatoes At Home, Intro

Data Sources You have two options for finding data to use in your advocacy work: use existing data or collect it yourself.  Data that already exists has the benefit of not needing to be collected, but it may not be formatted, organised or aggregated in a way that is helpful.  […]

Data Advocacy Essentials Pt III: Data Sources

What is data? How can we use it for advocacy? Advocacy is a process by which people, groups, networks and coalitions seek to bring about positive change by influencing policies, as well as the actions and opinions of others. In evidence based advocacy, facts in the form of data are […]

Data Advocacy Essentials, Pt I: Action Cycles and Stakeholders

Understanding how any technology used in campaigning functions as a tactic to further your campaign strategy is essential. For every training session that Fabriders runs, whether it’s about utilising data effectively or social media, we’ve found it important to start with an exercise that gets participants to thinkabout the goals […]

A Quick Advocacy Strategy Exercise w/ Stakeholder Mapping & Power ...

We co-wrote The Listening Cycle with Jessica Steimer, who has been helping non-profits use social media more effectively as part of her work with Aspiration. Jess rocks! Find her on twitter @JSteim. You can also find a version of this article on the Aspiration Social Source Commons Blog. Social media […]

The Listening Cycle, Part I

I was recently in Kiev, for Tactical Studios, running a training on Social Media for the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network, GIZ and Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe. To be fair, not everyone in the training was a drug user – there were advocates from a variety of different marginalised communities that were being […]

What I Learned from Drug Users

Please note: a new version of this exercise is now available: Using the Spectrogram for Stakeholder Mapping and Power Analysis. Click here for Step 1: Stakeholders  or here for Step 2: The Half Wheel Now it’s time to build a pyramid using the post-it notes along with the annotations showing […]

The Half Wheel & The Pyramid: The Pyramid (Step 3 ...

Please note: a new version of this exercise is now available: Using the Spectrogram for Stakeholder Mapping and Power Analysis. Step 2. The Half Wheel See also: Step 1: Stake-holders or Step 3: The Pyramid Next, the participants should take a big piece of paper and draw a half wheel […]

The Half Wheel & The Pyramid: The Half Wheel (Step ...

Please note: a new version of this exercise is now available: Using the Spectrogram for Stakeholder Mapping and Power Analysis. Or Using Power Analysis to Identify Technology Tactics for your Campaign in Three Easy Steps. Background: Understanding how any technology that you use in campaigning functions as a tactic to […]

The Half Wheel & The Pyramid (Step 1 of 3)