As campaign builders in the digital age, we at EchoDitto often find ourselves discussing “slacktivism” – the clever portmanteau for slacker-activism that has attained recent popularity among the left-leaning, politically savvy. As with most socially-entwined discussions, we’re not entirely sure what makes it so intriguing. But we do know one thing: it is not a question of why slacktivism exists. The structure of our society necessitates this strange breed of attached disengagement. After all, people are busy. Life is extremely complex. We enjoy less job security and less financial security than in the past. Moreover, causes and campaigns are plentiful. Everyone who gets anywhere near an internet connection is faced with complete information overload—making it incredibly difficult to hone in on a single campaign.

No, the question of slacktivism continues to come up precisely because nobody really understands quite what it can do for us yet. Slacktivists are paradoxical creatures. On the one hand, they’re eager to help, and they may feel very strongly about certain causes. On the other hand, if we ask them to translate that conviction into anything more than a few mouse clicks or a small donation, we often lose them – or so it seems, anyway.

Gilles Lipovetsky is a French writer whose books are fascinating precisely because they offer almost clairvoyant play-by-play coverage of the rapidly changing structures of our wired society. His most recent work, Hypermodern Times, keenly observes that many of the rigid and lumbering social institutions of the past are now long gone—institutions that lent people security and stability in exchange for much of the independence we now consider commonplace. What to do with your earnings, evenings, and career was far more constrained in the past, a time when necessity and circumstance ruled. Now, however, we confront these questions as individuals. In the wake of these changes, people seem to be rapidly dividing themselves into two broad categories. On the one hand are what you might call the “type A” personalities (Lipovetsky doesn’t; I’ve appropriated the term from some other literature in psychology). They’re ambitious, they crave success, and they’re willing to go out and do whatever it takes to win. They’re highly responsible, self-policing, and good at leading organizations. Most importantly for campaign strategists, they thrive in conditions of uncertainty, fluidity, and information overload. Campaigns love them: they’re your go-getter activists.

Then there are the others – the “type Bs.” Maybe these folks are more easygoing, less fiery and driven. Maybe they’re downright apathetic or fearful. They might be more prone to problematic or irresponsible behavior, and they usually make less inspiring and talented leaders. My colleague Bonnie Shaw posted an article yesterday about some of the less noble trends developing among people in contemporary societies — the proliferation of reality TV, in this case — and about how we might capture the hidden benefits of those trends to fuel progressive causes. In the same way, some of the underlying causes of slacktivism — laziness, apathy, timidity — seem to be problematic for democracy and activism. But that’s only because we haven’t made good use of them yet. How can we be faulted? It’s not immediately obvious what they are able to bring to our campaigns.

The solution will come fairly easily if we clarify a few things. Most good writing is a little exaggerated, and Lipovetsky’s is no exception. His fascinating tract glosses over the fact that most of us contain both tendencies, and that we can swing between the two quite wildly. And this is precisely the problem for online organizers, is it not? If the world divided itself up into two well-delineated categories, and if people didn’t tend to oscillate unpredictably between them, it would be far easier for online organizers to know how best to direct their efforts. If Bs are really as bad as they’re made out to be, then it would make sense to dismiss them. Get the As on board, and forget about the rest.

At present, this black-and-white strategy seems to be how many campaigns are run. Much of the outreach work seems to revolve around figuring out either how to target and mobilize the type A people or how to turn the other, less motivated sort into type A people. At best, type Bs are encouraged to give some money and, in recent months, tweet about it. It’s probably not deliberate or conscious on the part of organizers. I believe it’s simply a lack of creativity that has ensnared us.

Exaggeration or not, this “Lipovetskian” approach isn’t totally misguided. And the Obama campaign proves it. There are an incredible number of extremely motivated type A people hiding in the woodworks. But while this generated a windfall of participation for Obama, it fails to capture every possible resource available in this complex landscape of personalities.

Fortunately for the President, his campaign proved the contrary point as well. That is, slacktivists thrive on the web. By putting together a website that made it easy to find and call voters in swing states, the campaign was able to mobilize a huge B-leaning demographic – namely, those Democrats who really wanted to get out and help the campaign but who were too busy or too apprehensive to confront potentially hostile territory in person. The Bs—these gold mines of problematic personality traits—are our potential slacktivists. We just have to be creative enough to find things for them to do.

Most type B people aren’t going to become type A volunteers. Furthermore, some type As are too busy to attach themselves to campaigns in type A ways. If you don’t give all of these folks another way to contribute or participate (besides, of course, simply donating money), you’re going to lose them. Lipovetsky may be onto something when he breaks people up into A and B flavors, but when online organizers subtly (though perhaps unconsciously) dismiss one as being too vanilla, they’re failing to be pragmatic.

Obama is just a start though. Over the past few months, Britain’s The Guardian newspaper has been running a project called “Investigate your MP’s expenses.” Readers are called upon to rifle through countless pages of expense reports searching for suspicious expenditures. It’s essentially a crowd-sourced corruption investigation. While this task may seem both dull and daunting, The Guardian’s website makes it all seem brilliantly simple. You can read as many expense claims as you want — or just one — and then all you have to do is click a large, pretty button marking each claim as either unimportant or worthy of deeper investigation.

The Guardian’s project is working so well because it’s something that people can do in little pieces, alone, at home, or on the metro. It’s not even necessary to create an account on the site. The barriers to entry are incredibly low, the commitment is whatever people made of it, and unlike calling swing voters or going door to door, it doesn’t involve any uncertainties. The MP project is prime slacktivism territory. Like SETI@home long before it, it gives people a sense that they’re getting something for almost nothing. A feeling of involvement and pride in exchange for a few spare cycles here and there? It’s a trade few people would hesitate to make. Furthermore, it’s a trade that’s working out beautifully for the activists. There are only so many dedicated, highly-skilled workers on the team, but the low-skill work done by the informal team of slacktivists has turned an unimaginably tall and esoteric mountain of MP receipts into something far more manageable.

This brings us to what I believe to be the central issue in all of this. In order to maximize the amount of energy you can draw from a pool of volunteers, you have to create a clear division of labor. Separating the two camps will benefit your activists and your slacktivists alike. Energetic activists might be prone to take on any task that needs doing, whether or not it’s actually the best use of their skills. They’ll burn out. At the same time, slacktivists may be scared off by any project that violates a certain threshold of involvement. Be minimal. And furthermore, however small they start, projects suffering from a nebulous and vague scope have a tendency to balloon over time. Slacktivists can smell this kind of trouble from a mile away – so be precise with them as well.

By clearly delineating the tasks your volunteers are asked to do into two sets — a high-commitment, high-skill group and a low-commitment, lesser-skill group — you’re more likely to retain your slacktivists and to keep your activists from losing their grip on sanity.

It’s easy enough to suggest strategies like this in some abstract way. But more concretely, what kind of work constitutes effective slacktivism?

• Answering text messages or emails sent to the campaign with pre-written, stock replies (imagine Agrotext in Kenya, addressing a wider array of problems in far more areas, staffed entirely by slacktivists).
• Processing any kind of data that’s too complex for computer algorithms. The MP expenditures reports on the Guardian’s project are a perfect example of this. What other kinds of documents can we obtain for examination? Maybe items exposing voter fraud or tax fraud.
• Combing the internet or a database of contacts for potential supporters. This often requires human eyes, but they don’t always need to be skilled activist eyes.
• Organizing campaign logistics from afar.
• Disseminating information through social networks, online and offline. Bonus points for doing something more than a simple tweet or Facebook status update. A real message to a friend is far more likely to be noticed.
• Provide information to campaign staff about their region that might only be available to locals (local needs, local preferences and values, etc). For example, for our work with the Medco Foundation’s Give Health a Hand initiative, it might be useful to draw on local slacktivists to determine which underserved communities need free medications most.

The subject of slacktivism causes no shortage of contention among online organizers and progressives, and I imagine it will continue to do so for some time. Its root causes are dangerous for democracy – that is, if we don’t figure out how to channel them properly. A little creative thinking, on the other hand, can quickly turn lead into gold. Part of the Obama campaign’s success was activating a demographic that simply needed to be given the right sort of projects. As the amount of information campaigns need to process steadily increases over the coming decades, organizers may find themselves in a surprising position—they may actually cherish laziness in their volunteers.