Introduction
A collection of free tools for your digital campaigning programs including content creation and content planning tools. This list has kindly been shared by the Climate Advocacy Lab who gathered and noted these tools from a talk by Josh Klemons from Reverbal Communications.
Content Creation Tools
Creating content for email, web, SMS, and several social media channels can be really overwhelming, especially with a small comms team (or a team of one). Canva is probably my favorite free content creation tool – it’s a surprisingly sophisticated graphic design platform without the price tag or training needed to fully take advantage of software like Photoshop.
Canva has some free stock images, but if you want more options, Better Allies has a great list of inclusive free stock photo sites, including sites that feature gender and racial diversity, as well as plus size and disabled folks. For a more general way to search free stock image sites, use O-Dan or the Creative Commons image search.
Video editing can be really intimidating – but also important for social media content. The apps CapCut (owned by tiktok’s parent company) and Instagram Edits were built to help people create better content for those channels and are easy to use for non-experts.
If you get anxious when you have to write something, Grammarly and Hemingway can help make sure your writing is concise, easy to read, and grammatically correct. Related Words is fun for the word nerds – it helps you find that one word you’re looking for.
Content Planning
OK, but what are you going to make content ABOUT? How can you plan a content calendar that’s engaging and relevant? Want to see how others in your space (allies, opponents, or targets) are talking about your issues?
The Meta Ad Library and the Google Ad Library have years of archived political and advocacy ads. Milled and Political Emails do the same for email programs. You can even look up your own org’s emails or ads – a great resource if you’re new and your internal archives aren’t doing it for you.
Trying to plan a social media calendar that stays relevant? Use Into Action Lab’s cultural calendar to identify days that might be related to your mission, like this weekend’s anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act signing – or have fun with International Tell-a-Joke day (both this Saturday).
You can use a tool like feedly or mailbrew to keep track of newsletters and podcasts you follow. And if you don’t have a tool to manage and schedule your social media posts across channels, publer has a free tier to try out.
Techie Skills for the Non-techie
When I first started out as an organizer, I was intimidated by digital staff because everything seemed to involve a lot of tech and coding skills I didn’t have. If you could have shown 21 year old me everything you can do WITHOUT knowing complex code, I would have been amazed. Here are a few tools that let you act like you know your way around a website or an email program.
Search engine optimization is important if you want people to be able to find resources or information on your website. If you have a WordPress-based site, don’t forget to use their SEO tools when creating a new page or blog post. You can also use ubersuggest to find the best keywords and topics, or Answer the Public to understand what people are searching relevant to your issues.
And finally, a grab bag of cool web and email tools: Broken Link Checker does just that: crawls your website to find broken links. Google PageSpeed Insights tells you if users will have any trouble loading your site on desktop or mobile. Strip HMTL lets you take blog posts or emails you’ve written in Google Docs or Word, and strip any excess code out before you load them into your website or email program (this is especially important for making sure your emails get delivered). And WebAIM has a bunch of great tools to make sure your website is accessible to folks with a variety of disabilities.
Explore Further
- Digital Tools Newsletter by Reverbal Communications
- Digital Tools Assessment Template
- 4 Magic Steps to Creating Shareable, Purpose-driven Social Media Content
- Social Media Activism: A guide to online change making
- How to change the story on social media: ACF Community Toolkit
- Online Tactics: Digital Storms
- How to: Using Facebook groups for organizing
- The Death of the Follower: Progressive Organizing in the Age of Algorithmic Discovery
- Bluesky 101: How-to Guide for Progressives
- Digital Campaigning in Europe: A Series of Articles
- Digital Organizing Frameworks and Models
- TikTok for Organizing: How Groups are Using TikTok in Campaigns
- How campaigners are using Instagram
- Live tweeting at rallies and marches
- Fighting online racist trolls