Skip to content

New Year Poll: Setting the Agenda for 2012

Thanks for taking a few minutes to help set the course for Avaaz's future! As a people-powered movement, it's up to all of us to set our priorities and make overall decisions. This poll goes into some depth, so huge thanks for taking the time to go through it -- but feel free to skip questions if you don't have enough time. Every answer makes a difference!
1.Avaaz's mission calls us to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want. There are many such gaps, and we can only work on one or two of them each week -- so a shared sense of priorities is vital in choosing where to channel our energy. Please indicate which of these general issue areas you strongly believe should be a priority focus for Avaaz to campaign on:

1 (top priority)
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9 (lowest priority)
Economic policy that benefits the common good over the elite few
Biodiversity and Conservation
Poverty, disease and development
Political corruption and abuse of power
War, peace and security
Democracy movements and challenging tyrannical regimes
Food and health
Climate change and the environment
Human rights, torture, genocide, human trafficking
2.Avaaz members have already suggested a wide range of specific campaigns for this year. Check the boxes of the campaigns that you feel very strongly that we should prioritize:
3.All of our campaigns are made possible by the size, strength and commitment of our community, so we need to invest in our own capacity to make change. What do you think of each of these big ideas and directions for the development of our movement? Please indicate how excited you are by these ideas with 1 being most excited, 6 being least excited and 7 being opposed.
1 (most exciting direction)
2
3
4
5
6 (least exciting direction)
7 Oppose
a) Avaaz 2.0 - People-Power Meets Media
Old media is collapsing, with even major newspapers going bankrupt - and in some ways it deserves to decline. It's too often beholden to big corporate owners and advertizers, too superficial to create understanding, and too disempowering by constantly reporting problems without solutions or opportunities to act. With over 10 million subscribers, the readership of Avaaz is bigger than many of world's biggest news publications, and our members could become millions of correspondents creating people-powered media. We could launch a website that goes head to head with old media, providing citizens with deep and current insight in an outstanding daily briefing on what we need to know, and what we can do about it.
b) Crowd-Source Avaaz -- Create 10,000 Avaazes
Imagine if any Avaaz member could start their own Avaaz campaign and build their own online community, with full access to all the technology and tools that the Avaaz team currently uses. With this tool, we could run thousands of campaigns every week, at the local, national and international levels. The best campaigns would be supercharged by being sent out to the whole Avaaz community.
c) Go Offline
Avaaz regularly organizes rallies, protests, flashmobs, and vigils around key opportunities - 10,000 events and counting! But these events are one-offs -- what if instead of only being steadily connected online, our community got together regularly to meet face to face and organize offline - in schools, coffee shops, homes, and places of worship across the world. We are the world's biggest online movement - in this time of the Arab spring and the occupy movement and a rebirth of street protest across the world, maybe it's time to go offline as well.
d) Get Political
Unlike charities that accept tax deductions from governments, Avaaz is proud to be highly political, speaking out without constraint for and against politicians and their policies, because politics is all too often where the fight to save the world is won or lost. But in many countries the popularity of political parties is at an all-time low, and citizens are looking for alternatives. The next step for us might be to go deeper in our attempts to make politics serve people, and get involved in changing the parties and politicians we get to choose from at election time. How we do this would be different in different countries - in some we might create a meta-political affiliation, where any politician could get our community's support if they met the criteria our members set, in others our members might join some or all the political parties, placing Avaaz caucuses inside them to lobby for better policies and politics. In some countries our community might even help start new, people-powered political parties.
e) Radically Increase our Size
Much of the strength of Avaaz comes from our numbers. We're over 10 million strong now, the largest global group of our kind in history. But what if we could reach a much, much larger scale? Through viral campaigns, new technologies, and expansion of our campaigning into new languages and countries, we might massively increase our size and our impact.
f) Build a Larger, Powerful Base of Sustainers
Every big idea here will cost money, as does all Avaaz campaigning, but to remain independent and stay true to our mission we won't accept money from governments, corporations, foundations or any large donations from anyone! Currently just 20,000 Avaaz members fund all of our core operating costs. If we continue to rapidly grow the size of this base of sustainers, it will empower everything we do.
4.Which option best describes how you feel about Avaaz? (this gives us a sense of how we're all feeling about what we're doing together)
5.How good a job do you think Avaaz is doing?
6.In the last few years, we have used polls to guide our direction, but have also stayed nimble and shifted priorities to react to world events. How would you like us to use this year's poll?
7.To date, all our campaigning has been done by a very small team of just 25 campaigners. But with so much need for action around the world and a now 10 million member movement to serve excellently, Avaaz is considering doubling its team. This will cost money, but will mean we can significantly expand our campaigning and impact. Do you support this staff expansion?
8.Do you have any last comments, thoughts or ideas you would like to share with us (optional)?