Glossary

Plan and Strategize
Build Awareness
Mobilize
Stay Safe
Access Blocked Information
Collaborate
Fundraise

Plan and Strategize

Action

What you need your audience to do in order to achieve your campaign goal.

Audience

The group or individual who needs to take action for you to achieve your goal.

Campaign

A series of actions taken towards a specific (usually short-term) goal.

Long term goal

The overall mission or “guiding star” which motivates all your work as an activist for a particular cause.

Media

Platforms or tools used to store and deliver information.

Message

The information you will convey to your audience in order to convince them to take action.

Message Arc

A series of messages that move your audience from where they are to where you want them to be.

Mission

The long term goal which motivates all your work as an activist for a particular cause. Most formal nonprofit organizations have a mission statement that states this.

Neutral

A person who neither supports nor opposes your cause. This person will take no action.

Opponent

A person who opposes your cause. This person will take action to prevent your goal from being achieved.

Resources

What you have available to help you achieve your campaign goal. These resources can be broken down into financial, skill, and time resources.

Segmenting

Dividing an audience according to characteristics (political party, interests, etc.) that define their likely attitude towards your campaign. The goal of segmenting is present an audience with the exact message that will motivate them to take action for you.

Short term goal

The goal of this specific campaign. It should also support the long term goal (mission) of your cause.

Strategy

A clear plan of action to achieve a goal. It should makes the best use of resources and other factors available to your campaign in order create the change you seek.

Supporter

A person who supports your causes and wants it to succeed. Your goal is to convince supporters to take concrete action in support of your cause.

Tactic

Target

The person (often someone in authority) who have the direct power to give you want.

Build Awareness

Aggregator

A type of blog or section of a blog that compiles and organizes posts from other news sources

Analytics

Technology used to analyze the performance of a website. Webmasters use analytics to evaluate how they can increase website traffic or achieve other goals.

Blogroll

A series of links on a blog that link to other related blogs. It is typically located on a sidebar.

Blogging

A blog is a type of website or part of a website where an individual or group provide commentary or news on a particular subject. Blogs can also act as personal online diaries. In 2011, BlogPulse, a search engine for blogs, estimated that there were over 150 million blogs on the internet!

Bounce rate

The rate that describes how often different people are visiting your website and leaving without visiting other pages on the site

Conversion rate

The ratio of website visitors who complete a particular action or goal (which has already been defined by you). For example, what percentage of visitors click to join the email list and join?

DM or Direct Message

Private messages between only the sender and recipient. Tweets become DMs when they begin with "d username" to specify who the message is for. You can only send a DM to someone who is following you.

Embed

Adding code to a site to display media content hosted on another site.

Favorite

To favorite a Tweet means to mark it as one of your favorites by clicking the yellow star next to the message. You can also favorite via SMS. You can revisit your favorited tweets later by clicking on the “favorites” option.

FF

#FF stands for "Follow Friday." Twitter users often suggest who others should follow on Fridays by tweeting with the hashtag #FF.

Follow

To choose to receive someones tweets in your Twitter feed. When you "follow" @aym, you will see all of @aym's tweets when you log onto Twitter.com.

Friend

On Twitter, you don't have to follow users who follow you. If you do, and you are both following each other, then you are friends.

Hashtag

A hashtag is similar to a category tags on a blog. It's a tool that Twitter users created for themselves because there was no way to look at tweets by category. Hashtags have the 'hash' or 'pound' symbol (#) preceding the tag, like so: #traffic, #followfriday, #hashtag. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the tweet: some people just add a # before a word they're using. To see which hashtags are popular at any given time check out hashtags.org

Keyword

A significant word or phrase, relevant to the web page or document in question.

Page rank

This reflects how “important” a site is according to Google’s algorithm for ranking sites. Sites with high pagerank are usually easier to find than sites with low pagerank. A link from a site with a high pagerank also increases pagerank more than a link from a site with low pagerank.

Page views

The number of views one webpage of your site receives. Remember, people may not always reach your main homepage first.

PHP

This stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, a widely used scripting language used to write web applications

Pingback

An alert message that informs you that someone has linked to a piece of web content you have created.

Podcast

A type of blog whose posts are audio or video content instead of text.

Referral

This is a link from one website to another. Analytics tools often measure how many site visitors come from referrals from other sites.

@ Reply

When you want to publicly respond to another user on Twitter, put the @ symbol before their Twitter name. Like this: Hey @aym! You can also use the @ function if you the person you are targeting to notice your post.

Referring Sites

Websites that direct readers to your site via hyperlinks.

Robocall

Robocall is a term for an automated phone call that uses both a computerized autodialer and a computer-delivered pre-recorded message. The implication is that a “robocall” resembles a telephone call from a robot. Robocalls are often associated with political and telemarketing phone campaigns, but can also be used for public-service or emergency announcements.

RSS

Stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. People can use this to subscribe to blogs and are notified when the blog is updated with a new post.

RT or Retweet

When you want to raise attention to a tweet you agree with or find interesting, you can share it with your followers by re-posting their tweet. For example: RT @aym We just posted a cool new video about our protest yesterday: [LINK HERE]. What do you think?

Time on site

The amount of time people are spending reading the content on your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Methods used to make a website easier for search engines to find.

Tag

A tag is a marker that categorizes a post on a blog. It is used to organize blog posts to make them easier to find for visitors. Posts often have multiple tags.

Tweep

A Twitter user.

Tweet

An individual post on Twitter, which must be 140 characters or less.

Twitter Search

Searches everything that is being said on Twitter for your terms. You can search Twitter at search.Twitter.com, or by starting a new column in Tweetdeck by clicking the + button, or by choosing the “new search” option in an application on a mobile device.

Unique visitors

The number of different people visiting your site. Analytics tools measure how many unique visitors a site gets over a period of time. You want to pay attention to surges or dramatic drops in the number of unique visitors.

Visits

One visit means one time or one session browsing on the website. Google Analytics uses half an hour to measure a visit. You especially want to pay attention to surges or dramatic drops in the number of visits

Mobilize

Engagement ladder

This refers to the idea that by engaging an audience with a very easy and simple action at first, you can ask them to complete actions that require more and more committment over time and are more likely to succesfully compel supporters or potential supporters to take action on behalf of your campaign. 

Short code

A 3 or 4 digit number that can be made free for users who text that number.

Smart mob

A social practice by a group of people who coordinate and communicate primarily through the use of mobile phones and text messaging. Individuals are typically in pursuit of collective action with regards to a cause or goal.

SMS

Short message service. Also known as a text message.

Stay Safe

Add-on

Add-ons for Firefox are extras that can be downloaded and added to Firefox to enhance the functionality of the browser. They are available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Anonymizer

A tool used to make activity on your mobile phone untraceable.

Bridge relay

A private, unlisted relay that is harder for hostile ISPs to detect and block

Cloud computing

Computing in which services and storage are provided over the Internet (or "cloud"), instead of being on the user’s machine.

Cookie

A small piece of text stored on a user's computer by a web browser. A cookie consists of one or more name-value pairs containing bits of information. In some cases, cookies report back to the website, which can reduce a user’s privacy.

Digital signature:

A cryptographic digital code that can be attached to an electronically transmitted message or file that uniquely identifies and authenticates the sender or producer.

DNS resolver

The computer that connects the IP address (i.e. 800034803) to the domain name (google.com)

Domain name:

A string of words and/or numbers (such as "movements.org") that is a component of a URL that helps identify a specific web site; it may have a suffix such as .org, .edu, or .com.

Email client

A computer application that lets you download, send, receive, and manage email messages without a web browser. Popular examples include Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook.

Encryption

The process of converting data into a cipher or code in order to prevent unauthorized access.

Exit node

When using Tor, this is the point at which a packet is forwarded onto its original destination. It looks like it came from the Tor exit node, rather than the IP address of the anonymized user.

Firefox

Firefox is a free and open source web browser created by Mozilla. It can be downloaded at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html

Firewall

Part of a computer system or network that is designed to block unauthorized access while permitting authorized communications.

FTP

Short for File Transfer Protocol. This is a common protocol for transferring files online, but it is not secure.

GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG)

A program used to generate and manage the key pairs that are used in public key encryption to keep your email communications private and secure. You must install GnuPG before you can use Enigmail.

HTTP server

A computer program that delivers content, such as a web page, using HTTP over the World Wide Web

HTTPS

Stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. Signifies that communication with the server is secure and encrypted. Used by websites when it is important that the data being transferred is not compromised, such as during financial transactions.

Internet Protocol (IP)

The Internet Protocol defines how information is sent across networks. Every transmission of data under the IP involves packets and addresses.

Internet Protocol (IP) address

The number used to uniquely identify every computer (server or client) on the internet. Domain names often change their IP addresses causing content to shift across different IP addresses

Internet Protocol (IP) packet

The basic unit of information transferred over the Internet. A packet is made up of a header (which includes the IP address that the packet wants to go to) and a payload (the data within the packet). Packets have maximum sizes, so the full content being communicated is often split over multiple packets.

Internet service provider (ISP)

The company that provides the user with Internet access. Often operates the DNS resolver as part of a process called DNS lookup.

Java

A programming language used to build software applications for computers, mobile phones, and other devices. The application platform for mobile phones is known as Java ME. [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javame/overview/index.html]

Key

A password that is either public or private

Mozilla Seamonkey

Seamonkey is Mozilla’s all-in-one internet application that includes a web browser, e-mail, newsgroup and feed client, IRC chat, and HTML editing. Download at http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

MySQL

An open source database management system

OpenPGP standard

The most widely used email encryption standard in the world. The OpenPGP protocol defines standard formats for encrypted messages, signatures, and certificates for exchanging public keys.

PHP

This stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, a widely used scripting language used to write web applications

Relay

A computer that information passes through. Tor masks IP addresses by using a series of relays to send information.

Router

Directs IP packets to where they need to go. Routers identify computers (hosts) on the Internet by the computers’ IP addresses. Domain names represent IP addresses in a way humans can remember.

SSH

Short for Secure Shell. This is a secure protocol for transferring data online.

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)

Makes sure that all the packets sent from one machine to another are received and assembled in the right order

Tor

A privacy software that disguises or masks your IP address.

Unicode

The industry-wide character encoding standards for text that support all character sets/scripts

Vidalia

An interface software that connects to the Tor network and allows you to control your connection to it and settings.

Access Blocked Information

Cache

A temporary store of web pages held by a proxy server, the cache is used by requested for ISPs (the ISP operates the DNS resolver, so is necessary for connected domain names to IP addresses) from a second user of the same ISP it will give them the web page that is stored in the cache rather than connecting to the server again.

Circumvention

The act of evading censorship or a web filter.

Content Filtering

Communication is blocked according the contents of a packet (this is finer grained control than header filtering). It requires more equipment because routers usually just look at headers and not the content of packets.

Domain Name Server Filtering

For web browsing, IP addresses have to be connected to appropriate domain names. This happens using a “domain name resolver” - which refuses to answer a computers request for the corresponding IP address for a domain name if that domain name is on a list of blocked domain names.

Filtered ISP

An ISP that regulates what sites users can access.

Header Filtering

Communication is blocked according the destination IP address of a packet, or where the packet is going to or coming from, rather than the contents of the packet. Packets can also be blocked by port number.

Port number

This marks which process or program that is intended to use data sent from another computer. Each process has its own port. For example, if a user sends a server information on port 25, the server knows that this is an email message (Port 25 is the default email port).

Proxy Filtering

Using a proxy server to limit the access of a client to the internet. The client has to go through the proxy, which refuses to connect to certain websites or content.

Proxy Server

A computer system or an application program that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking information from other servers. Users can use proxy servers to access blocked content, but they do not typically conceal the identity of the person accessing the information. A content filtering proxy server serves to control access to web content for a client (or web user).

Web filter

Content control software that limits the content delivered to an Internet user.

Collaborate

Crowdsource

A technique used to solve problems by making the problem available to the public. Interested people can contribute solutions or suggestions to solve the problem.

FOSS

This stands for free and open source system

Open Source

Computer software where the source code is freely available to be used, redistributed or rewritten free of charge.

Wiki

A web-based application that enables a group of users to set up pages that can be edited within a web browser. Wikis allow users to collaborate on large projects.

Wiki family

Any group of wikis located on the same server

Wiki farm

A server that gives users the tools to create and develop their own wikis

Fundraise

PayPal

A site that allows users to securely transfer money electronically.

Widget

A standalone application that can be installed and executed within any HTML-based webpage by inserting the widget’s code. Widgets are often on-screen tools, like visitor count, a clock, or a donate button.