Inventive Response to a Troll Problem Engaged Major Donors

Xponential is proud to be a Principal Award Sponsor of the 2024 FIA National Awards for Excellence in Fundraising. The first in our series of interviews with award winners is with Amnesty International Australia winner of the Most Outstanding Fundraising Project, “Trollbait Campaign”.

We spoke with Tom Beech (Digital Marketing Specialist) and Jessica Pecar (Supporter Development Lead).

Amnesty International’s online campaigns and content experience aggressive misinformation and abuse by online trolls. As a creative way to address this, Amnesty approached major donors who supported a new kind of matched giving campaign. For a short period around May 2023, they made a secret donation every time Amnesty received a misinformation or troll comment. Imagine the sweet irony of raising $10,000 towards the cause that the trolls attacked, unknowingly through their very activity.

Xponential: What was the origin of the campaign?

Tom: It was born out of frustration, and our moderators’ experience that the usual process of hiding and reporting troll comments often does little to prevent the spread of misinformation and can create an unsafe space for supporters. Also, dealing with abusive comments is emotionally exhausting for moderating staff.

The idea itself was generated by our Development Team, which we then worked on with our Philanthropy Team and various internal stakeholders. There was a lot of excitement about making this idea happen, it was a lot of fun.

Jess: Mohamed Duar, our Philanthropy Lead, thought of the right donors to approach - people who would be motivated by the strategic purpose and considered themselves activists. They were also interested in the content which we featured during the period of the campaign, which was about climate misinformation and Amnesty Australia’s call for more effective climate action in the Asia Pacific. The donors felt engaged in the activism, and they’ve now seen our FIA Awards submission and video.

Xponential: What were some of the best results?

Jess: Amnesty has learned something really useful about innovation. For this project, we adopted an intentional process, deliberately encouraging work across different teams. We now have a regular “new ideas” meeting for the team, and when we find an innovation worth testing, we form a sub-team across different functional areas to work on that project. We’ve created space for innovation which is separate from “business as usual”.

Tom: For moderators, it was very popular and a lot of fun. The most satisfying part was the resounding silence from trolls for weeks after we announced the result of the secret campaign.

The idea also led us to an exciting piece of research. In that research, Nishad Kulkarni and the team set out to understand why we were getting so many troll comments. What became clear very quickly is that what a user is commenting, good, bad or untrue, matters less to social algorithms than if they are commenting at all. This is concerning because it means the more a person trolls, the more likely they are to be served content to pages they have trolled in the past. As such, when we dug a little deeper we learned a lot of our page’s ‘top fans’ were,? alarmingly, trolls. So we realised that unless we take further action against trolls, it is possible they could be inadvertently incubated in our comment sections.

Xponential: And something unusual from the project?

Tom: Strangely we created a different way of doing matched giving. We really hadn’t seen anything done like this before, so to try and bring it to life was such an unusual and careful process. But this was exciting because it felt bespoke, more true to us, and more in line with Amnesty’s goal of “challenging injustice”.

Congratulations to Amnesty International Australia. The campaign was also joint winner of the Most Innovative Campaign

Fundraising Institute Australia

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