Activist Handbook is a the Wikipedia for change-makers. Every month, we train about 12.000 new activists. On our platform, you can find 450+ guides and over 4.7K external resources.

Our goal #

All over the globe, green, social and progressive change-makers are trying to make a positive impact. But we often lack the skills to do so effectively.

That is why we built an online knowledge-sharing platform. It works just like Wikipedia: everyone can edit our articles. This way, we allow activists across countries and movements to exchange their experiences with change-making.

There are still many people that want to make this world a better place, but who do not know about Activist Handbook yet. There are also many topics that we do not have good guides on. And we operate with a very limited budget of only €50 per month to keep our website online. Help us scale up our project:

We are looking for organisations or individuals to take Activist Handbook to the next level! Are you training activists? Would you like to reach a global audience of change-makers? Do you have the financial means to invest in this project? Reach out:

[email protected]

Our history #

Activist Handbook was originally created by six activists (Sean Curry, Niks Derums, Joppe Hoekstra, Marijn Prins, Elizabete Vegnere and Daniel Whooley) from various countries in Europe during the FYEG Summercamp Hackathon 2019 in Serbia. We wanted to create a guidebook for fellow activists that would empower them to fight for change.

Our journey has not been one of steady growth. Instead, we have faced many challenges. Through it all, we have learned a lot about activism ourselves.

At our launch event, we sent an email to over 500 organisations announcing our project. We did not set up our Mailchimp account correctly, so most of those e-mails ended up in people's spam inbox. Oops...

In the beginning, we did not know that much about activism ourselves, which made it quite difficult to write good guides. Most of our work since has been collecting thousands (!) of books, guides and videos created by others, trying to learn from those teachers and building upon their work.

Working mostly online, we found it challenging to build strong social connections and keep people engaged with our project. Throughout the Covid crisis, we experimented with various creative ways of making our online meetings less boring and exhausting. While we definitely became better at it, we never really found a way to collaborate online that could compete with meeting up IRL.

In December 2021, we organised our first write-a-thon, in collaboration with FYEG. About 50 participants joined the hybrid online/offline event, coordinated from Brussels. In July 2022, we organised another write-a-thon, this time with 100 participants from both African and European countries. We coordinated the event from Greece, and had people coming together in small hubs in cities across the two continents. It was awesome to get together people from so many different places. However, our physical distance made it difficult to forge strong bonds, and unfortunately we lost touch with most participants after the event. Our lack of funding and difficulties with visas meant we could not get the entire coordination team to Greece.

After the event, our core group of volunteers fell apart. While our hard work did allow us to put together an event we had previously thought impossible, we also lost a lot of energy during the process. We had worked almost exclusively online, did not have any source of funding, and had been struggling to grow our small group of volunteers.

Throughout it all, the number of people reading Activist Handbook has been steadily increasing. As our collection of guides grew both in size and quality, more and more people started finding us via search engines. Today, over 100 co-authors have contributed to the handbook and we train about 12.000 new activists every month. We have also started to ask for donations to cover our website hosting costs.

Right now, the project is being maintained by Joppe. He moderates all contributions to the handbook, and spends his spare time (besides his paid job) writing new guides.

Do you have ideas on where this project could go next? We have achieved some incredible things with very limited resources. Right now, Activist Handbook is an awesome collection of guides with a decent number of readers, but we are certain you could take it to the next level.

If you can get together a group of people and arrange some funding, feel free to take initiative! We are happy to help you succeed:

[email protected]

Our content #

Many online platforms exist that host content for activists. So what makes us unique?

🕊 Free & reusable #

We publish all our work under a Creative Commons licence. Other people can freely redistribute and repurpose our work. It's out there for everyone to use, as long as it is not for commercial purposes. There is no paywall, no newsletter you have to sign up to first.

📖 Practical how-to guides #

We do not write inspirational or entertaining magazine articles. Our guides are practical and to-the-point. Each of our guides addresses a single challenge that activists face and provides step-by-step solutions.

♻️ Reusing existing work #

We copy other people's work and make it better. There is no point in reinventing the wheel. For each guide, we do extensive research to find out what resources already exist on the topic.

🗂 Well-organised content #

We organise our content with chapters, sub-topics, tags and lists of related articles: This makes it easier for people to find the content they are looking for, even if they do not quite know the right search term. In addition, we provide a super fast search engine.

Our research #

Activist Handbook takes a data-driven approach to training change-makers.

🔍 Analysing search queries #

We have analysed over 4.4K search queries that activists type into Google. We know what challenges activists face most, and what words they type into Google to find help. With this SEO data, we can write the guides that activists actually need and make sure our platform is found by the people looking for it.

📊 Measuring article quality #

Over the years, we have developed guidelines for our articles based on what we know works best. We measure reading time, scroll depth and other browsing behaviours to understand which articles need improvement.

Our tech #

We don’t just write guides. Activist Handbook develops digital tools to empower change-makers. We bring together our experience with web development and campaigning.

⚡️ Speed & accessibility #

Everyone should be able to use Activist Handbook, no matter if you are on a slow or expensive data plan. So we put in the work to make that possible. And it shows. For example, our platform loads 8x faster and uses 87% less data than the Beautiful Trouble website (tested using GTmetrix, 25 dec 2022).

💡 AI used for change #

Our writers never have to start with an empty page. Using artifical intelligence, we generate a first draft, as well as illustrations to accompany the guide. Whatever tech the capitalist elite can get their hands on to protect their interests, we use it too and fight back.

Our social media #

We are no longer active on social media. We want to invest our limited time in writing better guides, not feeding algorithms.

However, feel free to check out our not-so-up-to-date Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.