As activists, we communicate and create continuously. We collected a list of tools that will come in handy for you as as activist.
We cover two categories of tools on each of the pages listed below. Firstly, we list services that you can start using straight away, are easy to use, and are available at low costs. Secondly, we describe tools that are open source and can be installed on your own webserver. These tools require some developer experience to install.
You can contribute: This handbook is written by people like you. Feel free to create an account and add the tools that you find useful! Find out more about how to contribute.
¶ Communicating
- 💬 Chat apps: Community building continues online. These chat apps will enable your movement to stay in touch.
- ☎️ Video calling: These tools allow you to meet face to face even when you are on the other site of the world.
- ❤️ Social media: Reaching out to potential supporters is vital for every activist organisation. Check out our tips how to use various social media platforms more effectively.
- ✉️ Email and newsletters: Email may seem old fashioned, but sending out newsletters is still a great way to call people to action. We have made a comparison of several newsletter services.
- 📡 Broadcasting messages: If your contact list contains phone numbers, these tools will help you broadcast text messages to your audience.
- ❓ Support desk: No matter via what platform people reach out to you, these tools will help you communicate efficiently using omnichannel dashboards.
- 🔗 Website: Having a professionally looking website enables your members and others to find the information they are looking for. In this guide, we made a list of open source and cheap blogging, wiki and other website software for activist organisations.
- 🎤 Podcasts: Publish your audio recordings with one of these tools. Podcasts are a great way to convey your message in a personal way.
- 🍿 Videos: In this article we discuss various ways in which you can share videos with your fellow rebels, including Youtube and Vimeo, but also open source self-hosted alternatives.
¶ Organising
- ⚡ Organising: All-in-one solutions for membership management, hosting events, sharing petitions. Also make sure to check out our own free to use platform called Rebel Tools.
- 🙋♀️ Decision making
- ✅ Planning: e.g. Trello
- 💡Brainstorming: e.g. Mural
- 📂 Files and storage: e.g. Google Drive, Nextcloud
- 📝 Notetaking & documents: Airtable, Notion, Coda, Workflowy
- 🎤 Presentations: e.g. Google Slides, Pitch
- 🤖 Workflow automation: Zapier, n8n
- Forms: google forms, tally
¶ Acting
¶ Creative
- 🎨 Graphic design: Creating visually attractive imagery is a great way to illustrate your message. In this article you will find a list of photography and vector editing applications.
- 🎬 Video editing: By publishing promotional videos for your actions on social media and recording your protests, even people who are outside your direct circle will be able to get to know your movement.
¶ Security
You should protect yourself from hackers. As activist, you are in a high risk group. We highly recommend reading Watch Your Hack, which explains everything in layman's terms (1 hour reading time).
¶ Our honest approach
We only recommend tools that we actually like to use. We are not being payed to promote any services. We ask everyone who adds items to our collection to stay objective and review the tools with a critical mindset. Any spam or promotional contributions will be removed. However, if you have developed a useful tool for activists yourself, feel free to share it with us!
As most activist organisations do not have access to large funds, we prefer free and open source services over payed ones.
In addition, we like to see that the products that we use reflect the positive impact we are trying to make on this world. In other words: we do not only assess the quality of the tools that we review, but we also try to look at the people and organisations behind the tools.
¶ Related resources
- Apps and digital platforms for organizers by Blueprints for Change
- Tools for canvassing and door knocking by Blueprints for Change
- Digital security basics for campaigners by Blueprints for Change
- Texting campaigns by Blueprints for Change
- Volunteer-led phone banking by Blueprints for Change
- Org-in-a-box by Aslan French
- Privacy tools by Paper Revolution