Opium Season is about Hafvenstein’s time in Afghanistan in 2005, when he was working for a USAID funded cash-for-work project that was supposed to supplement the income of people who were due to lose money because of a poppy-eradication campaign.

The problem with donor driven programmes

What makes this book such a good  read is not only that it is well written, but also that it gives excellent examples for what’s wrong with donor-driven aid programmes.

From the very beginning, the project was not driven by the needs of the population, but by the donor’s requirement to create 2.5 million days of work in a Helmland province within a year. Hafvenstein writes: “Everything else – the amount of money we spent, the total number of people we hired, the nature of the jobs we created was flexible.”

In other words: whether the work made sense or was even counter-productive hardly mattered, as the project managers were struggling to meet the expectations of USAID. The worry that was constantly on their – and their bosses – minds was that if they failed, they wouldn’t get the next, bigger project. A poignant reminder that today, aid is a frequently seen as business first and something that can help people second.

Having money is not the same as having resources

Joel Hafvenstein writes about this with great honesty and explains very well how he reflected on these issues more and more the longer he worked in Afghanistan. The book also illustrates the lack of resources and the frustrations that a lot of aid managers have to deal with on a daily basis, even if the project is well funded. His efforts to get from one day to the next without screwing up on a monumental scale will feel familiar to many people who work in the non-profit sector.

Last but not least. I like “Opium Season” because it contains a lot of background information on the history of  the region and helped me to appreciate that hardly anything is clear-cut in Afghanistan.

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Harfoush (@rahafharfoush) was a volunteer with Obama’s new media team. She describes the different tools that the campaign used along a rough chronological narrative, which works surprisingly well. In addition to her own observations, most chapters also contain at least one short interview with a team member who had been working on that particular aspect of the campaign. Each chapter also has a short summary with “social media lessons”.

Yes We Did - An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand

Good balance

The thing I really like about this short (185 pages) book is that Harfoush managed to keep exactly the right balance between strategy and operational details. Too many books about social media still explain step by step how to set up a YouTube account or explain what a Facebook page is. Harfoush doesn’t do this. She assumes that her readers know the tools. She focuses on how they were used in this particular context and what the thoughts were behind this.

Know what you want to say

It is exactly the explanation of these thought processes which I find one of the most valuable things about the book. Because it shows clearly how crucial two elements are that are missing from most social media initiatives – certainly in the non-profit sector: an actual social media strategy and a clear message.

Harfoush shows beautifully how the different tools were used in concert to:

• Tailor messages for each micro-constituency while keeping  the overall message intact.
• Escalate involvement strategies on an individual basis.
• Give people a feeling that this was their campaign.
• Ask for small actions offline (thus creating an instant satisfaction feedback loop) to help the long-term goal.

Resources, resource, resources

The second thing I find really valuable about the book is that it gives you an idea of the resources that the campaign had at their disposal. Harfoush doesn’t give an exact number in her book, but by my count the new media team consisted of  at least 35 people.

Where most NGOs have (maybe) one web-person who is expected to be a jack of all trades, the campaign had their own email team, design team, online organizing team and even analytics team - you name it, they had a team. And from the sounds of it these guys and girls were busy seven days a week and working long hours. No non-profit or international organization has those resources. This makes this book an excellent instrument to counter questions along the lines of “Why can’t you do what the Obama campaign did?”.

To summarize: “Yes We Did – An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand” is an easy to read, interesting and really useful book. It is not a set of step-by-step instructions how to duplicate the Obama campaign. But if you are working with social media on a strategic level, I highly recommend you getting it.

Related posts:

1. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap
2. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections

I hope you like it. Please tell me what you think.

By the way: this is the first presentation I’ve done since reading Nancy Duarte’s excellent “Slide:ology“, a book I highly recommend to anyone who wants to improve his presentation skills.

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