The National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI, is an organization dedicated to helping people dealing with mental illness and to further interests that would benefit them. These include gathering support for elections that could pass laws to help people dealing with mental illness and also organize fundraising events to donate to charities involving mental illness. Their websites are broken down into smaller sub-websites that are situated around individual regions around the country so that each one of these websites have information about events the organization have set up or sponsored in the area. They also provide links to support groups and personal community where members can discuss their own personal ties to mental illness issues. The online social sphere has allowed NAMI to connect with people across a large area and yet by allowing these sub-websites to cover smaller areas, the members feel like they have a smaller and more tight knit community. My group’s Facebook page tries to do this by inviting our friends to like it. This would hopefully create a sense of security and people would be more likely to participate.
The organization avoids clicktivism by avoiding gathering support by simple click to support functions. Their links provide members and visitors of the site with ways to actively participate, whether through real life events or forums and talk groups and donations. In this way with my posts I tried to engage the audience by providing links that would at the least require people to view the material. Links like the quiz site would provide people with competition allowing them to connect with the material instead of being presented with a form of clicktivism. The only form of clicktivism they use is to provide a sign up sheet that states that people are willing to vote for a law that the organization supports.
Their social media platforms usually involve just websites but their influence extends to Facebook where they have sub-sites that act just like their sub-websites. They are limited to areas thus creating smaller sub communities for participation. Here people are more likely to post a variety of information. Where the websites are more structured, the social media platform is more loose in the type of content posted. Most of the posts are personal stories but there are also connections to other media such as videos, memes, and images. On my Facebook page I tried also posting multiple media sources. These connections to mass media are important in building more interest because the content is then more relatable and people are attracted to that. NAMI’s Facebook pages do that by allowing people to be creative and express their own ideas of what mental illness, and especially awareness, mean to them and so they create this saturation of the online space.
The organization NAMI has provided us with insight into how effective having multiple online platforms is in engaging audiences from different angles. The way to avoid clicktivism is through providing ways for people to truly see the material and then allow it to mean something personal. NAMI accomplishes this through more structured websites, but important mass media connections are made by people visiting their Facebook page and sharing their creativity. I attempted to combine these by the posts shared on my group’s Facebook page.
A Word To the Wise 