Several Texas anti-death penalty groups are jointly entered in the Jenzabar Social Media Leadership Award contest for $3,000. The winner is the entry that gets the most people to comment on their entry by April 30, so to “vote”, you leave a comment. We have a good chance to win this and we deserve to win because we have all used social media tools very effectively to jointly mobilize against the Texas death penalty.

Your comment won’t show up immediately, because it seems like the comments are moderated by the Foundation, so they should update the comments from the weekend on Monday.

http://tinyurl.com/cyf8fx

To help us win, you can just leave a short comment or a longer one on our entry. Go to the page and scroll down to the comment form. There are four fields, name, email, website (you can leave that blank or put in your own personal website or a website you like, such as the one of the sites of our anti-death penalty groups), and a field for your comment. Short comments could be like “nice work” “good job”, “they are doing a great job”, “impressive work, “I hope they win”, etc etc. Several Texas anti-death penalty groups are entered jointly, so in your comment you can be specific to one group or say something general about all the groups.

Our entry is called “Texas Friends and Allies Against the Death Penalty

http://thejenzabarfoundationblog.com/2009/04/24/texas-friends-and-allies

From the entry:

I would like to nominate for The Jenzabar Foundation Social Media Leadership Award: a group of allied organizations in Texas that have been using social media to effectively work together against the Texas death penalty: Texas Moratorium Network, Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement, the Austin chapter of Campaign to End the Death Penalty, Texas Students Against the Death Penalty, Kids Against the Death Penalty, Students Against the Death Penalty and the Texas Death Penalty Education and Resource Center. These groups have a cause on Facebook called Abolish the Death Penalty in Texas. Each organization brings unique skills and experiences to the cause. Decisions on how to use any award money will be made jointly by these organizations.

This alliance is a great example of how small organizations can have a remarkable impact way out of proportion to their funding by using social media tools to work together.

Texas is a challenging environment in which to work against the death penalty, but these groups have found a way to make significant progress against the death penalty by working together both offline and online using social media tools for education, outreach and grassroots organizing.

Texas is a large state, so it is vitally important for groups here to use social media tools effectively. In the future, we want to increase our capacity to work for human rights in Texas by finding new ways to expand our use of online social media tools in order to identify new activists and grow our movement to achieve legislative victories on policy and to organize campaigns to stop specific executions.

Most recently, these groups all worked together to get the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence to approve the bill to end the death penalty under the Law of Parties. We continue to push for a vote on that bill in the full House. On Monday, April 27, we are holding our second Lobby Day of the year in order to meet with more legislators about the bill and on May 2 we are holding a march and rally for the Law of Parties bill in Austin. We also have worked together on the campaign to remove Sharon Keller and of course on the annual March to Stop Executions.

If you think these groups have been doing a good job using online social activism tools, especially considering that we are all-volunteer organizations, please vote for us in The Jenzabar Foundation Social Media Leadership Award by leaving a comment on our entry.

http://tinyurl.com/cyf8fx

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