In recent days a new controversy has been brewing in Oxford as Richard Dawkins has declined to debate visiting American theologian William Lane Craig and Craig’s supporters have taken out 30 ads on Stagecoach buses in the city (more from The Oxford Times) with the slogan “There’s Probably No Dawkins”.

My mother e-mailed me, asking whether she could donate to a counter campaign (along the lines of “Dawkins exists. Question is whether god does.” perhaps?) but, on reflection, I don’t actually think any counter campaign is needed.

The ”There’s Probably No Dawkins” bus ads use the same colours and font as the Atheist Bus did and when you see those buses you think Atheist Bus and/or atheism. The atheists framed the whole fun but thought provoking bus ads thing, and any religious rival campaign uses our frames. So this latest campaign is one more win for our efforts.

Atheist Buses are also now embedded enough in the British psyche to have also featured in a couple of books recently as well – Alexander McCall Smith’s Corduroy Mansions, and Marcus Brigstocke’s God Collar.

Not bad for an idea from a journalist and a campaign started by a blogger.

Hold on, are they just doing the old, traditional stuff (e-mail, follow up calls) very well? Or are all of their online advocacy efforts just for campaigns that otherwise do not get wider media coverage?

Because (and sorry to return to it) the Atheist Bus Campaign managed to use basically only Facebook, Twitter and blogs for the entire transmission of its message, and that resulted in online donations of £153,523.51, with more than 9000 donors. OK, over the months the website has clocked up almost 600k individual visitors (see Google Analytics below), with 24k in the Facebook group and 3k followers on Twitter – that’s not a fantastic conversion rate into donations – but it’s for sure a social media generated fundraising effort.

For more on social media (and web) fundraising see Webdesigner Depot’s 8 tips for a charity website, and Mashable’s Twitter fundraising tips.

[UPDATE] I made an impromptu presentation about Atheist Buses in Duane’s training course. Slides I used for that are here (40mb).

Spotted recently at St Pancras - mockup on the basis of an original CC / Flickr image

In some weird transport / religion crossover an online magazine called Communicate Jesus has done a write-up on the Eurostar mess and has linked to my post about the issue. Seems they did not notice the Atheist Bus banner in my sidebar Their article is entitled ‘Important lesson from Eurostar’ and the article is categorised ‘for Churches, for Pastors’. The idea of a sermon about Eurostar is a rather odd thought, or maybe they hope that some divine intervention will stop Eurostar breaking down in the future?

As seen on the streets of Zürich (not) - made with the bus slogan generator

The Swiss referendum banning the construction of minarets has caused a load of hand-wringing. Why?

Of course it’s absolutely wrong to deny freedom of religious expression, and the outcome of the vote is wrong. I’m no fan of any religion but here the Voltaire quote seems apt: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

But to be remotely surprised or aghast or shocked that Switzerland would pass such a vote strikes me as utterly ludicrous. After all the SVP/UDC is the largest party and Switzerland, it’s been fiendishly hard to get Swiss citizenship for decades, and it even took the country until 2002 to join the UN. The country’s direct democracy is seldom a force for anything progressive, and indeed seems to be quite the opposite.

And while everyone is having a good old rant at the offense caused to muslims by this vote, equally have a look at the difficulties atheists have had in Switzerland to run an advertising campaign – see the report below from Swiss TV from 9 months ago, and look at the way atheist posters have been defaced. Basically if you’re not christian then you don’t count (which is what the bus slogan above alludes to).

Launched today!

Gott am Bahnhof, Köln - J. Worth

One of the arguments that my German friends like to make against the Atheist Bus Campaign (and especially it’s German equivalent) is that ‘because there is no religious advertising on public transport in Germany atheists do not need to advertise’. This is the sort of reasoning why companies such as EVAG Essen declined the advertising.

So then what do I see when changing trains today at Köln Hbf? The pictured religious advertising right in the middle of the station! So much for there not being religious advertising that atheists are wholly within their rights to counter.

Germans also need to reflect a little about their vocabulary when it comes to atheists. I was introduced to someone (admittedly born and brought up in Baden-Württemberg) on Thursday who’s reaction to me – essentially a complete stranger – when someone said I was behind the atheist bus campaign was “das ist total schwachsinn” (“that is total bullshit”). Think about that for a moment. Am I going to go “that’s bullshit” to someone who I meet who is on the way to church? No I’m not, and it’s not socially acceptable to do so.

Apparently some grumpy old man with old fashioned ‘ethics’ has been invited by Gordon Brown to the UK next year. Time for another bus campaign?

(Image: Bus Slogan Generator)

Zukunftswerkstatt at Medienforum.NRW - © Medienforum.NRW

I’ve had a few interesting experiences with what I would call the media establishment over the last few weeks, notably when asked to present the atheist bus campaign at Medienforum.NRW in Köln and at the European Communication Summit in Brussels. Köln was a panel discussion in German, while Bruxelles was a presentation followed by Q&A – the presentation I used was similar to this one. To be on the programme with people both times with people much more senior yet being able to make audiences laugh, think and reflect has been quite an experience.

In both cases I was almost the youngest person present, one of the few not employed in the traditional media business, or in comms for a traditional agency or large corporate. My background is not typical – I worked for 3 years in the UK civil service before my freelance career started 2 years ago. At both events there was a dawning realisation that the world is changing, that the media landscape is changing, and that the traditional media and PR industries better up their game to try to keep up. All of this was rather elegantly summed up by Gallo Blog (the author was present at my session in Brussels):

To underscore this point, yesterday’s workshop had Jon Worth talk about his campaign AtheistBus.org.uk. In the time it takes for a company director to book a ’social media expert’ to come and speak to her/his Board, and for the board to agree, “Yes, this is important, let’s set up a task force”, someone like Jon has run an online/off-line campaign and is on to the next project. I exaggerate for effect, but not by much.

This ties in rather neatly with the article “EU lobbying scene not quite ready for next generation PR” from The EU Lobby blog, a blog that’s quickly rivalling Public Affairs 2.0 for good Brussels PR blogging. Yes, Facebook and Twitter might not be journalism as we know it, but those sorts of technologies are here to stay. Technological changes are allowing more to be done than ever before with less financial outlay and those with the right skills can profit – see for example how Danfung Dennis has adapted in war photography.

Perhaps the finest moment of the atheist bus campaign from a professional point of view was when I was called by PR Week, the magazine of the PR industry in the UK, and they asked me which PR firm we had been using. “None” was the answer… “It was a journalist with an idea and some contacts, and a website designer who knew some bloggers”. Needless to say no article was published by that particular publication. Perhaps they would do well to pay attention to this NY Times article cited by The Lobby, and maybe in London as well as in Brussels some urgent lessons need to be learnt as the economic crisis eats into organisations’ comms budgets.