To carry out the comparative analysis of Fossil Free Stanford and Who’s teaching us, this project will ask four big questions and then explore all these areas further. The four questions are: what kind of messages were these groups asking, what was the measurable impact of these messages, what platform was this message on and lastly, what kinds of media (text, images, statistics) were used.

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The first two questions will focus on activism — they will look at the intentions of activists and their success or failure to meet their objectives. To measure the impact of the activist messaging on the audience, it is first important to understand what impact the message was intended to have — and there are 4 different components parts to understanding that answer, that activists need to ask themselves. These questions are:

1. What are they trying to communicate? What is the content of their message, what do they really care about people knowing? Is it something simple that can be communicated in a hashtag — like BLM — or does that hashtag need to accompany a more complex, more thorough knowledge to be useful?

2. Who are they trying to reach? Audience matters — are these activists trying to reach those in power or are they trying to reach as many people as possible so they can leverage the power of the people? Are they aiming for a certain demographic?

3. How do they want people to react to this information — do they want to inform people so they know of the problem, do they want to change attitudes with their message, do they want people to share the message to amplify it and/or do they want to motivate people to take some action?

4. What medium will they use to convey/spread this message — what channels of distribution will they use and in what form will this information be circulated?

Getting the answers for these questions from activists will allow a comparison between their message, their target demographics, the investment they demanded from their audience and their media strategies.

The next question of impact takes this information to survey students on Stanford’s campus to measure three different types of engagement, because as outlined in the paper, "Terms of Engagement: Analyzing Public Engagement with Organizations Through Social Media" by Brian G. Smith and Tiffany Derville Gallicano, there is a lot of ambiguity that surrounds the term engagement when used online. For the purpose of this paper, engagement can be taken of three levels, each requiring higher engagement than the last: being aware, being convinced (agreeing with the message), being a part of the collective action. These can be measured, respectively, by looking at the number of people reached, the number who agree and the number who were involved in the protests.

To measure the number of people reached, this paper will look at statistics from the group's facebook page and google analytics for their website (if it exists), as well as a survey sent out to students. To measure whether people were convinced, the survey will ask respondents to answer on a scale whether they agree or disagree with the group's main message. To measure involvement, statistics from the group’s size, the size of their protests and the social media statistics of engagement will be used.

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The total sample size for this survey, sent out to Stanford students via google forms in November 2016, is 70 students.