Billed as the film “every South African should see”, Miners Shot Down is a documentary about the Marikana massacre which is worth watching again as we approach the anniversary of the killings and the end of the inquiry. If you can watch it, that is. It’s already been shown on DSTV and Al Jazeera, but there is a campaign to get the film shown on SABC and eTV – and hence available to all. Nearly 4 000 people have signed an online petition to ask terrestrial broadcasters to show the film in the two weeks since the campaign launched – which is a fairly substantial number by any count. The petition was delivered the broadcasters’ respective offices this afternoon.

If you’re reading this site, the chances are that you won’t have heard of this campaign or amandla.mobi, the organisation behind it. That’s because, as activist and amandla.mobi founder Koketso Moetsi put it to an audience at the Guardian’s Activate conference in Joburg recently, amandla.mobi’s aim is to put all the awesome digital tools people like us evangelise – like open data, civic reporting apps and the free flow of information that the world wide web encourages – into the hands of people who could actually benefit from them most. Namely people who don’t have access to broadband internet, who don’t carry smartphones.

“Our first campaigns have been ‘pilot’ campaigns in that we’ve been testing the mobile technology and campaign model we’ve been developing,” says Moetsi, “Having said that, our unemployment campaign mobilized 250 people and together with local young people we’re organising a meeting with the Ekurhuleni Municipality to hold them to account in implementing the nation youth policy which includes funding ‘youth desks’ where young people can access information about jobs, bursaries and learnerships.”

In a nutshell, amandla.mobi is Change.org or Avaaz.org – the hugely successful online petition platforms – for Africa. Using it is simple: people will be able to create a campaign on the amandla.mobi website, and others can sign up to support it using the webform, a Mxit app or by dialling a star messaging number. For the Marikana campaign, for example, you could have dialled *120*4729# and selected 1 from the USSD menu that appeared. This then goes on to ask you for your name, location and – if possible – email address.

The USSD technology developed by the Praekelt Foundation, namely its Vumi platform for SMS and star messaging, which lets amandla.mobi log certain details and fire over question and answer text messages. Once you’re signed up to a campaign, organisers can send updates, invite you to meetings and publish rally dates, as well as send out regular mailshots regarding other campaigns you might be interested in.

Letting people know about campaigns which they might want to support has been the secret to Avaaz.org’s success. It has a database of nearly 40 million people it knows might sign up for certain causes if they knew about them, and uses that knowledge to help campaigns spread.

The downside, of course, is that it encourages ‘clicktivism’. Malcolm Gladwell famously railed at the profusion of social media activists in a 2010 New Yorker argument. “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice,” Gladwell wrote.

amandla.mobi seems to avoid many of Gladwell’s concerns so far, however, by tying in virtual activism – signing up for a petition – with real world action too. So far, the campaign to get Miners Shot Down onto terrestrial TV is by far the most successful of the pilot campaigns, but Moetsi says she’s also been happy with responses to two other test runs, one of which was to pressure Joburg Police to volunteer at soup kitchens and help the homeless, and the other was a call for investigations into allegations of shootings by Sun City security guards.

But it’s still very early days.

“After testing our assumptions and using these pilot campaigns to refine our work, we will officially launch,” says Moetsi.

As for that official launch, we’re told it will be “soon”.