Here's some info. on putting together great action alerts on the Internet.
It might be helpful to go down the checklist near the end before posting
an action alert to the list.
kelly
Designing Effective Action
Alerts for the Internet
_________________________________________________________________
by Phil Agre
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
La Jolla, California 90095-1520
USA
[log in to unmask]
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
Version of 23 December 1998.
Copyright 1994-1998, all rights reserved.
_________________________________________________________________
This is an updated version of an article from the January 1994 issue
of The Network Observer.
Acknowledgements.
I appreciate the comments and suggestions of Steven Cherry, Nathan
Newman, Steven Snedker, and Larry Yates. Jillaine Smith of the Benton
Foundation did the HTML markup as part of her Best Practices Toolkit.
An action alert is a message that someone sends out to the net asking
for a specific action to be taken on a current political issue.
Well-designed action alerts are a powerful way to invite people to
participate in the processes of a democracy. Having seen many action
alerts in my twenty years on the Internet, I have tried to abstract
some guidelines for people who wish to use them. Even if you do not
plan to construct any action alerts yourself, I do not recommend that
you forward anybody else's alerts unless they conform to at least the
spirit of these guidelines. If I sometimes seem stern or didactic in
my prescriptions, please forgive me. It's just that I've seen badly
designed action alerts do an awful lot of damage.
Although an Internet action alert should always be part of an issue
campaign with a coherent strategy and clear goals, I won't discuss the
larger strategic questions here. Instead, I will simply divide action
alerts into two categories, single messages and structured campaigns.
Single alerts are broadcast in the hope that they will propagate to
the maximum possible number of sympathetic Internet users. Structured
campaigns are typically conducted through mailing lists specially
constructed for the purpose, and their intended audience may include
either the whole Internet universe or a narrower group of already-
mobilized partisans.
Both types of action alerts are obviously modeled on things that have
been happening on paper, through telephone trees, and lately via fax
machines, for a long time. What computer networks do is make them a
lot cheaper. A networked alert can travel far from its origin by being
forwarded from friend to friend and list to list, without any
additional cost being imposed on the original sender. This phenomenon
of chain-forwarding is important, and it behooves the would-be author
of an action alert, whether a single message or a whole campaign, to
think through its consequences:
1. Establish authenticity. Bogus action alerts -- such as the
notorious "modem tax" alert -- travel just as fast as real ones.
Don't give alerts a bad name. Include clear information about the
sponsoring organization and provide the reader with several ways
of tracing back to you -- e-mail address, postal address, URL,
phone number, etc. Including this contact information makes sense
anyway -- you want people to join your movement, and this means
establishing contact with you. One way to establish authenticity
is by appending a digital signature, presumably using PGP. Few
people will check the signature, though, and many people will
remove the signature when they forward your message to others. So
there's no substitute for clearly explaining who you are and
giving people a way to reach you.
2. Put a date on it. Paper mail and faxes get thrown away quickly,
but action alerts can travel through the Internet forever. Even if
an alert seems to have faded away, it can sleep in someone's
mailbox for months or years and then suddenly get a new life as
the mailbox's owner forwards it to a new set of lists. Do not
count on the message header to convey the date (or anything else);
people who forward Internet messages frequently strip off the
header. Even better, give your recommended action a clearly stated
time-out date, e.g., "Take this action until February 17, 1998".
If you think there will be follow-up actions, or if you want to
convey that this is part of an ongoing campaign, say so. That way,
people will contact you or look out for your next alert.
3. Include clear beginning and ending markers. You can't prevent
people from modifying your alert as they pass it along.
Fortunately, at least in my experience, this only happens
accidentally, as extra commentary accumulates at the top and
bottom of the message as it gets forwarded. So put a bold row of
dashes or something similar at the top and bottom so extra stuff
will look extra. That way it will be very clear what you and your
credibility are standing behind.
4. Beware of second-hand alerts. Although it is uncommon for someone
to modify the text of your alert, sometimes people will foolishly
send out their own paraphrase of an alert, perhaps based on
something they heard verbally. These second-hand alerts usually
contain exaggerations and other factual inaccuracies, and as a
result they can easily be used to discredit your alert. If you
become aware of inaccurate variants of your alert, you should
immediately notify relevant mailing lists of the existence of
these second-hand alerts. Explain clearly what the facts are and
aren't, implore the community not to propagate the misleading
variants, and provide pointers to accurate information including a
copy of your own alert. This action has two virtues: first, it may
help to suppress the mistaken reports; and second, it positions
you (accurately, I hope) as a responsible person who cares about
the truth.
5. Think about whether you want the alert to propagate at all. If
your alerts concern highly sensitive matters, for example the
status of specifically named political prisoners, then you will
probably want to know precisely who is getting your notices, and
how, and in what context. If so, include a prominent notice
forbidding the alert's recipients from forwarding it.
6. Make it self-contained. Don't presuppose that your readers will
have any context beyond what they'll get on the news. Your alert
will probably be read by people who have never heard of you or
your cause. So define your terms, avoid references to previous
messages on your mailing list, and provide lots of background, or
at least some simple instructions for getting useful background
materials. In fact, you might consider making the e-mailed alert
relatively short and include the URL for a Web page that provides
the full details. Your most important audience consists of people
who are sympathetic to your cause and want to learn more about it
before they can take action. Write your alert with that type of
reader in mind, not the complete insider or the apathetic
stranger.
7. Ask your reader to take a simple, clearly defined, rationally
chosen action. For example, you might ask people to call their
representatives and express a certain view on an issue. In this
case, you should provide a way to find that representative's name
and number, and explain how to conduct the conversation: what to
say, how to answer certain likely questions, and so on. The
purpose of such a script is not to impose your thinking but to
help people to learn a skill that might otherwise be intimidating.
Decide whether to ask for e-mail messages (which can be huge in
number but near-zero in effect), written letters (which will be
fewer but more effective), or phone calls (which fall in between).
Consider other options as well: perhaps the sole purpose of your
alert is to solicit contacts from a small number of committed
activists, or to gather information, or to start a mailing list to
organize further actions.
8. Make it easy to understand. It is crucial to begin with a good,
clear headline that summarizes the issue and the recommended
action. Use plain language, not jargon. Check your spelling. Use
short sentences and simple grammar. Choose words that will be
understood worldwide, not just in your own country or culture.
Solicit comments on a draft before sending it out.
9. Get your facts straight! Your message will circle the earth, so
double-check. Errors can be disastrous. Even a small mistake can
make it easy for your opponents to dismiss your alerts -- and
Internet alerts in general -- as "rumors". Once you do discover a
mistake, it will be impossible to issue a correction -- the
correction will probably not get forwarded everyplace that the
original message did.
10. Start a movement, not a panic. Do not say "forward this to
everyone you know". Do not overstate. Do not plead. Do not say
"Please Act NOW!!!". Do not rant about the urgency of telling
everyone in the universe about your issue. You're not trying to
address "everyone"; you're trying to address a targeted group of
people who are inclined to care about the issue. And if the issue
really is time-critical then just explain why, in sober language.
Do not get obsessed with the immediate situation at hand. Your
message may help avoid some short-term calamity, but it should
also contribute to a much longer-term process of building a social
movement. Maintaining a sense of that larger context will help you
and your readers from becoming dispirited in the event that you
lose the immediate battle.
11. Tell the whole story. Most people have never heard of your issue,
and they need facts to evaluate it. Facts, facts, facts. For
example, if you believe that someone has been unjustly convicted
of a crime, don't just give one or two facts to support that view;
most people will simply assume they are getting half the truth. If
your opponents have circulated their own arguments, you'll need to
rebut them, and if they have framed the facts in a misleading way
then you'll need to explain what's misleading and why. On the
other hand, you need to write concisely. Even if you are focused
on the actions, good explanations count more. After all, one of
the benefits of your action alert -- maybe the principal benefit
-- is that it informs people about the issue. Even if they don't
act today, your readers will be more aware of the issue in the
future, provided that you don't insult their intelligence today.
12. Don't just preach to the converted. When you are very caught up in
your cause, it is easy to send out a message in the language you
use when discussing the issue with your fellow campaigners. Often
this language is a shorthand that doesn't really explain anything
to an outsider. If you really care about your issue, you'll take
the time to find language that is suitable for a much broader
audience. This can take practice.
13. Avoid polemics. Your readers should not have to feel they are
being hectored to go along with something from the pure
righteousness of it. Some people seem to associate non-polemical
language with deference, as if they were being made to bow at the
feet of the king. This is not so. You will not succeed unless you
assume that your readers are reasonable people who are willing to
act if they are provided with good reasons.
14. Make it easy to read. Use a simple, clear layout with lots of
white space. Break up long paragraphs. Use bullets and section
headings to avoid visual monotony. If your organization plans to
send out action alerts regularly, use a distinctive design so that
everyone can recognize your "brand name" instantly. Use only plain
ASCII characters, which are the common denominator among Internet
character sets. Just to make sure, do not use a MIME-compliant
mail program to send the message; use a minimal program such as
Berkeley mail. MIME is great, but not everybody uses it and you
don't want your recipients getting distracted from your message by
weird control codes. Format the message in 72 columns or even
fewer; otherwise it is likely to get wrapped around or otherwise
mutilated as people forward it around the net.
15. DO NOT use a chain-letter petition. A chain-letter petition is an
action alert that includes a list of names at the end; it invites
people to add their own name to the list, send in the petition if
their name is the 30th or 60th etc, and in any case forward the
resulting alert-plus-signature-list to everyone they know. This
idea sounds great in the abstract, but it really doesn't work. The
problem is that most of the signatures will never reachtheir
destination, since the chain will fizzle out before reaching the
next multiple of 30 in length. What's even worse, a small
proportion of the signatures will be received in the legislator's
office many times, thus annoying the staff and persuading them
that they're dealing with an incompetent movement that can never
hold them accountable.
16. Urge people to inform you of their actions. If you are calling on
people to telephone a legislator's office, for example, you should
provide an e-mail address and invite them to send you a brief
message. Explain that you'll use these messages to count the
number of callers your alert has generated, and that this
information will be invaluable when you speak with the
legislator's staffers later on. Only do this, though, if your mail
server is capable of handling 50,000 messages in a short period.
You might want to check this out with your service provider
beforehand.
17. Don't overdo it. Action alerts might become as unwelcome as
direct-mail advertising. Postpone that day by picking your fights
and including some useful, thought-provoking information in your
alert message. If you're running a sustained campaign, set up your
own list. Then send out a single message that calls for some
action and include an advertisement for your new list. If you must
send out multiple alerts on the same issue, make sure each one is
easily distinguishable from the others and provides fresh, useful
information. Above all, don't spam. Post your message only where
it belongs. When in doubt, ask the maintainer of a given mailing
list whether your alert is appropriate. And include a phrase like
"post where appropriate" toward the beginning so that people
aren't encouraged to send your alert to mailing lists where it
doesn't belong.
18. Do a post-mortem. When the campaign is over, try to derive some
lessons for others to use. Even if you're burned out, take a
minute right away while the experience is still fresh in mind.
What problems did you have? What mistakes did you make? What
unexpected connections did you make? Who did you reach and why?
Which mailing lists was your alert forwarded to, and which of
these forwardings actually caused people to take action? Good
guesses are useful too.
19. Don't mistake e-mail for organizing. An action alert is not an
organization. If you want to build a lasting political movement,
at some point you'll have to gather people together. The Internet
is a useful tool for organizing, but it's just one tool and one
medium among many that you will need, and you should evaluate it
largely in terms of its contribution to larger organizing goals.
Do the people you reach through Internet alerts move up into more
active positions in your movement? Do you draw them into
conferences, talk to them by phone, meet them in person, become
accountable to them to provide specific information and answer
questions? If not, why do you keep reaching out to them?
20. Encourage good practices. The Internet is a democratic medium that
provides us all with the time and space to do the right thing. So
let's use the Internet in a positive way and encourage others to
do the same. You can help by passing these guidelines along to
others who might benefit from them (including people who have sent
out badly designed alerts), and refrain from propagating alerts
that do not conform to them. Remember, forwarding a badly designed
action alert actually harms the cause that it is supposed to
support. Modeling thoughtful, constructive action on the Internet,
however, provides everyone with a living example of democracy in
action.
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