Here's some info for information access activists for using e-mail and the
web. This was originally designed for environmental groups, but it is
general enough to apply to most organizations and campaigns.
kelly
An Activists' Strategy for Using Email and the World Wide Web
The tools of electronic networking--computers, modems and Internet
accounts--are becoming more and more common in the Northwest
conservation community. However, many activists, although they
intuitively sense the potential of this technology, are casting about
for effective strategies for applying the power of electronic
networking to their work.
Most conservation organizations have attracted large numbers of people
who care enough about the work of the organization to become
dues-paying members, or pledge their time and energy to actively
support their conservation issues. While most organizations regularly
communicate with this constituency by mail, phone and fax, few are
using email and the Web effectively to communicate with their activist
base. The number of people in our region who are "online" continues to
grow, and we feel most groups are missing a huge opportunity to reach
out electronically to their own online membership and help them become
powerful and effective activists.
ONE/Northwest feels that online networking is first and foremost a
tool to communicate more efficiently and effectively with your
existing audience, i.e., your members, in order to develop them into
more informed, active and effective activists. We feel that email and
email lists are the best tool for this type of outreach, and that your
email organizing efforts should be "backed up" by a Web site that can
serve as reference center. We don't feel that electronic networking is
(at present) a very effective way to expand your outreach to new
constituencies; it's difficult if not impossible to break through the
"background noise" online.
With these ideas in mind, we offer you our "modest proposal" for using
online networking to further your environmental activism. Our strategy
has four key elements:
1. Gather email addresses from your membership. Solicit email names
whenever you ask for phone, fax or postal addresses.
2. Establish broadcast email lists for your online members to
disseminate general information about your issues and activities,
and for key activists who will most often respond to "action
alerts" and other requests. These will provide you with a simple
mechanism to keep your online membership informed, and to call
upon your ardent activists when action is needed.
3. Establish discussion lists to facilitate communication between
staff, board and key volunteers, and to communicate with
colleagues on specific issues or geographical areas. Interactive
discussion lists are more time-consuming than one-way broadcast
lists, but if managed properly can be a highly productive means of
communication.
4. Create a Web site that initially focuses on providing information
to (and getting action from) your existing membership and key
activists. Build a strong base for online activism among the
people most interested in your work, and expand it to the general
public as your expertise increases.
Using Email & Email Lists to Reach Your Existing Audience
We feel there are two things that every online conservation
organization should start doing now:
1. Gather Email Addresses!
Email is the building block of online activism; nearly everyone
with a computer and a modem can find a way to get an email address
for very little money. Surprisingly, we continue to find that many
conservation organizations in the Northwest do not yet collect
email addresses from their members, activists or other interested
parties. We ask for their address, phone and fax numbers, but not
their email addresses. Even if you are not currently using email
to communicate with your members and activists, it is very
important that you start gathering this information now so you can
use it in the future. After all, you can't send email to someone
if you don't have their email address! Here are just a few ways to
do this:
* Add a space for "Email Address" to every membership form,
petition, and response card you provide to your membership or the
public. This should go alongside "phone number" and "fax number".
* Ensure that everyone in your organization makes it part of their
routine to ask for this information whenever they make contact
with someone interested in the organization (on the phone, at
public meetings, etc.).
* If your group publishes a newsletter, include a short article in
your next edition saying that your group wants to use email
communication in the future, and ask for their email address so
you can send them more information when it becomes available. Let
your members know that electronic communication is a key part of
your communications infrastructure. Remind them that environmental
issues often demand timely action, and that electronic
communication is a cheap and effective way to communicate on short
notice. Be sure to provide an email address for them to send this
information to!
* Remember to add a field to your contact database to accommodate
this new information. Again, an email address should be considered
at least as important as a phone or fax number.
* Focus your greatest effort on gathering email addresses from
members and activists who are most likely to respond to your
electronic communications (the people you can count on to write
letters, make phone calls, attend meetings, etc.). Find out if
they're on email, and encourage them to get online if not. This
group can form your core group of dependable online activists (see
below).
* Publicize your organization's email address. Make sure it is
included on your business cards, brochures, factsheets,
newsletters, or any other publication from your organization.
Email communication is a two-way street!
1. Establish and Nurture Email Lists
Once you have built even a small database of members/activists who
use email, we recommend that you begin contacting them regularly
by email with quality information about your activities and
issues, and engage them in a way that is commensurate with their
level of activism. Because it is inexpensive and easy to generate,
there is a tendency in the conservation community to use email as
a "digital megaphone," broadcasting information and "action
alerts" to online activists with such frequency that recipients
are overloaded with information that often precludes their action.
We feel it is more effective to fully incorporate email into the
overall communication plan of your organization, and use it
sparingly and strategically to reach different audiences that you
work with.
As a beginning point, we feel most organizations in the Northwest
should start communicating with their constituencies by
establishing two email lists (often referred to as "listservs").
One is for general communication with your online membership, and
the other is for your core activists
* General Communication for Members: Useful, concise information
sent on a consistent basis is an effective way to stay in
communication with your overall online membership. We recommend
that organizations establish a brief email "newsletter" to send to
their general online membership on at least a monthly basis. This
newsletter would consist only of text (no attached documents), and
could include a general update about your activities, snippets
from your paper newsletter, and other information that your
general membership may find useful and interesting. The key point
about this form of communication is a.) brevity and b.)
consistency. Get your members used to receiving good email from
you on a regular basis. An announcement about this email
newsletter can be made in your paper newsletter, or via a single
email to all your online activists. Ask them to join!
* "Action Alerts" for Core Activists: Again, it is easy to overwhelm
online activists with messages asking them to take action on a
particular issue. Usually, only a subset of your general
membership can be counted on to regularly respond to action alerts
by your organization, and these are the people you should try to
identify and focus your alerts on. These core activists don't mind
getting a lot of email from an organization because they have
indicated they are willing to attend meetings, send letters/faxes
and make phone calls when asked to do so. We feel it is better to
send an email alert to 100 people who you know are likely to
respond than it is to send a message to a broad audience that may
not be interested (and may be annoyed to get such emails).
A good way to help identify these core online activists is to ask
them. Again, place an article in your paper newsletter or send an
email to all your online activists, and tell them you're
establishing an email alert system. Indicate what you are planning
to send via this list and with what frequency, and what you expect
from participants (i.e. action!). If your group is large enough to
work on multiple issues, consider starting an action alert list
for each of your major issues. This will further narrow your
target audience to those who are truly interested in a specific
issue and are therefore more likely to act when called upon to do
so.
By establishing both an online "newsletter" and an "action alert"
list, you will create two levels of communication that most of
your constituency is likely to participate in. Over time, you'll
be able to move more and more of your online members into the
"action" list(s), which will help make you more effective.
Starting with these two simple concepts, you will learn more about
how email can be used in your work, which will enable you to move
on to more sophisticated techniques and technologies.
Note: ONE/Northwest can help you establish simple email lists for
use by your conservation organization. There is no charge for this
service. For more information, send us an email ([log in to unmask])
or visit our Web site
(http://www.onenw.org/toolkit/maillist.html).
Using email lists to generate online discussions
Unlike a "broadcast" list (which is one-way communication), a
"discussion" list is an email list which allows for "many-to-many"
communication between everyone subscribed to the list; anyone on the
list can post a message to the list that every member will see.
Discussion lists allow for rudimentary online "conversations" to take
place, and can be a very effective way to communicate with a
relatively small group of people.
Below are two simple examples of how discussion lists can be used in
your conservation work:
1. Communication between staff, board members and key volunteers (if
appropriate)
Many groups have members of their staff and board (and key
volunteers) scattered across the region. Arranging in-person or
conference-call meetings can be difficult and expensive, and this
often means that even within an organization, people are
communicating less than they would like. We think that one of the
simplest and most powerful uses of a discussion email list is for
intra-organizational communication; establish a discussion list
that includes your staff, board, and other key organizational
participants. You can use this list for mundane purposes
(scheduling meetings, issuing monthly reports, forwarding
interesting information, etc.) or for more strategic uses
(reviewing document drafts, discussing strategy, planning events,
etc.). Even with as few as 10 people, we feel such an
intra-organizational list can be a valuable addition to your
overall communication methods.
2. Communication between issue- or geography-focused colleagues
(including coalitions)
Email discussion lists work best when members share common
interests and goals, and the people on the list already have some
context for working together (i.e. "they already know each
other"). Again, given expense and scheduling difficulties,
coalition members and groups working on similar issues do not get
many opportunities to meet in-person to share information and
coordinate their activities. A discussion list is an ideal way to
facilitate many-to-many communication between conservation
organizations and activists, and the nature of email can help to
remove barriers of time and geography that often makes
communication difficult. Many such lists already exist in the
Northwest (ONE/Northwest currently hosts over 60), but we feel
this simple technology should be used more extensively by the
online segments of our community.
Here are some tips for being effective with email discussion lists:
* Start small & grow (if necessary): We recommend that discussion
lists start and remain small; fewer than 50 people working on a
specific issue or in a specific geography is ideal. Big lists,
unless very closely managed, can produce volumes of email messages
that cause "information overload". It is better to start out small
and focused, and grow as your capacity to handle information
grows.
* Stay focused: Related to the size of the list, we believe that
lists should be created around highly focused issue areas, and not
around general topics. Lists that are construed too broadly tend
to fall into the trap of trying to be all things to all people in
a community that is large and diverse. If the topic of your
discussion list is too broad, then many messages will not be of
interest to most of the list participants, and this not targeted
will bring about "information overload." Start several lists if
you need to create forums for multiple issues or for different
aspects of a "big" issue such as forest or salmon management.
* Keep messages short: As with all email communication, brief
messages are much more effective than lengthy treatises. Given the
"conversational" nature of these lists, it makes sense to keep the
messages as brief and to-the-point as possible. Very active lists
will generate a lot of messages, and short emails means less
on-line reading time to get to the information you need.
* Try to avoid "Action Alert" overload: There is a tendency to use
discussion lists to continually broadcast "action alerts" and
other time-critical information to participants. This is, of
course, a very valuable function of email-based communication, but
it is very easy to generate too many alerts asking the same people
to do too many things (which also leads to overload). A better
idea is for list members to devise clear plans and procedures for
issuing action alerts to the list, and frequently ask the list
members if this procedure is working effectively.
One key thing to remember: email discussion lists are not a substitute
for in-person or other communication, but can help augment the amount
of communication you do now (usually for less money and in less time).
We encourage you to think about this, and contact ONE/Northwest if you
would like to establish your own email list. (More information about
this service can be found on our Web site, at
http://www.onenw.org/toolkit/maillist.html, or call/fax/email us).
Using Web Sites Effectively
The World Wide Web is everywhere in the media, and there is
considerable interest by the conservation community in this new medium
as a way to reach out to the public and generate interest in
environmental issues. In the Northwest, we have identified over 200
web sites created by non-profit conservation organizations in the
region, and the number grows daily (see our Web site for a searchable
database of sites). Clearly, a lot of effort is going into the
creation and maintenance of these sites, and conservation
organizations recognize them as important for their work.
What is not clear is whether conservation Web sites are proving to be
valuable tools for reaching new constituents. A Web site does make
information about your organization and issue accessible (in theory)
to millions of people on the Internet, but it doesn't mean that those
millions are actually visiting your site. Quite simply, there are so
many sites available now that competition for readership is incredibly
high, and it's getting progressively more difficult even to make the
general public aware of a specific site.
How can a conservation group maximize their benefit from a Web site?
Here is our view of the situation, based on our ongoing review of Web
sites by conservation groups in the Northwest, as well as discussions
with many of these groups.
1. Definitely build a Web site, but clearly define your audience,
objectives and the costs for achieving those objectives.
Building a simple Web site to represent your organization or issue
is increasingly becoming a fairly easy and inexpensive thing to
do. Many Internet Service Providers now offer 5 MB of disk space
for a Web site as part of a basic Internet account, and there are
several good (and free!) software products available that make it
easy to create simple Web sites. Finally, given the rapid growth
of the Web, we believe most groups can find someone associated
with their organization who can do this work or is willing to
learn. Establishing a simple Web site with basic information about
your organization and issue is relatively easy, and provides a
low-cost way for people to get information from you; so why not do
it?
If you want to go beyond a simple site, however, we strongly
encourage you to think long and hard about three things:
* The audience for the site: Who are you trying to reach, what
information does this audience want, and how can you best deliver
this information to them? Does the intended audience have access
to the Web? A site designed for attracting new people to your
organization or issue will be very different from a site designed
for people who are already familiar with you, and establishing
your target audience before you even think of what the site will
look like is very important.
* Your objectives: How many people do you expect to reach with this
site, and what results do you want to achieve? Again, it is hard
to attract people to your site, and you should set realistic
objectives for your site (see below). More important than the
number of visitors or "hits" on your site are the measurable
actions that result from these visits: how many new members,
responses to action alerts or financial contributions do you
expect from your Web site? Establishing clear, measurable
objectives is a key step for gauging the return on your
investment.
* The cost for achieving these objectives: How much time and
resources will you need to commit to create a Web site that will
effectively realize your objectives? Is a Web site for an intended
audience the most effective use of your money and resources to
reach these objectives?
1. Set realistic expectations for mass public outreach (or
fundraising, membership development, etc.)
Thus far, we know of no Web site by a regional conservation
organization that has enjoyed significant success as a vehicle for
attracting large numbers of new people to an organization (as
paying members) or issue. Again, creating awareness of your site
with the general public is hard enough; it is much harder to
present information in a way that will immediately engage someone
and cause them to become involved. The day may come when a Web
site will be an efficient and effective vehicle for outreach on
local conservation issues, but we don't feel this is generally the
case now.
2. Start "small." Focus on your existing constituency, and expand as
interest in your site grows.
Rather than create an expansive, expensive and highly technical
Web site to reach out to the mass public, we recommend that
conservation organizations begin by creating simple, quality sites
that initially cater to their existing constituencies: online
members and key activists. While a long-term goal for online
networking is to expand the community of people who actively care
about conservation issues, we feel that initial online networking
efforts should be targeted at your existing membership--they are
already interested in your issues, and electronic media (email and
the Web) are a very effective way to provide them with timely,
in-depth information. The goal should be to develop your members
into activists.
3. Think of your Web site as your organization's library, with
sections on New Titles, Publications, Reference Desk, and
"Stacks."
Using the Web to share your organization's information with your
constituency is one of the most practical applications for your
site. Your site should contain separate sections with the most
recent issue of your newsletter, action alerts, information about
your organization, links to other related sites, and an archive of
past issues of your publications. Personal stories and photographs
about your work give your electronic site a more human touch.
Having this information on your Web site can save a lot of staff
time and postage: instead of copying and mailing information out
to interested parties, you can refer them to your site, where they
can read, download, and print at their leisure.
For tips on creating a well-designed, basic Web site, see
"Building an Effective Web Site" on the ONE/Northwest Web site
(http://www.onenw.org/toolkit/webdesign_intro.html)
4. Integrate the Web with your overall communication plan (especially
the use of email and email lists).
In your online action alerts and broadcast emails, reference your
Web site within your document where the reader can obtain
additional information about an issue. If you are working in a
coalition on a particular event or topic, include the URLs of the
other groups' Web sites in your emails. Create online versions of
any action alerts for publication on your Web site. Provide
information about your broadcast email alerts on your Web site. In
short, make sure you give activists as many avenues as possible to
get the information they need to help your organization accomplish
its goals. Always keep in mind that your Web site is just one of
the tools your organization uses to communicate, and for it to be
effective it must be integrated into your overall communication
strategy.
To summarize the main points of our "modest proposal":
1. Gather email addresses from your membership. Solicit email names
whenever you ask for phone, fax or postal addresses.
2. Establish broadcast email lists for your online members to
disseminate general information about your issues and activities,
and for key activists who will most often respond to "action
alerts" and other requests. These will provide you with a simple
mechanism to keep your online membership informed, and to call
upon your ardent activists when action is needed.
3. Establish discussion lists to facilitate communication between
staff, board and key volunteers, and to communicate with
colleagues on specific issues or geographical areas. Interactive
discussion lists are more time-consuming than one-way broadcast
lists, but if managed properly can be a highly productive means of
communication.
4. Create a Web site that initially focuses on providing information
to (and getting action from) your existing membership and key
activists. Build a strong base for online activism among the
people most interested in your work, and expand it to the general
public as your expertise and resources increase.
ONE/Northwest: Online Networking for the Environment
1601 2nd Avenue Suite 605
Seattle, WA 98101
206.448.1008 fax 206.448.7222
[log in to unmask] http://www.onenw.org/
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