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/ VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List. To join or leave the list, send a message to [log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type "subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations. VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html