Tag Archives: online organizing

Getting Your Email On

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Emily Thorson of EchoDitto offers some great pointers on why and how to write compelling emails, which are they key to driving online action.

Real-life fact: email drives traffic and participations. Implications:
  1. Stop stressing about your website. Yes, it should have regularly updated content and look halfway professional. But it shouldn’t drive your strategy, it should be driven by your strategy.
  2. Figure out what organizations have big lists and befriend them. In DC, this might mean MoveOn or Democracy for America. If you’re running a local organization, it might be your local Planned Parenthood or League of Conservation Voter chapter.
  3. Always be growing. Constantly ask yourself “How can I make this into a list-growth activity?” Tell your list to tell a friend. Do campaigns that encourage signups. Partner with other organizations.
  4. Write decent emails. Just follow a simple principle: write emails as if you’re talking to a friend. There are a couple of points that go along with this.
    • Your emails should be from human beings, not organizations. Put the name of a person in the subject line. The candidate, the campaign manager, whoever.
    • I try to do a “term paper check” a few hours after writing my first draft, where I go through and figure out which sentences sound like they belong in a political science paper, and delete them.
    • No email newsletters! People have very, very short attention spans. Figure out the action you want the email to focus on, and write the email around that link. Paragraph, link, paragraph, link, paragraph, link, signature. PS: link. Even though you also want to include a link to the photo gallery, and the front page, and the campaign you did last week, and the event calendar…don’t do it! Just pick one. Just pick ONE.
    • Write out the link. This sounds petty, but it makes such a huge difference that I would be remiss in not mentioning it. Do not make “click here” into a link. do not make the name of your campaign into a link. Write the whole thing out, with the http://www. for each one. People like to know where they’re going when they click.

Introducting CommonTimes – a social bookmarking community for news readers

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Man, getting fired can be great for your creativity and productivity. At least that’s what I’m learning from my friend Jeff Reifman these days.

Jeff’s been on creative streak lately, playing with a bunch of permutations at the fertile intersection of social networks, alternative media, progressive activism and emerging tech. His latest creation, CommonTimes is “a social bookmarking community for news readers” and I think it’s quite amazing.

If you’re already familiar with social software, CommonTimes is basically “del.icio.us for news stories.” For the less-techie among us, CommonTimes lets you quickly “tag” news stories on the web into its database. Your stories are combined with those of all the other users of the system to produce a news service that reflects the aggregated wisdom of its users. Simple, but very powerful.

CommonTimes produces a wide variety of RSS feeds, including:

  • Feeds for each individual user, which makes it a quick and easy way to “reblog” stuff

  • Feeds for each “topic” (tag) in the system, which make it easy to form only-the-fly “news communities” — for example I could quickly find all news that CommonTimes users have tagged as being about “Seattle“.

I think that the killer feature will be the ability to join groups of users, and to see the aggregated news from those groups. The collective judgement of all CommonTimes users is interesting, but the collective judgement of everyone who self identfies, say, as a “Northwest environmentalist” or a “nonprofit technologist” is even more interesting and useful. I’ve already spoken to Jeff about this, and he promises me that it’s on his roadmap as the CommonTimes community grows.

And Jeff, I also think it would be smart to include the domain of the news story in the RSS entry for each story — I’d like to see the source along with the headline.

ActionStudio reborn

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I’m pleased to report that Jeff Reifman has rescued ActionStudio from the train wreck created by Groundspring’s recent organizational turmoil.

He’s relaunched his low-cost, high-featured online activism tool as eAdvocacy from ActionStudio.

eAdvocacy is a great tool for doing online petitions and contact-your-decisionmaker elements. It offers a great blend of powerful features at a bargain-basement price — $50/month plus a penny per email.

ONE/Northwest will be enthusiastically recommending both eAdvocacy and Democracy in Action to folks who are looking for solid low-end online advocacy tools.

The role of cell phone text messaging in state legislative advocacy

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The use of cellphone text messaging (aka SMS, for short messsage service) in activism contexts has already been well documented by Howard Rheingold, among many others. But most of the celebrated examples have been drawn from the contexts of international national-elections and associated mass protests: the recent elections in Spain, the Phillippines, Korea, etc. A recent AP story noted that newspaper editors are starting to feel threatened by the ability of text messaging to provide instant news, opinion, and rumors far faster than traditional print & television media.

I’ve been thinking a bit about how this technology could best be applied in the context of Northwest environmental activism. Of course there’s the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, but was really an international-scale protest event, rather than a local/regional-scale environmental campaign.

The challenge is that most Northwest environmental issues are neither top-of-mind, a source of mass public outrage or particularly fast-moving. I’m also wondering how cell-phone text messaging could be most effectively used outside of a protest-organizing context. How can it be more of a news & information service?

One thing I’m thinking is that it might be worthwhile to set up an instant messaging network to connect environmental lobbyists in Olympia with each other and with their colleagues back in the main offices in Seattle and elsewhere. While this is not a very “public-facing” kind of application, I think it may be very high-value. Why? Well, critical moments in legislation often happen very quickly, and require quick coordination among a bunch of busy people who are often hard to reach. These people already carry cell phones, but it’s often not practical to provide quick information updates via conversation.

What I imagine is the text-message equivalent of an email listserv… where lobbyists can instantly post quick updates on conversations, deals, etc. to their collleagues. A way to improve our “operational intelligence” if you will. Also, this will help the lobbyists improve communication with their more distant collegauges — Executive Directors, Communications Directors and Field Organizers — back in Seattle and elsewhere.

A service like this would be easy to get going — nearly all of the principles already have cellphones — although some might require upgrades to SMS-capable phones. The only other piece would be to establish a centralized list to manage the updates.

First (?) massive use of cell-phone activism — responding to the “nuclear option” threat

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People For the American Way are preparing a massive text-messaging action alert to be launched in the event that Bill Frist pulls the trigger on the Senate’s “nuclear option.”

By giving us your cell phone number, we will text message you as soon as Senate Republicans trigger the “nuclear option.” Embedded in that text message will be a link to the Senate switchboard. With the push of a couple buttons, your call � along with thousands of others � goes right through to the corridors of power demanding preservation of the filibuster.

This is a brand new technology, and this is the first time it is being used on a large scale.

It will be interesting to see how well this works. The fundamentals are pretty simple — I predict it won’t be long before grassroots groups are doing this with open-source software like Asterisk

Hat tip to my colleague Sean Pender.