June 27, 2002 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Decision makers do not all agree on the best way for constituents to contact them, says a new report published by the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, in Washington. For e-mail activism networks to be effective, nonprofit organizations need to learn what form of communication officials favor and encourage their activists to contact them that way, recommends the report.
In the spring of 2001, the fund conducted interviews with 12 legislators and officials in Georgia, Minnesota, and Washington State. The organization found that each official ranked the importance of various forms of communication differently. One legislator said that telephone calls were most important, followed by letters and faxes, and that e-mail was the least-preferred form of communication. But another said that letters are most effective, followed closely by e-mail messages, and that phone calls are good only for “for or against” tallies. Faxes, the legislator said, are not effective because fax machines are shared by several offices and faxes are sometimes lost.
The League of Conservation Voters Education Fund also conducted interviews with the managers of 30 e-mail action networks run by nonprofit organizations and asked them to complete a survey. The study found that the networks varied widely in size, the amount of staff time the organizations devoted to managing the networks, rate of response to alerts, and the percentage of activists who personalized their messages.
Among the findings the fund said warranted further study: The two networks with the highest response rates to alerts were among the groups with the lowest percentage of activists who modified the groups’ sample messages.
The comments from the network managers suggested that to increase the response rates to action alerts, nonprofit organizations need to focus on building relationships with their activists, according to the report. The managers said that nonprofit groups can strengthen their ties to activists by providing concise, reliable background information about issues, thanking activists for taking action, and letting activists know the outcomes of campaigns.
To get there: Go to http://www.voteenvironment.org.
