September 21, 2000 | Read Time: 3 minutes
By NICOLE WALLACE
An activist in New York has invested $43,000 of her own money — and countless hours of her time — in an online lobbying campaign to persuade Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.
Irene Weiser, a mediator at a dispute-resolution center, also heads the board of a domestic-violence organization in Ithaca, N.Y. This summer, she became increasingly worried that the October 1 expiration of the act wasn´t getting coverage in the press and decided that she had to do something.
Her idea: Stopfamilyviolence.org, a Web site that allows visitors to send e-mail messages supporting extension of the act to their senators and representatives.
Ms. Weiser paid E-Advocates, a consulting company in Washington, $6,000 to build the site, which also provides information about the act and statistics about domestic violence in the United States.
Since Stopfamilyviolence.org went online July 14, about 15,000 visitors have sent 45,000 messages to Congress.
At first, Ms. Weiser depended almost entirely on word of mouth to promote the site. She e-mailed some friends, who in turn forwarded her message to others. Eventually, several national women´s organizations sent announcements about the site to their lists of activists, and Ms. Weiser paid E-Advocates an additional $2,000 to promote Stopfamilyviolence.org.
Despite her amazement at the response to the Web site, Ms. Weiser worried that it wasn´t enough — and she was concerned about which lawmakers were receiving the messages.
“Mostly we were preaching to the converted,” says Ms. Weiser.
So, the next step in the campaign, Ms. Weiser decided, would be aimed at Internet users in states and congressional districts whose representatives needed more persuading. She did this by purchasing — at a cost of $35,000 — 500,000 pop-up advertisements on Juno. Juno is a company that provides free Internet service, in return for which subscribers fill out personal profiles that allow advertisers to focus on specific audiences — in the case of Stopfamilyviolence.org, residents of particular zip codes.
Halfway through the ad campaign, 13,000 Juno subscribers have sent 39,000 messages to Congress.
As another benefit of the Juno campaign, Ms. Weiser receives the e-mail addresses of everyone who responds to the ad by sending a letter; she then adds the addresses to her e-mail alert list. So far fewer than 400 of the 13,000 respondents have asked to be removed from the list, and 4,000 visitors to Stopfamilyviolence.org have asked to receive the alerts. Ms. Weiser hopes that after all the Juno ads have run she will have a list of 30,000 names.
Ms. Weiser, who has applied for a home-equity loan to pay for the Juno advertisements, believes that the list´s potential for future advocacy on the issue of domestic violence is well worth her investment.
“In making the decision to go to the next level, I wanted to know that there is going to be some future,” she says. “I at least had to be sure that it would be a valuable, long-term investment and not just a short-term blip on the screen.”
To get there: Go to http://stopfamilyviolence.org.
