Taking Action Online

Advocacy groups pursue local issues with e-mail alerts

While e-mail alerts and sample “Dear Senator” letters on Web sites have become staples of most national

advocacy organizations, such Internet tools increasingly are being used to promote or oppose state and local issues.

The Capitol Resource Institute, a conservative advocacy group in Sacramento that lobbies on social-policy issues that affect families, says e-mail messages are rapidly replacing the old systems of telephone calls and faxes to prompt members to take stands on pending legislation.

“Now we tell people that if you aren’t online, please go out and buy a secondhand computer, whatever you can afford,” says Karen Holgate, the organization’s director of policy. “Get online, because it is absolutely crucial in the state legislative environment to be able to get immediate information out to people and get their immediate response.”

She says votes in the California statehouse can sometimes be called with less than a day’s notice. When that happens on a bill the institute cares about, Ms. Holgate sends electronic messages to several thousand supporters asking them to weigh in with their comments.

At the same time that state nonprofit groups like the Capitol Resource Institute are turning to e-mail and the Internet as a quick and inexpensive way to communicate with their activists, national organizations are expanding their online advocacy efforts to include state issues. Some nonprofit observers believe online activism may prove to be more powerful and effective on state and local issues than on national ones.

Still, both state and national groups are grappling with the question of whether to ask their members to take action online by sending e-mail to legislators or offline with a mailed letter, phone call, or fax.

Ms. Holgate says one problem with e-mail is that it is too quiet, making it easy to ignore. “If the telephone is ringing, everyone in the office is aware that they are being bombarded with either support for a bill or negative comments about a bill, and it carries more weight,” she says.

Mary E. Dixon, legislative director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, says asking her activists to use e-mail to communicate with state lawmakers and regulators is not an option. “In Illinois some legislators don’t even have e-mail addresses,” she says. “So it wouldn’t work for me to do alerts to people that said, ‘E-mail your legislator.’”

But other advocacy experts believe that state lawmakers may be more responsive to e-mail messages from constituents than those at the federal level.

“State legislators get fewer pieces of mail from constituents and therefore don’t have to be as aggressive in controlling the information that comes into their office in order to get their work done,” says John Pomeranz, nonprofit advocacy counsel at the Alliance for Justice, in Washington. He also says state legislators tend to be younger than members of Congress and therefore might be more familiar with information technology.

Screening Messages

Among state lawmakers who use e-mail, wide variation exists on whether e-mail messages sent to their offices go directly to the legislators or are screened by an assistant.

Jeff Hatch-Miller, a Phoenix Republican in the Arizona House of Representatives and chair of the House Energy, Utilities, and Technology Committee, reviews his own e-mail, and says about 100 to 150 e-mail messages arrive in his inbox each day. He estimates that about 65 percent of them are communication from constituents on public-policy issues. Such messages, he says, can be effective so long as they are “one page and to the point.”

Having said that, though, he acknowledges that he and his colleagues have some misgivings about electronic correspondence. Knowing that many people have multiple e-mail addresses, he says that he often wonders if each of the e-mail messages he receives on an issue is in fact from a different person. “If I get two postcards and 10 e-mails, maybe that’s the same number of actual people who are writing to me,” he says.

Representative Hatch-Miller says using an e-mail address that incorporates the writer’s name in some way, rather than a string of letters and numbers, is more effective, and that he is likely to pay more attention to messages in which activists include their full name, mailing address, and telephone number. Such information, he says, not only makes the correspondence less anonymous, but also establishes that the writer is a constituent.

Still the most effective means of communication, says Representative Hatch-Miller, are messages delivered during face-to-face meetings.

Drawing any general conclusions about how to contact local officials, however, is difficult.

Every Lawmaker Is Different

The League of Conservation Voters Education Fund recently conducted interviews with a dozen state officials on how they felt about e-mail as a form of communication with constituents. The organization also surveyed 30 state and national charities that run online activism programs. While the formal results of the study won’t be released until early next year, Bill Bradlee, the fund’s Northwest program manager and a co-author of the report, says the study drove home the point that every decision maker is different. “It was incredible,” he says. “One person would say, ‘Personal letters are the best thing, and e-mails are terrible.’ The next person would say, ‘E-mails are the best thing.’”

Mr. Bradlee believes that the findings from the interviews emphasize how important it is for nonprofit organizations to know the decision makers they are trying to influence and to ask them how they prefer to be contacted.

The Washington Environmental Council, in Seattle, does just that, deciding on a campaign-by-campaign basis whether to ask the more than 600 members of its GreenTree network to take action online or off.

Last year, Washington’s State Department of Ecology asked for public comments on proposed rules to toughen the state’s shoreline protections. In talking to staff members at the agency, the council discovered that the department was looking to tally the number of messages for and against the rules and wasn’t concerned about how those comments came in. So working in cooperation with environmental groups across the state, the council generated more than 330 comments in two weeks, enough to help tip the tally in favor of the stronger rules.

This fall, however, staff members at the Board of Natural Resources made it clear that the best way to influence members of the board during a public-comment period on logging practices would be handwritten letters. So the council explained in its e-mail to activists and on its Web site why it was important to send a traditional letter to the board — and intentionally did not offer an e-mail link on its Web site for sending in comments. The campaign resulted in 84 written letters sent to the board, a number the council describes as significant for an agency that very seldom receives many comments from the public.

Tom Geiger, the council’s outreach director, says the key to online activism is to not abandon proven methods of activism. He believes, however, that e-mail correspondence between constituents and state officials has the potential to be more meaningful than communication with national representatives, provided legislators are actually reading their e-mail and not just tallying it.

“When somebody’s communicating with their state senator, the distance between them and that senator is much less than the distance between them and the one of two U.S. senators who represent the entire state of Washington,” he explains.

Thinking Locally

Proximity also plays a role in prompting people to take an activist stand in the first place.

Environmental Defense, in New York, has had strong results sending e-mail alerts on state and local issues. By sorting its database by state or ZIP code, the national organization is able to make sure that the e-mail messages only go to activists living in areas affected by a particular issue.

This summer, for example, an alert to Environmental Defense activists in California generated about 5,000 faxes to the California Fish and Game Commission in support of establishing marine reserves around the Channel Islands near Santa Barbara. In October, the organization sent a message announcing a series of public hearings on proposed dam reforms to protect endangered species on the Missouri River to members who live in communities along the river.

According to Ben Smith, who runs Environmental Defense’s Action Network, about half of the organization’s action alerts focus on local or state issues, and he says that the percentage of people who take action on those alerts is consistently higher than the percentage who respond to national alerts.

“Local or regional or state campaigns are more effective because they hit closer to home for people,” says Mr. Smith. “When you send out an action alert on a local issue, it seems more salient to them. I think people just get more excited.”

The national American Civil Liberties Union, in Washington, is also turning its attention to state issues and how it can help its affiliates take advantage of online activism.

The ACLU is running a pilot program in which four of its affiliates, including the ACLU of Illinois, are sending out action alerts that include links to the charity’s national Web site, from which activists can send faxes to elected officials. The organization plans to open the program up to other chapters early next year, and is also developing a handbook to help its chapters get started with online activism.

Ms. Dixon of the Illinois office says she is hopeful the system will make it easier for her supporters to weigh in on legislative issues. But she worries that there may be technological snafus because often as many as three or four lawmakers share one fax machine. “We’re going to have to figure out to what extent all these faxes get to the right legislator in a timely manner,” says Ms. Dixon.

Keeping Current

Phil Gutis, the ACLU’s director of legislative communications, says he hopes that by teaming up with the national organization, state offices will be better able to keep their list of activists’ e-mail addresses current. Doing so can be difficult if state organizations only send out messages during state legislative sessions, many of which are only three months long, he says. But by supplementing state action alerts with messages about national issues, Mr. Gutis hopes that ACLU affiliates will be better able to keep up with their members’ often-changing e-mail addresses.

He quips, “Congress is — fortunately or unfortunately — active all year round.”

Another national organization, the American Lung Association, has created a national alert system based on the success of the local networks set up by several of its affiliates, including the American Lung Association of California.

A key to the California group’s success has been the decision to promote its E-Advocacy Network to people who interact with the group online in other ways, such as by participating in an online program to help smokers quit or by making an online gift. In turn, the nonprofit group encourages people who come to it interested in advocacy work to use its Web site for other purposes as well. “A donor isn’t seen just as a donor, and an E-Advocacy Network member isn’t seen as just an advocacy volunteer,” says Andy Weisser, vice president for communications of the California association.

Each month, the state office sends a list of network members to its 15 local offices in California that highlights new members and encourages the chapters to contact the people who live in their geographic region.

The organization has found that sending a reminder message partway through a campaign is a good way to increase its response rate after the initial burst of activity begins to fade.

In May the association ran a weeklong campaign to encourage California Gov. Gray Davis to increase the percentage of tobacco-settlement money that goes to antismoking programs. Midway through the week, the association sent a message to its activists to thank the 101 people who had already sent faxes through the association’s Web site and to ask those who hadn’t taken action to let the governor know how they felt. In the 24 hours after the message went out, more than 40 activists sent faxes of their own.

If an activist doesn’t take action soon after an alert is sent out, “then it just kind of goes down their whole e-mail list,” says Paul Knepprath, vice president for government relations. “So if you go back and get at the top of their list, then you have a really good shot at getting more letters and more activism.”