Action Alerts: Please Improve Them for Networking

by John S. James

Summary: Political action alerts could be much more effective if they were designed to be shared -- to be easily picked up by other interested organizations and sent to their members, or to other people and organizations that listen to them. From our experience we suggest five ways to make existing action alert work this way.

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We want to publish relevant action alerts (for AIDS or health funding, for example), but are repeatedly frustrated by poorly presented alerts that would make informing our readers a messy project. Organizations could do much better in political activism if they published action alerts that individuals and other organizations could easily pick up and bring to their constituents, to the people who listen to them. Here is a quick checklist for how to do so:

1. Have a Web page with complete information for the alert.
That way organizations or publications like AIDS Treatment News can write a paragraph or two telling our members or readers why the issue is important, and referring them to your Web page for the details. But if the alert is not on the Web but only in email or print, then we have to copy the whole text in order to inform our constituents accurately, which usually is not feasible. Readers strongly prefer a couple paragraphs written for them to a long email written to people in general, which they will probably delete.

And use a reasonable Web address, like:
www.yourorganizations.org/funding-alert.html
or better, with a little more Web work:
www.yourorganizations.org/funding-alert

If you send this address by email (or expect others to cut and paste from your site into email), do not put a period or other punctuation directly after it, because many email programs will automatically include the punctuation in the Web address and give the user an error message instead of your Web page. Also note that after the .org, upper or lower case does matter; we prefer Web addresses in all lower case, so that users do not need to remember what to capitalize.

2. Keep the alert's Web page up to date.
When the alert ends (because the bill in Congress has been voted on, for example), say so on the page. And maybe you can refer those who arrived too late to other, still-current alerts, from your organization or from others. When you have people coming forward to help, find a way for them to do so, instead of turning them away.

3. Tell what support you already have.
For example, if you want people to ask their Congressperson to join a Congressional sign-on letter and it already has 25 members of Congress signed on, say so. If it's a sign-on for organizations or individuals, your Web page should show who has signed so far. Other organizations need this information to strengthen the case for the alert.

(Fortunately, most organizations have now learned to ask for sign-on to a short statement of principle, with explanation kept separate, instead of seeking signatures on a long document -- which will invariably have side issues, ambiguities, or word choices that unnecessarily keep people from signing.)

4. When sending your alert to an AIDS list, show any AIDS support as well.
If major, credible AIDS organizations have already signed, that's important for me and my readers to know.

5. Never forget the importance of credibility networks today.
Everyone now has information overload. And everyone knows that plenty of disinformation, malice, self-interested spin, and plain mistakes are circulating in the media, on the Internet, and elsewhere. People respond by tuning out and turning off. Meanwhile, thousands of top professionals in politics, marketing, media, entertainment, and elsewhere spend much of their careers trying to break through into peoples' attention, for whatever purposes they are paid to promote. The resulting standoffs define much of the modern age.

We can still talk with people by working through the constituencies and credibility networks that already exist. For example, an organization can tell its members about action alerts they probably agree with, but would not have read or acted on if they came from strangers. This can happen on a large scale only if the alerts are designed to travel gracefully through social and organizational networks. We may need to re-channel some of the traditional competitiveness of organizations, to assure that the public interest is served.

In the U.S. today the political right controls most of the Federal government and most of the mass media. It has endless money, its own think tanks, TV stations, and big talk shows, and it has people who will work themselves up after hearing one side of a story and allow themselves to be used for the agendas of others. But the more influence the right needs to buy, the less credibility it has.

AIDS and other human services seldom have those resources. We need to compensate by better networking. One tool is action alerts designed to be shared through existing networks of familiarity and trust.

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