Gathering and Using E-Mail Addresses From Your Members

E-mail is the building block of online activism; nearly everyone with a computer and a modem can find a way to get an e-mail address for very little money.  As of May 1999, it is estimated that 97 million people in the U.S. and Canada have access to the Internet (somewhere between 25 to 30 percent of the population). Surprisingly, we continue to find that many conservation organizations in the Northwest do not routinely or effectively collect e-mail addresses from their members, activists, or other interested parties.   Even if you are not currently using e-mail to communicate with your members and activists, it is very important that you start gathering this information now so you can use it in the future. After all, you can't send e-mail to someone if you don't have their e-mail address. Here are just a few ways to do this:

• Add a space for E-mail Address: to every membership form, petition, and response card you provide to your membership or the public.
• Ask for information: ensure that everyone in your organization makes it part of their routine to ask for this information whenever they make contact with someone interested in the organization (on the phone, at public meetings, etc.).
• Get the word out: if your group publishes a newsletter, include a short article in your next edition saying that your group wants to use e-mail communication in the future, and ask for their e-mail address so you can send them more information when it becomes available. Let your members know that electronic communication is a key part of your communications infrastructure. Remind them that environmental issues often demand timely action, and that electronic communication is a cheap and effective way to communicate on short notice. Be sure to provide an e-mail address for them to send this information to.
• Add a field to your contact database: to accommodate e-mail addresses. Again, an e-mail address should be considered at least as important as a phone or fax number.
• Focus: your greatest effort on gathering e-mail addresses from members and activists who are most likely to respond to your electronic communications (the people you can count on to write letters, make phone calls, attend meetings, etc.). Find out if they're on e-mail, and encourage them to get online if not. This group can form your core group of dependable online activists.
• Publicize your organization's e-mail address: make sure it is included on your business cards, brochures, factsheets, newsletters, or any other publication from your organization. E-mail communication is a two-way street.

Our experience has shown that it often takes a very direct "ask" to get an e-mail address from your member. Even the steps above may be insufficient to get more than about 10 to 15 percent of your members' e-mail addresses.  If this is the case for your organization, consider doing a special insert for your next membership mailing that makes a focused, specific ask for e-mail addresses, and tell people what you plan to do with their e-mail address once you have it.  (See below for suggestions.)

Establish and Nurture E-Mail Lists

Once you have built even a small database of members/activists who use e-mail, we recommend that you begin contacting them regularly by e-mail with quality information about your activities and issues, and engage them in a way that is commensurate with their level of activism. Because it is inexpensive and easy to generate, there is a tendency in the conservation community to use e-mail as a "digital megaphone," broadcasting information and "action alerts" to online activists with such frequency that recipients are overloaded with information that often precludes their action. We feel it is more effective to fully incorporate e-mail into the overall communication plan of your organization, and use it sparingly and strategically to reach different audiences that you work with.

As a beginning point, we feel most organizations in the Northwest should start communicating with their constituencies by establishing two e-mail lists (often referred to as "listservs"). One is for general communication with your online membership, and the other is for your core activists

• General communication for members: Useful, concise information sent on a consistent basis is an effective way to stay in communication with your overall online membership. We recommend that organizations establish a brief e-mail newsletter to send to their general online membership on at least a monthly basis. This newsletter would consist only of text (no attached documents), and could include a general update about your activities, snippets from your paper newsletter, and other information that your general membership may find useful and interesting. The key points about this form of communication are brevity and consistency. Get your members used to receiving good e-mail from you on a regular basis. An announcement about this e-mail newsletter can be made in your paper newsletter, or via a single e-mail to all your online activists. Ask them to join.
• "Action alerts" for core activists: Again, it is easy to overwhelm online activists with messages asking them to take action on a particular issue. Usually, only a subset of your general membership can be counted on to regularly respond to action alerts by your organization, and these are the people you should try to identify and focus your alerts on. These core activists don't mind getting a lot of e-mail from an organization because they have indicated they are willing to attend meetings, send letters/faxes, and make phone calls when asked to do so. We feel it is better to send an e-mail alert to 100 people whom you know are likely to respond than it is to send a message to a broad audience that may not be interested (and may be annoyed to get such e-mail messages).

A good way to help identify these core online activists is to ask them. Again, place an article in your paper newsletter or send an e-mail to all your online activists, and tell them you're establishing an e-mail alert system. Indicate what you are planning to send via this list and with what frequency, and what you expect from participants (i.e., action). If your group is large enough to work on multiple issues, consider starting an action alert list for each of your major issues. This will further narrow your target audience to those who are truly interested in a specific issue and are therefore more likely to act when called upon to do so.

By establishing both an online newsletter and an action alert list, you will create two levels of communication that most of your constituency is likely to participate in. Over time, you'll be able to move more and more of your online members into the "action" list(s), which will help make you more effective. Starting with these two simple concepts, you will learn more about how e-mail can be used in your work, which will enable you to move on to more sophisticated techniques and technologies.

Using E-Mail Lists to Generate Online Discussions

Unlike a "broadcast" list (which is one-way communication), a "discussion" list is an e-mail list which allows for "many-to-many" communication between everyone subscribed to the list; anyone on the list can post a message to the list that every member will see. Discussion lists allow for rudimentary online conversations to take place, and they can be a very effective way to communicate with a relatively small group of people.

Below are two simple examples of how discussion lists can be used in your conservation work:

1. Communication between staff, board members, and key volunteers (if appropriate):Many groups have members of their staff and board (and key volunteers) scattered across the region. Arranging in-person or conference-call meetings can be difficult and expensive, and this often means that even within an organization, people are communicating less than they would like. We think that one of the simplest and most powerful uses of a discussion e-mail list is for intra-organizational communication; establish a discussion list that includes your staff, board, and other key organizational participants. You can use this list for mundane purposes (scheduling meetings, issuing monthly reports, forwarding interesting information, etc.) or for more strategic uses (reviewing document drafts, discussing strategy, planning events, etc.). Even with as few as 10 people, we feel such an intra-organizational list can be a valuable addition to your overall communication methods.
2. Communication between issue- or geography-focused colleagues (including coalitions):E-mail discussion lists work best when members share common interests and goals, and the people on the list already have some context for working together (i.e. "they already know each other"). Again, given expense and scheduling difficulties, coalition members and groups working on similar issues do not get many opportunities to meet in person to share information and coordinate their activities. A discussion list is an ideal way to facilitate many-to-many communication between conservation organizations and activists, and the nature of e-mail can help to remove barriers of time and geography that often makes communication difficult. Many such lists already exist in the Northwest (ONE/Northwest currently hosts over 60), but we feel this simple technology should be used more extensively by the online segments of our community.

Here are some tips for being effective with e-mail discussion lists:

• Start small and grow (if necessary): We recommend that discussion lists start and remain small; fewer than 50 people working on a specific issue or in a specific geography is ideal. Big lists, unless very closely managed, can produce volumes of e-mail messages that cause "information overload." It is better to start out small and focused, and grow as your capacity to handle information grows.
• Stay focused: Related to the size of the list, we believe that lists should be created around highly focused issue areas, and not around general topics. Lists that are construed too broadly tend to fall into the trap of trying to be all things to all people in a community that is large and diverse. If the topic of your discussion list is too broad, then many messages will not be of interest to most of the list participants, and this not targeted will bring about "information overload." Start several lists if you need to create forums for multiple issues or for different aspects of a "big" issue such as forest or salmon management.
• Keep messages short: As with all e-mail communication, brief messages are much more effective than lengthy treatises. Given the conversational nature of these lists, it makes sense to keep the messages as brief and to-the-point as possible. Very active lists will generate a lot of messages, and short messages means less online reading time to get to the information you need.
• Try to avoid action alert overload: There is a tendency to use discussion lists to continually broadcast action alerts and other time-critical information to participants. This is, of course, a very valuable function of e-mail communication, but it is very easy to generate too many alerts asking the same people to do too many things (which also leads to overload). A better idea is for list members to devise clear plans and procedures for issuing action alerts to the list, and frequently ask the list members if this procedure is working effectively.

One key thing to remember: e-mail discussion lists are not a substitute for in-person or other communication, but can help augment the amount of communication you do now (usually for less money and in less time).