Tips and Recommendations

Below are a few general recommendations for online campaigning.

• Make it easy to sign up for your email list, both online and offline. This is the single best way to begin building a relationship with activists interested in your work. If you have a Web page, this should be visible above the lower edge of the first screen. More on this in the section on email.

• Keep it simple, short, and sweet. Folks just don’t have the time. Your message is vying with many, many others for attention and consideration.

• Consider the usability of your Web site. Usability is the ease with which users can satisfactorily achieve their goals in a particular environment. This is often achieved by integrating user testing and feedback throughout the design process.

  Sadly, nonprofit and government Web sites tend to be among the least usable. Many organizations compare their sites to those of similar groups. Most users, however, spend most of their time on other sites. See http://useit.com/ for several essays on ways to make a site more usable.

• Be specific with your message. An action alert may not need deep background information, but it should outline your solution to the problem and what people can do to help. Demonstrate that you are doing something that can have an impact. Raising funds for a specific project with a target amount creates a kind of transparency, too.

• Consider timing. How long will a campaign take to develop? When will it have the most impact on the issue?

• Follow up. Thank your users for taking action. Let them know how it went. Celebrate small successes. Good news energizes campaign participants. And thank government officials publicly for actions that help your cause.

• Organize your information. A clear navigation scheme makes it easy for the user to find what they are looking for. It also helps build trust.

• Create different messages for different audiences. Provide different levels of action. A user may prefer to take action alone or with others. They may be willing to host a house party for friends, or for anyone who calls.

• Keep it fresh. Don’t just send out endless appeals for donations. Mix it up with updates, background, feedback, and different types of actions.

• Amnesty International USA is often careful to throttle its online campaigning. For instance, ensuring that authorities in a particular country are not overwhelmed with letters, email, and faxes from the U.S. and Western Europe just because the membership in those countries may be more connected to the Internet, and can thus respond faster. An action alert may only be sent to a small subset of the membership in a particular country to balance the global response.

• Show date stamps on pages to indicate when they were last updated. While news releases, blog items, and reports are not expected to be current, users arriving at a campaign page may indeed expect it to reflect the current situation. Even if a situation has not changed, provide some indication of the ongoing status. Campaign pages that appear out-dated are not likely to generate trust or action — even if ongoing action is warranted.

• The best Web site is not much use if no one can find it. Spread the word. Grow your list. Set aside time and resources for outreach to build your email lists. Plug into existing networks and communities.

• Provide tools to your users. If your goal is to involve people in their communities, provide downloadable resources for local organizing or media work. This could include fact sheets, petitions, stickers, posters, or photos.

• Consider opening it up. Provide a space for user generated content and connection. Just build in some kind of moderation system.

• Build trust over time. While credibility may be established with quality content and a measured tone, reputations are built over time. When a controversy starts your site should be already recognized as an authority and well-placed in search engine indices.

• Move them up the “commitment chain”. Do not expect all your users to take direct action right away. On a list of 1000 people, perhaps 500 will open email, 100 will take online action, 50 will take offline action, and 30 will donate. The next step is asking them do something more. As trust develops, invite users to take deeper and deeper levels of action.

• Measure action taken. If you are asking users to take action offline, always include some mechanism for them to notify you of action taken. This could be a simple button on a Web form, or in an HTML formatted email message. Unless there is a compelling reason not to, let your users know the scale of participation.

• Consider the long run. If you are building a special campaign Web site, what will happen to it after the campaign has ended? If you are using a special Web site or email address, and particularly if you are producing printed materials referring to those addresses, what will happen to them in the future?

Last modified on January 19, 2006 6:32 PM