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Stanton McCandlish on action alerts
``` [Stanton McCandlish at EFF is one of the most experienced organizers of online political actions. In response to my praise of his most recent alert, he typed a few pages of reflections on his experiences.]
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Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 15:17:34 -0800 (PST)
From: Stanton McCandlish
> [Even aside from its important topic, this is an exceptionally well-crafted > action alert. Note that its deadline is immediate.]
Why thank you. :)
Most of the "content" per se was by Shari Steele, our staff counsel, while the format is mine, based on trial-and-error experiments with alert formats that Shabbir Safdar, Jonah Seiger and I worked on over the years, mostly with crypto and CDA campaigns. It has several features some of which are missing from most activist alerts I see. This is all generic enough that it applies to action alerts that range from civil liberties groups targeting legislation in a lobbying effort to liberal groups targeting naughty corporations for picketting.
1) issuance date, just like on a press release; 2) cutoff date - very important to prevent "modem tax"-style memes that will not die (usual cutoff date is 1-2 weeks past the action deadline, because the alert will still have some news value at that point); 3) sponsoring organization(s) & their contact info; 4) very short executive summary at the top; 5) backgrounder, and pointers to even more info (should be short - you want people to get to the action section quickly - but informative enough that people will WANT to act); 6) what ACTION to take, and what/who the target is; 7) sample communiques, with encouragement to not just copy them verbatim; 8) contact info of the target(s) (it helps to also provide pointers to where people can get more for other relevant side targets); 9) dos and don'ts for making the calls & sending the letters/faxes (can be replaced with an URL if you set up a web-to-fax gateway); 10) encouragement to forward, but only to apropos areas; 11) specific information on the issue & process (especially legislation; alert authors should provide bill numbers, bill titles, bill sponsors and their party & state, etc., and information on the status and timing of the impending legislative or other action); 12) a headline that sums up the issue and action to take, and conveys the apropos level of urgency; 13) and a "what ELSE you can do" section for hyper-activists, those who missed the main action deadline, and those willing to take follow-up action.
VTW and CDT typically add another:
14) request that the respondents to the alert report back to the sponsoring orgs and tell them what kind of response they got from the call targets.
With short-deadline actions like this, we want people to focus energy on making the calls, rather than reporting back to us, though. To do #14, you also need a process to handle the incoming emails from respondents, of course. #14 is most useful when congressional positions on an issue are very divided and you need intelligence on where specific legislators stand. In other cases, you are fighting a very uphill battle, and you already know where most of the policymakers are at on the issue map, as it were.
The most frequent missing item I see on other orgs' alerts is #2 (missing cut off dates), followed by #10 (more specifically, I see lots of "please forward this!" exhortations that do not mention the appropriateness of the forums to which the forwards will be directed.) Another common goof is a bungled #6 in which the alert sponsors go on at length about the issue/problem and get people fired up, but fail to direct that energy into specific action with specific targets.
One last comment is that action especially toward legislators needs to be coordinated. Some helpful hints:
A) Action needs to coincide with action. That is, your action alert should direct people to make calls and so forth at a time when legislative action is pending, such as a hearing, floor vote, or committee markup. If you expend energy getting thousands of people to call about a bill that isn't on anyone's radar on the Hill, this is will be wasted energy. Hill staffers will just see it as "noise". This is less true if there is an issue that needs to be addressed, but no legislation yet introduced to address it. Here you're encouraging a legislator to take that step and come up with a bill or resolution to address the issue.
B) Communications are "ranked", both by who's communicating and how. Legislators care first and foremost about constituents (voters in their districts or states), so it's important to especially ask people from the target legislators' states/districts to contact them, and do so via the media that Congress treats most seriously. In order from most to least they are: personal visit, handwritten but legible letter, typed/wordprocessed letter, fax & phone call, email. Fax & phone call seem to be sort of "in flux". Some legislative offices take the former more seriously, likening faxes to letters, others seem to find them impersonal and form-like, giving more weight to personal voice calls. The White House and some agencies by contrast treat email and fax about the same (for legislators, the main issue is that anyone in the world can send email, and you can't tell if they are constituents. When emailing, include offline contact info, especially if you are a constitutent, so they know you aren't some foreigner from Bangladesh or London.) Most action alerts should call for phone and fax, and email if directed at a target other than Congress. Personal visits are not usually useful to call for except when Congress is out of session, and legislators are in their local offices, since most activists aren't going to fly to DC to talk to their Congressfolks, of course. Also, the content is important. Staffers and their bosses will take personal letters/calls, in which you express your views in your own words, more seriously than prepared letters/scripts with some personal content, and that in turn more seriously that totally unoriginal form letters. Finally, if you represent an organization or corporation, your communciation may have more weight than that of an individual, since you represent an aggregate voice and/or a potential campaign funding source, so you should usually say you are representing the org/company, and aren't just some random voter. This isn't a pretty fact, but there you have it.
A final note is that alerts should strive to be reasoned, reasonable, accurate, and informative. Disinformation, propaganda, slander, hysteria, and off-topic wander do NOT make for good action alerts. Avoid the hyperbole, and just get to the point. If your issue matters, the facts will speak for themselves.
More tips available at:
http://www.eff.org/congress
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Stanton McCandlish mech@eff.org Electronic Frontier Foundation Program Director http://www.eff.org/~mech +1 415 436 9333 x105 (v), +1 415 436 9333 (f) Are YOU an EFF member? http://www.eff.org/join ```
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