Online Advocacy Report

The LCV Education Fund researched best practices in online advocacy in early 2002 to inform its work with online advocacy systems designed to educate environmentalists and spur them to action on environmental policy issues.  Anecdotal evidence aside, there was little research or collaborative analysis about what is working, what is not, and why.  Clearly this medium is one in which there is increased
investment on the part of the advocacy community, and it is therefore worthwhile to investigate the best practices.

LCV Education Fund interviewed 30 online advocacy network managers and asked them to answer a questionnaire about their individual network. LCVEF also interviewed 12 state-level decision makers who are targets for online advocacy.  Some clear conclusions can be drawn and some questions remain:

• Online organizing is one tool in the larger organizing toolbox. It must have clearly articulated goals and investment appropriate to those goals;
• Building a relationship with online activists is crucial to the effectiveness of your program;
• It is worthwhile to educate activists on the importance of their response, identifying themselves as constituents and the value of personalizing their response;
• Activists need to understand their targets, and how their targets prefer to receive communications (email, faxes, phone calls or letters);
• Online advocacy managers need to be strategic – track what works and share information with likeminded organizers;
• The potential of online organizing is not well understood because there are many aspects that are not fully developed.

This research did not answer some important questions. More work must be done to define best practices in the field of online advocacy. Specifically, more research is needed on:

• Most effective recruitment techniques – both for activist retention and quality of activist;
• Online advocacy networks by their size and scope of work to offer more specific recommendations;
• What outcomes are possible or useful for online advocacy networks – policy change, education, reaching out to a different age group for an organization;
• Ways to overcome the unique challenges of a centralized effort that appears to produce form letters;
• Ways to share information so that the advocacy community can learn collectively from work in different sectors.

Finally, it is clear that online advocacy is here to stay.  As decision makers become more comfortable with the technology of email it will remain a tool for inexpensive communication.  Our community should continue to determine what works and what doesn’t, share information, and improve our online advocacy efforts.

View the full Report here (69 kb PDF)