Using email for campaigning and advocacy
For those nonprofits involved in advocacy work, email and e-newsletters are an important weapon in your armoury. They are cheap, easy and fast and can help mobilise supporters who in turn can use email to put pressure on MPs, public servants and other decision-makers.
But partly because they are cheap, easy and fast, you and your supporters need to avoid the email spam effect and target your recipients carefully.
Action alerts
If you are working on an advocacy issue build an email list of activists and alert them rapidly and cheaply. You can even set it up so that, with a click, they can send messages, by email or fax, to politicians or key policymakers.
Building website traffic
If you want to get people to revisit your organisation’s website, you need to provide a simple and short registration procedure for visitors to receive email updates when there’s something new of interest to them on the site. Only ask the most basic information that you need, i.e. their email address and key interest areas. The easier the process of registration, the more you will get.
See also Broadcast SMS.
True story
International email campaign saves workers’ jobs
A successful campaign by the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union
(LHMU) involved the Sydney Hilton.
LHMU National Media and Campaigns Officer Andrew Casey explains: ‘A couple of years ago, when the Sydney Hilton was shutting down for renovations, the hotel wanted to sack all of our members – pay them redundancy at below market rates and give them no guarantee of getting their job back.’
The campaign resulted in 3000 emails being sent to the Sydney Hilton from all around the world. The Hilton's General Manager contacted LHMU and said that they would negotiate if they stopped the emails from clogging up the company’s inbox.
‘The Sydney Hilton was receiving calls from other Hiltons around the world,’ Andrew says, ‘telling them that Sydney had to sort it out because the other Hiltons were getting hassled from local unions. The Canadian Postal Workers Union even contacted us saying that they were holding their annual conference at their local Hilton and that they had voted to boycott Hilton hotels from then on if the Sydney Hilton did not negotiate with our members’.
Andrew says that the web was ‘the key to turning the situation around’.
More information
An article from the United States on using email for advocacy.