Resume Folder

Unfortunately, the International staff at Ashoka did not recognize the potential of my idea, not yet knowing in detail the nouns and verbs, and the fellowship was not funded. I understood that they made their decisions in a global context, and agreed with it. I still think it's a good idea. (Also, unfortunately, the images for this document have been lost).

The Problem

The internet is the fastest-growing communications medium in human history. Within a decade of the invention of the world wide web, 50% of American adults already use the internet daily. For better or worse, the American experience portends the experience of the rest of the world. We have choices about how the internet—and civilization—evolves.

In a study released March 2000 [1], the number of Americans on the internet who report giving time or money to social causes represents 25% of the adult population. Furthermore, 16% of the adult population, or 32 million people, are willing to take action online:

Yet 66% of "netizens" are unaware of opportunities to take action online:

Because of rapid internet growth, attention is quickly becoming the scarcest resource in the new economy. Direct email marketing by dot-coms will increase 40-fold in five years, at a time that web sites catering to social cause organizations are among the last that citizens visit.

Social cause organizations are having an increasingly difficult time translating public support for their issue into social change. Already, even though 75% of Americans describe themselves as environmentalists (Time, 1995), only a tiny minority (10%) are affiliated with any organization.

With the internet, every organization is forced to redefine its relationship to its audience. The balance of power in this relationship has shifted from the organization to the individual, who can now visit another organization's web site with the click of a mouse. That other organization is increasingly a dot-com, spending millions on cause-based marketing to attract attention to its e-commerce site, at the expense of a social cause. Its interruption marketing [2] as usual, but faster, better and cheaper. Well-financed internet marketing accelerates social disintermediation.

Dot-coms and dot-orgs are in a vicious cycle of interruption marketing, which explains why 71% of netizens are concerned about protecting their personal privacy on the internet:

The social backlash to an increasing interruption marketing assault—online marketers simply cannot restrain themselves when the cost of distributing messages is nothing—will be well deserved. It's a problem that social cause organizations on the internet could turn into an issue [3].

If the problem is not addressed, public interest access to online constituencies will be through expensive data profiling companies, far beyond the resources of social cause organizations.

The Idea

protectpersonalprivacy.org [4] will be a new service, coalescing social cause organizations with dot-coms developing personal privacy tools and public interest organizations addressing privacy policy to reintermediate a critical mass of new social cause netizens that value personal privacy.

protectpersonalprivacy.org needs to satisfy the value proposition of several internet-based constituencies in order to help social cause organizations be heard in the new economy:

• The vast majority of internet users want the medium to work for them while maintaining their option of anonymity. Providing protection of personal and private data is paramount.
• Far-sighted dot-coms recognize the rapidly growing privacy market but need to jump-start it with appropriate solutions to address the coming crisis in advance of government regulation.
• Privacy policy advocates need a vocal constituency that can push businesses and governments to extend and institutionalize the social protection of individual privacy on the internet.

Through protectpersonalprivacy.org, a virtuous cycle can be initiated where the satisfaction of each value proposition reinforces the other. Thus, social cause organizations can identify and mobilize a growing constituency of netizens by embracing personal privacy protection as a key tenant of the public interest agenda in the next decade. To the extent that social cause organizations collaboratively engage in protectpersonalprivacy.org, they can become a strategic coalition for structural change to reintermediate an online public engaged in social causes. protectpersonalprivacy.org can become a trusted internet-based platform for effective civic engagement.

The Strategy

protectpersonalprivacy.org is a new strategy designed to establish a trusted infomediary [5] that engages citizens on the internet in social causes by publishing information about actions that match an individual's social or community interests. protectpersonalprivacy.org enables netizens to own and control their own data by building profiles of their interests and actions so that they may be kept informed of news and events by organizations active in relevant social causes.

The two keys to protectpersonalprivacy.org will be the Privacy Portal and a Privacy Player:

• The Privacy Portal will be a decentralized registration system on participating organizations web sites that allow individuals to indicate their civic engagement and privacy preferences via a web browser. Netizens, who need not be a member of any organization, will register to participate by indicating the standard action opportunities they want to be informed about.
• The Privacy Player will be an application that is administered on a person's computer (or via a secure web connection to a remote server) to help individuals monitor and update their preferences, making it possible to refine their receipt of action opportunities.

Social cause organizations affiliated with protectpersonalprivacy.org will publish action opportunities, but only those opportunities that match the preference profiles of individuals will be delivered. The first filter will be applied by protectpersonalprivacy.org based on information attributes supplied by participating organizations, but the final filter will be at the individual's desktop based on attributes recorded in their Privacy Player. Of course, an individual can visit any Privacy Portal to view the full range of action opportunities, and thus adjust their Privacy Player by editing their own filters. protectpersonalprivacy.org will analyze the results of all outreach campaigns, and publish them to participating organizations and individuals.

protectpersonalprivacy.org will not determine which online action campaigns are conducted, nor the content of any published messages. Nor will it broker emailing lists. Rather, protectpersonalprivacy.org will be the trusted infomediary managing data profiles representing relationships between individuals and the groups or campaigns that seek access to them for engagement. Only the individual has access to their own profile: dot-orgs or dot-coms never see this data unless permission is provided by the individual.

protectpersonalprivacy.org will be a neutral place where any and all groups can build a trust relationship with the online public. The more social cause organizations proactively respect privacy needs, the more information netizens will provide about their interests. With greater understanding of these interests, targeted online campaigns will have much greater impact, starting a virtuous cycle as netizens recruit their family and friends to an increasingly effective service that they trust.

To establish protectpersonalprivace.org, several initial strategies need to be pursued:

Develop the Social Cause Constituency for Privacy (6 months)

Education of social cause organizations will be key to protectpersonalprivacy.org. They need education about the self-defeating nature of their current broadcast communications on the internet (which their constituents regard as spam, and tune out). protectpersonalprivacy.org will educate social cause organizations to develop data management policies that conform to the Code of Fair Information Practices [6]. Privacy policy organizations and technology assistance organizations will be engaged as partners to start marketing protectpersonalprivacy.org. A governing board will be established for protectpersonalprivacy.org to oversee the operations of the infomediary.

Develop the Revenue Model (12 months)

protectpersonalprivacy.org will be a free service to individuals and social cause organizations that want to connect with them. Businesses that want access to this constituency will be charged, with revenues in excess of direct operating expenses distributed to participating individuals and social cause organizations. Initial start-up funds will be secured from foundations and social venture philanthropists.

Build a Suite of Privacy Tools (18 months)

protectpersonalprivacy.org will develop partnerships with dot-coms building privacy tools (such as Privada) to develop a suite of applications designed to anonymize web surfing (allowing users to shield their identity as they surf the web); suppress cookies (preventing web sites from tracking user behavior); and filter email (to screen out unwanted spam). The Privacy Portal could be developed with a company like WinWin.com. Some tools will be bundled into the Privacy Player, others will be deployed on servers that users share. All tools will be developed based on XML standards facilitating the exchange of the data in the system based on privacy preferences.

An Ashoka Fellowship will enable me to devote all my creative energies toward realizing this idea. Not only will I be able to begin implementing the strategies outlined above, but I will also be able to access a network of other social entrepreneurs who can coach me to extend and adapt my idea.

Endnotes

[1] Socially Engaged Internet Users: Prospects for Online Philanthropy and Activism, prepared for Craver, Mathews, Smith Interactive by the Mellman Group. [back to text]

[2] See Permission Marketing by Seth Godin, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999, especially Chapter 1. [back to text]

[3] Only etrust.com is addressing this issue, but its membership is comprised only of dot-coms that cannot compromise their business models by not compromising the personal data of their e-commerce customers. [back to text]

[4] protectpersonalprivacy.org is the code name for this service. The domain name is registered. A permanent name will be selected that is short, memorable, and available. [back to text]

[5] The term infomediary is used in the technical sense as first defined by John Hegel, III and Marc Singer in Net Worth, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999. [back to text]

[6] Developed by a commission headed by Elliot Richardson in the Nixon Administration. See Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, Boston: O'Reilly & Associates, 2000. [back to text]

A PDF of this report is also available for downloading (191kb).

Table of Contents

Preface by Donald K. Ross

Executive Summary

I. Introduction

II. List Enhancements

III. Success Stories
Increasing Environmental Voter Turnout
Influencing Public Policy

IV. The Significance of Conservation Databases

V. Future Challenges
A. Think Strategically, Act Collaboratively
B. Use Projects to Grow the Constituency
C. Develop Useful Tools for Organizations
D. Design Projects from the Grassroots Up
E. Rigorously Measure Results
F. Establish a National Service Bureau
G. Address Privacy Issues Head On
H. Conduct Progressive Outreach
I. Adapt to the Internet
J. Grow the Conservation Database Field

VI. Conclusion
For Further Reading
About the Author

VII. Appendices
A. Conservation Database Glossary
B. Sample Database Security Agreement
C. Standard Contact Fields
D. Contact Information

Endnotes

This useful report by Marshall Mayer was supported by the Rockefeller Family Fund. In it, he describes a series of promising efforts to use database technologies to enhance the environmental communitys effectiveness, and suggests ways to expand and improve upon them. Special attention is paid to the work of the Washington Environmental Alliance for Voter Education (WEAVE) which pioneered the technique of matching conservation group membership lists with state voting records and using the resulting enhanced data to mobilize environmentalists on election day. WEAVE continues to do fine work today, and its director, Ed Zuckerman, has become a resource for the entire conservation community.

Unfortunately, for every success, such as WEAVEs or the Colorado Action Networks, which Mayer also recounts, there are many more stories to be told about missed opportunities. In fewer than a dozen states have environmental coalitions taken the first step of pooling their membership lists and matching them with their states master voter files. Of those projects, only a couple have gone beyond the basics to enhance the lists with demographic and other information, and to use the new data in targeting more sophisticated outreach. The rest ignore the information that they have in hand.

The challenge for funders is to figure out how to make groups aware of what they have and to inspire them to help themselves. The hardy band of technology circuit riders who have spread word to the grass roots of the power of email, the use of database technology, the information riches of the Internet, and the convergence of telephones and computers agree that the greatest challenge remains getting people to use what they have. It is a bottom-up process that can be time consuming, frustrating, and costly. Yet, it needs to be done. Such investments of time and money may, in time, yield remarkable returns both fiscal and political.

Just before I sat down to read Mayers report, I picked up a national business magazine and read for perhaps the tenth time the story of how Wal-Mart uses information technology to secure competitive advantage. The article quoted a senior executive to the effect that he didnt yet know how to use all of the information the company was collecting, but hed figure out what to do with it in the future. Although they dont realize it, many environmental groups are in a similar position. Their members have given them valuable information about themselves that could be used to advance their organizations goals, and deepen their members commitments to improve the environment. But, they dont know how to use the data they are already collecting.

Marshall Mayers report is one attempt to remedy this deficiency and to introduce several concrete projects that environmental groups can undertake immediately and for minimal expense. It is a worthwhile exercise, as is the work of his circuit-riding colleagues across the country. Our collective challenge is how to expand and speed up the diffusion and utilization of these empowering techniques and technologies.

Donald K. Ross
Rockefeller Family Fund
October 13, 1997

At a time when it finds itself increasingly under attack, the U.S. environmental movement needs to find effective ways to rebuild its grass roots base and increase the political activity of conservationists. Conservation databases—computer applications that allow environmental organizations to turn their lists of members and supporters into powerful communications, organizing, and fundraising resources—offer a promising new set of tools for such efforts. Such technologies are rapidly becoming more accessible to nonprofit groups, and can allow them to leverage limited resources into far more successful outreach programs. A well-designed database may be the single most strategic information or communication technology available to conservation organizations.

The usefulness of conservation databases may be dramatically increased through list enhancement projects. Such projects combine the membership lists of several environmental organizations, and then enhance them with information from state voter files on the demographic characteristics and voting behavior of individual members. The resulting, enhanced membership lists are analyzed for carefully targeted use in collaborative conservation campaigns, which most often focus on increasing environmental voter turnout. All list enhancement projects also return to participating groups enhanced versions of their own lists, to help build their capacity to organize and communicate with their members.

The best list enhancement projects lead to a sophisticated understanding of who the conservation constituency is—demographically and geographically—and how often they actually vote. Such information makes it possible to target conservation campaigns at audiences that organizations know, in advance, will be receptive, making it possible to significantly increase turnout of environmental voters. The Washington Environmental Alliance for Voter Educations (WEAVE) 1995 list enhancement and outreach project led to a sharp increased in turnout—almost 13 percent—among the infrequent voters it targeted for a statewide referendum on a takings bill passed by the Washington legislature. The effort certainly had a substantial effect on the referendum, which, in a major victory for conservationists, was soundly defeated.

Conservation databases can also enable effective use of new communications tools, such as the Internet and automated fax systems. The Colorado Action Network (CAN)—a high-tech network of over 3,000 activists around the state—consists of members recruited through the use of data from a 1996 League of Conservation Voters Education Fund (LCVEF) list enhancement project. Using Internet email, CAN members receive alerts that include pre-addressed sample letters to the targets of the action (who, most often, have been the members state legislators). Citizens responses can be emailed back to the CAN, which automatically converts the letters into faxes and delivers them to the appropriate fax machine in a matter of minutes. The system clearly affected votes on a number of important issues, and offers an innovative model for electronic activism in other states.

Conservation databases and related technologies offer enormous potential. They will only fulfill it, however, if such efforts simultaneously develop the capacity of local groups to manage and analyze data, the ability of environmental consortia to do list enhancement work, and the capability of environmental groups to organize via the Internet. Funders approaching conservation database work should support:

• a national, strategic approach that includes development of standards;
• a strong focus on outreach to new conservation constituencies;
• the development of model database applications for conservation groups;
• projects designed from the grass roots up, with substantial technological and management assistance for local groups;
• rigorous measurement of results, and development of tools and data for such evaluations;
• creation of a national service bureau for list enhancement work;
• a frank, ethical, thoughtful approach to privacy concerns;
• collaborative database work with other progressive constituencies;
• the use of the Internet as a communications and organizing medium; and
• interchange among those now pioneering conservation databases and list enhancement projects.

As it approaches the twenty-first century, the U.S. environmental movement finds itself facing a paradox. The vast majority of Americans describe themselves as environmentalists, and a large share of them even declare themselves willing to sacrifice income or living standards to reduce pollution and conserve natural resources. Yet, at the same time, American voters continue to elect many politicians who view the environmental movement with indifference or outright hostility. The two most recent national elections brought in the most ardently anti-environmental congresses in memory. Public support for natural resource conservation and environmental protection remains a mile wide but an inch deep, and the conservation movement—with all its sophistication in media relations and direct marketing—is, all too often, failing to turn broad support for its goals into political action.

Luckily, a new set of tools that may improve this situation is now becoming available. Many groups are creatively using information and communications technology to translate environmental sentiment into political power. Since the 1994 election, there has been a renewed effort by several state, regional and national conservation organizations to identify and mobilize citizens who will support green candidates and initiatives. Many of these campaigns have also sought to increase the strength of local conservation groups by building their capacity to recruit and engage members, donors and activists.

All of these efforts utilize technologies: computer applications that allow organizations to turn their lists of members and supporters into powerful communications, organizing, and fundraising resources. Such technologies are rapidly becoming more accessible to organizations with limited technological and financial resources. With proper equipment, training, and support, information technologies can allow groups to leverage limited resources into much more successful outreach programs. Indeed, a database may be the single most strategic information or communication technology that a conservation group can develop.

This report seeks to educate donors about the emerging field of conservation databases, highlighting some success stories that provide lessons for future projects. This report also identifies needs for strategic investments that could increase the effectiveness and national significance of conservation database projects. This report is not intended to help donors decide who should receive support for conservation database projects. Rather, I hope it will serve to educate donors about an important, emerging field, and motivate them to support the diverse, creative and coordinated efforts of many organizations.

I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Rockefeller Family Fund, as well as the intellectual engagement of Rob Stuart of the Rockefeller Technology Project, in developing the ideas in this report. Of course, the pioneers in the field of conservation databases deserve much of the credit, for without their creative application of information technology this report would not be possible. However, responsibility for final content of this report remains with me. Finally, I encourage further dialogue among colleagues to grow this emerging field.

A list enhancement project seeks to combine the membership lists of several organizations, enhance the membership lists with new data (such as and ) from a , analyze them, and then use the enhanced information in a collaborative conservation campaign. List enhancement projects also return the back to the participating groups to build capacity to organize and communicate with their members. The result, in the best of the list enhancement projects, is a sophisticated understanding of who the conservation constituency is—demographically and geographically—and how often they actually vote. Such information makes it possible to target conservation campaigns at audiences that organizations know will be receptive, making it possible to significantly increase turnout of environmental voters. Such data were rarely, if ever, available to conservation groups until the advent of the projects described in this report.

Cooperation among many conservation organizations is a crucial facet of successful list enhancement projects. The databases addressed in this report are not the property of a single organization. Rather, they are always the result of a collaboration between many, where groups agree to combine, enhance and use their data—membership lists, activist networks, petition signers, and so on—together. Just a few years ago, many thought it impossible that conservation organizations would agree to pool their names into a common database. Mailing lists are the lifeblood of membership organizations, commonly viewed as assets to be protected at any cost. But some conservationists realized that they were having only marginal influence on the political process, and that gaining much greater power would require pooling the resources of like-minded organizations. They found list enhancement to be one of the most productive areas for cooperation.

List enhancement projects are a relatively new strategy for conservationists. The Washington Environmental Alliance for Voter Education (WEAVE) conducted its first list enhancement project in 1995. It was closely followed by a regional list enhancement project conducted by the Northern Rockies Campaign and Desktop Assistance for Idaho, Montana and Wyoming groups. Since 1995, state-based, conservation-oriented list enhancement processes have been conducted in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Michigan, New York, Maine, California and North Carolina. The Sierra Club sponsored a national list enhancement project in 1996, targeting 10,000 conservation voters in each of 18 Congressional District races and 7 U.S. Senate races.

Currently, state-based list enhancement projects are being organized in Minnesota and Alaska, and a regional project is being organized in the Southwest (Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado). Because many of these projects have been or are being conducted under the partial or complete sponsorship of the League of Conservation Voter Education Fund (LCVEF), and the methodologies have been developed in coordination with each other, there is a great deal of consistency in the approach taken by all the projects. A list enhancement project typically has several steps, which can take as little as three months or as long as a year:

• A formal agreement is reached between groups with shared conservation goals to prescribe how each groups names can and cannot be used in the collaborative project. Clear and compelling outcomes bind the coalition together, but it is each groups confidence in the security of its list that determines if and how the groups participate. A is designed to secure the appropriate use of a groups names, and is the single most important factor in a projects success.

   

  Although all agreements are unique, key elements of the typical database security agreement include:

  • names in the common database are only for the use of the project and its participating groups;
  • any enhancements made to the database are the property of all the participating groups;
  • access to the common database will be only by the project;
  • any use of the common database will safeguard the anonymity of the source of each record; and
  • no fundraising, membership recruitment or illegal electoral activities will be conducted from the common database by the sponsoring organization of the list enhancement project.

• The membership lists of the participating groups are into one large list, names and addresses are converted to a standard format, and duplicate records are removed or . Duplicate records are those members that belong to more than one group. Typically, there is only a 15 to 20% membership overlap in a list project.

   

   

• The cleaned list is sent to a voter file vendor. These vendors collect voter information from local election officials (usually at the county level), including registration date and voting history. They also add demographic data from the U.S. Census files and other public sources. The vendor matches the conservation list against the list of all registered voters, and, if there is a match, returns the election data along with other demographic and geographic information, such as sex, age and the legislative districts in which the registered voter resides.

   

   

• The list enhancement project conducts an analysis of the returned data. The analyses depend on the goals of the project, but generally examine the match rate (usually 50 to 60% ), the (whether or not they are registered to vote and how often they vote) of the conservation constituency (which, according to all list enhancement projects to date, is nearly the same as the general population), voting behavior by sex and age, number of members that belong to more than one group, membership numbers by political districts, etc. These analyses are generally used to help refine outreach strategies.

   

   

• The uses of the data depend on the collaborative goals of the participating groups. Most list enhancement projects use the data to increase participation of conservationists in the political process, in ways that are permissible for 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations. Other list enhancement projects try to influence state-based legislative processes. Still others focus on identifying and mobilizing regional constituencies to participate in administrative procedures, such as public comment on environmental impact statements or proposed regulations. Each use requires a detailed analysis of the data and how they can be used to further the conservation objectives of the participating groups. Many of the projects are demonstrating impressive results (see the next section).

   

   

• A final step of all list enhancement projects is to return to each participating group an enhanced version of the list they submitted. The groups then use the enhanced data for targeted fundraising and organizing. At a minimum, the list is returned as a standard-format file with enhanced data appended to the original contact information (along with documentation about the enhancement process). More ambitious projects actually overhaul or convert the database of the participating group (complete with extensive technical support), making possible ongoing, in-house analyses of relationships between the enhanced data and existing fundraising and activist lists.

   

While all list enhancement projects face difficulties unique to their situation, several types of problems are common. Among them:

• Timeliness, expense, and data quality are the biggest and most frequently reported problems. All list enhancement projects are dependent on data that are available only from voter file vendors. Currently, most states have at least one vendor, but some have none. Many states have only one. These vendors usual customers are political campaigns that deal with much larger volumes of data than the typical conservation list enhancement project. List enhancement projects thus often get assigned lower priority by vendors, pay higher prices than larger-volume customers, and suffer longer turn-around times. Many list enhancement projects also complain that the data they receive are not as accurate as it could be. While data-quality problems are often eventually fixed, sometimes the resolution comes too late to be of much use in a time-limited campaign.

   

   

• Database management and technological capacities in local conservation groups can be quite limited. Substantial training and support may be needed before some groups can make effective use of enhanced data. Most organizations maintain mailing lists for regular communications with members and supporters, but few have databases that enable them to analyze the effectiveness of their outreach and membership campaigns. Most groups involved in list enhancement projects have difficulty relating their (information about membership and activism) to the enhanced data (information about demographics and voting history) so that they can analyze trends and gaps.

   

   

• List enhancement projects—and the direct mail and telemarketing often done in conjunction with them—can be expensive, and can come into competition with groups other priorities. Especially when in campaign mode, there are no more precious resources for organizations than time and money. Such conflicts can limit the number of outreach contacts projects can make. Clear planning and budgeting—with long lead times—are essential for successful collaborative outreach campaigns.

   

In spite of all the problems that can plague list enhancement projects, pioneers in the field have realized major benefits:

• List enhancement projects bring about greater cooperation between groups. This is the single most important benefit, one cited by all projects and their participants to date. List enhancement projects are not just about building databases: they are about building relationships and trust between groups that too often have not worked well enough together in the past. The most successful projects spend a lot of time, early in the process, facilitating agreements between groups about how proprietary information will be protected. At the end of the process, increased cooperation tends to produce more consistent statements from participant groups, making it easier for a cohesive conservation message to get across to the public.

   

   

• Conservation groups gain a much greater understanding of their individual members through list enhancement projects. When a group keeps a simple mailing list, all they may know about their membership is how to send them mail and perhaps when a member last contributed. List enhancement projects add value to membership databases, increasing knowledge about individual members that enables one-on-one relationship building with larger constituencies—with the appropriate use of demographic, geographic and voting behavior data.

   

   

• Conservation groups also understand more about their membership in the aggregate. Groups can measure the appeal of their organization to certain demographic groups. For example, many conservation groups currently appeal primarily to older white males. If this constituency is not all that is needed to win on conservation issues—college educated, middle-income women and young people are key swing constituencies on many issues—groups can change their outreach tactics to appeal to more appropriate demographic groups.

   

   

• List enhancement projects help to limit the universe of potential targets, thus maximizing the impact of limited outreach resources. No organization has the advertising or direct marketing budget to indiscriminately attract new supporters. Rather, they all need to skillfully target their efforts to people that are most likely to respond positively. List enhancement projects enable a group to slice and dice the universe into ever more manageable and discrete parts.

   

   

• List enhancement projects have the potential to lead to increased political sophistication, confidence, effectiveness and clout on the part of conservation organizations. Conservationists get noticed when they can turn out a block of votes on election day, when they can mobilize a large number of citizens to weigh in on a legislative proposal, when they can influence public policy by organizing an active constituency—all of which are more likely when groups work together with enhanced data. In many ways, the most sophisticated list enhancement projects are taking a role—voter registration, permissible political education, and get-out-the-vote activities—that political parties once played, before the current reign of PACs and consultants.

   

The potential of databases and list enhancement projects to influence public policy and build the conservation movement can be illustrated best by success stories from the field. This brief compendium is not intended to be inclusive of all the many worthy efforts around the country. Rather, it is intended to be illustrative of the key elements that have made these efforts successful.

Perhaps the most valuable information that list enhancement projects can glean from matching their lists with voter files is data on how frequently their constituents vote. List members identified as registered voters are assigned a voting propensity index, which indicates how many times that person has voted in the last 4 elections. Thus a perfect voter has an index of 4/4 (voted in all of the last four elections) while someone who is registered but has not voted is given an index of 0/4.

List enhancement projects operate under the theory that conservationists are more likely to vote when an organization they support asks them to do so. In practice, their goal is to identify those constituents who are most likely to increase their environmental political activity when contacted. These are generally held to be registered voters who sometimes, but not always, participate in elections. Projects to date have used 2/4 voters—those that have participated in at least two of the last four elections—as their key swing constituency. The following cases indicate that such efforts can be an effective way to increase the turnout of environmental voters.

In the spring of 1995, the Washington Environmental Alliance for Voter Education (WEAVE) initiated a project to enhance the mailing and membership lists of Washington state conservation groups. It did so, in part, in response to rumors that anti-environmental groups had begun to incorporate sophisticated database technology in their work. WEAVE set out to find out if these techniques could also be effectively used by conservationists.

The list enhancement project came at a critical time for the states environmental movement. The combined efforts of the timber, construction, real estate, and agribusiness industries and other moneyed interests had resulted in the passage of a takings bill in the Washington legislature. In response, a broad coalition successfully mounted a signature drive to stop the legislation by placing the issue on the November, 1995 ballot. This No on 48 campaign had strong support within the conservation community. While some members of the environmental community joined the campaign steering committee, others encouraged their organizations to mount separate projects within the scope of the IRSs rules for nonprofit organizations.

The WEAVE project was to become an important part of the environmental communitys response to Referendum 48. WEAVE merged the membership lists of 19 organizations, removed duplicate names, and enhanced this mega-list by matching it to information in the voter file. The list enhancement was conducted to incorporate such information as voting frequency, legislative district, and other demographics. The result was a merged list of more than 233,700 registered voters who were members of one or more environmental organizations. The enhanced lists were then returned to the organizations, with the registered voters identified and their voting propensity listed.

Conservation organizations used this information to target a get-out-the-vote campaign—a legally permissible effort for nonprofits—for Referendum 48. The campaign focused on increasing turnout of infrequent voters in the environmental constituency. Those environmental members who had voted in only 2 of the last 4 elections were contacted and urged to defeat Referendum 48. The campaign was a success: between the efforts of the coalition-led No on 48 campaign and the supporting activities of the environmental organizations, Referendum 48 was defeated 60% to 40%.

To estimate the effect of the use of its enhanced data on the outcome of Referendum 48, WEAVE examined voter participation data from the November 1995 election. They compared the turnout of two sample voting groups from King County (Seattle): regular 2/4 voters and 2/4 voters contacted by WEAVE. They found that WEAVEs field effort increased voter turnout by almost 13% over that of the average King County 2/4 voter. This increase was remarkable compared to other attempts to boost voter turnout: standard campaign wisdom holds that field work can be expected to move no more than 2% of any voting population during a campaign.

The success of WEAVEs work on Referendum 48 was eye-opening for long-time campaigners. The true potential for activating the environmental grass roots became apparent. The tremendous possibilities for using enhanced data were not lost on groups who did not participate in the first year of the WEAVE project. A total of 32 groups—13 more than in 1995—participated in the 1996 list enhancement project.

Across the country, state legislatures, governors, and natural resource agencies are playing an increasingly important role in setting environmental policy. This is certainly true in Colorado, as well as most states in the West.

As assaults from Wise Use groups and extractive industries have grown louder, the Colorado environmental community has found itself at a competitive disadvantage when attempting to influence public processes. In an effort to counter increasing attacks on environmental protection, the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and other members of the broader environmental community have developed the Colorado Action Network (CAN).

The CAN is a high-tech network of over 3,000 activists around the state who belong to various conservation and recreation groups, including EDF, the League of Conservation Voters, the Colorado Environmental Coalition, and the Colorado Public Interest Research Group. Activists were recruited through the use of the enhanced voter data provided to each group by a LCVEF list enhancement project conducted in 1996. LCVEFs project in Colorado combined the membership lists of 15 groups to enhance the data of 75,000 registered conservation voters.

Members who passed through a high activism propensity screen—including voting in all of the last four elections—were solicited by telemarketing to join the network. The screen proved incredibly useful and cost effective, identifying a target group of potential members who joined CAN at a surprising rate of over 65%.

CAN uses new communication technologies, based on the national EDF Action Network, to deliver action alerts to its members. New members provide their name, street address and email address, and the CAN database automatically assigns state legislative districts and congressional district based on their address information. Action alerts are then sent to activists via email. The alerts include background facts on an issue and a sample letter pre-addressed to the target. Members are encouraged to edit the letter and then send it back via email to the CAN, which automatically converts the email letter to a fax, addressing it to the appropriate target and sending it to the destination fax machine in a matter of minutes. The system also automatically records the members response to the appeal in the CAN database.

Although 1997 was just its first year of operation, the CANs success was impressive. No bill was actually defeated on the floor of the legislature, but the response from the grass roots community prompted many legislators to vote with the environment on a number of important issues. The first full alert effort resulted in constituency contacts that overwhelmed fax and phone machines.

Colorado offered particularly suitable conditions for establishing such an activist network: the Denver-Boulder area has the highest email usage rate in the country, and the LCVEF list project provided an important resource for targeted recruitment efforts. Thus, CANs communications are immediate, and its operation inexpensive. In addition, Colorados citizen legislature—in which all members serve part-time, with no professional staffs—is particularly sensitive to such activism, since all faxes and phone calls are received directly by the legislators themselves. Citizen legislatures operate in much the same manner in many other states, and many local elected officials are accessible via similar contact methods.

The CAN has been more than just a new opportunity for the states conservation groups to influence public policy. It has also brought the environmental community together in an unprecedented way. All of the participating groups approved each alert, and network strategy was based on coalition actions, not individual agendas. The CANs success in cooperative use of inexpensive, accessible technology portends well for groups in other states that face long odds as they try stem the downward spiral of citizen influence on environmental public policy.

These impressive success stories all are less than two years old. But conservation groups have been using databases for years. What has changed, and why is this change significant now?

In the late nineties, the U.S. environmental movement is at a turning point. With fewer friends of the environment in Congress—and hardly any chairing key committees—the substantial corps of expert lobbyists employed by the environmental movement now find themselves mostly on the defensive. Even some of the movements friends in government have come to fear—and, at times, accommodate—what they perceive as a substantial anti-environmental movement in grass roots America. The result has been lawmaking that increasingly fails to protect the environment. Furthermore, with a more conservative federal judiciary interpreting the laws, the courts—the traditional last resort of environmentalists—are also becoming a less useful avenue for reform.

The national environmental movements traditional emphases—lobbying and litigation—thus now are aimed at far less receptive targets. Whats more, the national groups long-term dependence on Washington-based lawyers and experts has been to the detriment of their grass roots base, which all too often has been allowed to atrophy. Some groups and campaigns have continued to make effective use of activist members, and media campaigns have helped shape public opinion, but, by and large, the environmental movement derives much of its remaining power on its expertise and the righteousness of its beliefs.

At the same time, anti-environmental groups have done the kind of grass roots work that the conservation movement has neglected. It is now widely acknowledged that the environmental movement has been out-organized by its opponents—using methods that democratic and progressive organizations pioneered and perfected. Industry-sponsored front groups have conducted well-financed Astroturf campaigns , using traditional organizing methods and supplementing them with state-of-the-art communications tools. These campaigns have been successful at changing public opinion and influencing public policy. Such a campaign, for example, led to the Washington takings legislation eventually stopped by Referendum 48.

Many conservation organizations have responded to these developments by turning back to grass roots organizing. In the hopes of mobilizing a large power base to offset the inroads of the anti-environmental movement, many state, regional and even some national groups are doing traditional base-building work. By and large, these efforts are not intended to replace legal or lobbying strategies, but to augment them by putting some bark behind their bite. Such organizations are also beginning to look more to cooperative work with local groups, who—since they are the grass roots—never forgot the power of traditional organizing.

List enhancement projects are an important new tool that can help the conservation movement rebuild its base, and draw individual activists, local groups, and national organizations closer together around a common agenda. At their best, they recognize that relationship building—constituency organizing—is the basis for future development and expansion of the environmental community.

List enhancement projects supplement traditional community organizing by leveraging groups capacity to develop one-to-one relationships with ever-larger constituencies. They do so by making possible careful targeting of messages, a marketing strategy shared by the most adept organizations in business, government, and the nonprofit sector. As mass communications overdose the public with messages, attention has become a scarce resource. An effective communications process delivers the right information to the right people at the right time in an easy-to-use fashion. The basic strategy is the same, whether the message is to buy a product, RSVP to a wedding invitation, or call a Senator to help pass environmental legislation.

List enhancement projects are a necessary tool for a revitalized environmental movement, but are not themselves sufficient to meet the challenges at hand. The WEAVE and CAN success stories discussed earlier also reveal additional, related tools for development of conservation action in the Information Age. A comprehensive strategy can be summarized as the three legs of a stool:

• Local Data Management Capacity

   

  The first leg of the stool is the capacity of local conservation organizations to manage information about their members, donors, activists and prospects. Local conservation groups will remain the strength of the environmental movement. List enhancement projects can only add value to the membership lists of cooperating conservation groups in proportion to the size and quality of the original lists. Local conservation groups are also in the best position to consistently use the results of list enhancement projects to build constituencies for change. Thus it is incumbent upon all—list enhancement projects and donors alike—to support efforts to increase the capacity of local groups to manage, augment and expand their membership, donor and activist constituencies. Such efforts should include both management training and technological assistance.

   

• List Enhancement Projects

   

  The second leg is the combined capability of the conservation movement to add value to its local data through list enhancement, and to use the results in coordinated campaigns. List enhancement projects help the conservation community understand, at a much deeper level, who their constituents are, and how those constituents attitudes and demographics compare to those of the public at large. This can help mobilize hitherto unidentified constituencies for conservation action. Long-term information on the activism of individual conservationists—and how it changes in response to groups work—can help measure and improve the effectiveness of conservation organizations.

   

• Online Organizing

   

  The third leg of the stool is the conservation movements ability to attract and contact large numbers of constituents quickly and cheaply through the . The number of potential conservation constituents connected to the Internet is large and growing explosively. Though the technology is new to most people, 20 percent of American adults now use Internet email daily. With 45 percent of its users now female, the on-line world is no longer primarily the domain of male computer experts. In fact, the Internet constituency contains a disproportionate number of successful female baby-boomers and other demographic groups that typically support environmental causes. The Internet is the major new public sphere for unmediated civic action, and communications on it are instantaneous, inexpensive, and interactive. Though it cannot reach everyone—yet—conservationists must target it in organizing efforts.

Without any the three legs of the stool, organizing efforts are likely to fall down:

• Without local data management capacity, list enhancement projects cannot be sustained. Each list enhancement project is fundamentally dependent on the contribution of high-quality data by local groups. Collaboration is relatively easy to accomplish the first time, but local groups need to see a significant return on their investment to justify continued involvement. The most successful list enhancement projects understand this, and integrate local capacity-building with data enhancement work. The results are quantitatively and qualitatively measured in each participating organization, and reinforce each other over time, as better and better local lists are combined into successively more powerful list enhancement projects. And, at the other end of the process, large, collaborative campaigns depend on the "introduction" that local groups give them to activists on the combined list. Familiarity is an essential ingredient, for instance, to conducting successful appeals over the Internet—often an anonymous, impersonal medium—and email recipients are much more likely to respond to an appeal from, or associated with, a local organization they support.

   

   

• Without enhanced data, the universe of conservation supporters would still be "a mile wide but an inch deep." Conservationists simply wont fully understand who their supporters—current and potential—are, and will thus find it hard to reach out to them reliably and cost-effectively. Without the additional data available from voter files, even if individual conservation organizations or coalitions had the capacity to contact each of their constituents via email directly from their databases (few currently do), they would only be broadcasting indiscriminately to very large groups of people. Electronic communications may be virtually free to the publisher, but it is also very easy for the recipient to throw out junk mail with no guilt over wasted trees. Enhanced databases make possible more effective targeting, or "."

   

   

• Without Internet capacity, conservationists cant afford to communicate with the constituencies they need to reach. This is true both for growing, local organizations and for the statewide, regional or national campaigns in which they collaborate. Large-scale direct media is largely beyond the budget of most campaigns, local or larger; free media that conveys the messages conservationists want to get across is harder and harder to get. The solution is to use the Internet to reach a conservation constituency directly. New, integrated tools for Internet organizing that are now being developed could enable environmental groups to build one-on-one relationships with very large numbers of activist citizens.

   

List enhancement projects have played a valuable role in illustrating the practical value of more accurately characterizing regional conservation constituencies. In their very short history, they have shown major potential for increasing environmental activism, and particularly for boosting conservation voter turnout. To the extent that such results can be scaled up to regional and national levels, it is clear that list enhancement projects, in and of themselves, are a valuable strategy for the conservation movement.

But efforts to identify and mobilize constituencies for conservation change cannot stop with list enhancement projects aimed solely at influencing elections. Conservation database projects, more broadly defined, must also build the data-handling capacity of local organizations, and improve the environmental movements ability to recruit and engage constituencies using the Internet. Taken together, such efforts can help conservation groups organize successfully in the Information Age.

List enhancement projects clearly offer a compelling strategy for building the conservation movements base. Here are ten directions that the conservation database movement should take in the near term to build a foundation for constituency building far into the future:

The increased conservation action created through list enhancement projects clearly makes them worthy of support. However, a strategic approach is necessary as the list enhancement movement expands. Decisions on new projects should not be made solely on estimates of where the conservation community can influence a swing constituency of voters in the next election. Instead, a coordinated, national strategy—developed with the involvement of all the major national and regional organizations—should attempt to identify the areas of the country that can make the most immediate and long-term use of list enhancement capacity building. National organizations should follow the lead of local organizations that have invested in these list enhancement projects.

There is also a need for national standards for database development and analysis, so that the results of different projects can be meaningfully compared. Developing such standards will require national leadership, and the involvement of both data producers and end-users. Without standards, it will be extremely difficult for national organizations—universally acknowledged as key partners in all list enhancement projects—to combine data from different regions or states in national projects.

For example, list enhancement projects in some states determine 4/4 voters by looking at the last four state/local and federal elections, while others consider only federal elections as the basis for their analyses. Local elections are important, but voting behavior in them is often quite different from the federal elections which the national environmental organizations are most interested in analyzing. It is difficult to draw definitive conclusions when comparing apples and oranges. Each list enhancement project should make national comparisons possible by using, as a baseline, the federal election results from the two most recent cycles. Any additional election results will add a richer dimension that will be most useful to local groups.

Other standards should be set as well, such as defining in each list enhancement project the status of the individuals involved. Many projects request only members from each participating group, while others have no status requirements, accepting records of individuals who are members, donors, activists or, sometimes, merely membership prospects.

List enhancement projects should focus more on innovative strategies to expand the ranks of conservation members, donors and activists. Its not enough to enhance the data of members: finding new members among a constituency that is a mile wide and an inch deep—but unorganized—is also important. It is surprising that there are almost no success stories—or even attempts—featuring the use of list enhancements to identify and recruit new conservation members or activists.

Initiative campaigns are excellent vehicles for base building when done in conjunction with a list enhancement project. Petition signers have acted on behalf of an issue; list enhancement projects should get these names to participating groups so they can recruit new members and activists. WEAVE has begun to experiment with this strategy. The voter identification telemarketing efforts of the LCVEF are also a step in the right direction, but more tests need to be conducted to determine if conservationists thus identified can be engaged as members or activists of participating organizations.

While these recruitment strategies still are largely untested, they should be given a high priority. If support for conservation is really much wider than is reflected in the ranks of existing groups, only such new efforts are likely to engage unorganized conservationists as members and activists. Otherwise, groups will continue to simply recycle each others lists, since it is far easier to recruit someone that has already joined another conservation group than to try to find new members among the general public with the only the crude targeting hitherto available.

Support is needed for efforts to build basic tools that local, state and regional groups can use to manage information about their constituencies. The databases that most conservation groups are using effectively prevent them from taking the best advantage of the data gleaned from list enhancement projects. Most in-house databases are developed by well-meaning conservationists with little or no database development or data management training. Most groups are trying to adapt off-the-shelf software that is usually difficult to learn, use and customize. The market is not working well when it comes to providing useful tools to conservationists.

WEAVE, in a report summarizing their past two years of experience pioneering list enhancement methodologies (see For Further Reading, below), observes, When WEAVE returns a membership list to a participating organization, the format may or may not be compatible for reintegration. This is undeniably the single biggest stumbling block for organizations. Groups cant add fields to incorporate new enhanced data, or import it to relate it to their legacy member, donor and activist data.

The WEAVE report points to a possible solution:

Probably the tool with the greatest promise comes from Desktop Assistance. Presently in the development phase, DA plans to unveil a low cost, user friendly database [ebase]. This could be the single, most effective answer to the long term problem of reintegration of data. It would encourage expansion of database work by a greater percentage of staff and allow for more ease in lists exchanges between organizations.

List enhancement projects should be designed from the beginning to encourage membership and activist development among participating groups. Too often a list enhancement project is designed to meet the immediate needs of an electoral campaign. To make the investment worthwhile, for donors and participating groups alike, the list enhancement project should be designed to promote strategic skills development and constituency-building in local groups.

For example, when voter identification calls are made, an additional question might be asked to determine if the conservation voter is a member of or donor to any other citizen-based nonprofit. Since the act of joining or giving to a nonprofit is a far higher predictor of future organizational behavior than is their voting propensity, this information will be most valuable to participating organizations whose major goal in list enhancement projects is organizational development.

List enhancement projects and their funders also need to anticipate that participating groups will require technological and management assistance to make the most of enhanced data. Groups often do not have adequate hardware and software, and—more important—may need substantial staff training to build their human capacity to creatively approach, analyze and use data. Management support should start with basic education about the possible uses of enhanced data for conservation organizations, and should also include training in campaigns, organizing, and membership and donor development. Such support services should be made available to participating groups through list enhancement projects themselves, or through partnerships with local management support organizations or specialized consultants. Grassroots groups may also need financial assistance to help defray direct marketing costs associated with testing new approaches to constituency building.

Above all, funders and project managers should be careful to resist the temptation to use list enhancement projects to spur change in the behavior of grass roots conservation organizations. Grass roots leaders often perceive that better ways of doing things are imposed on them without regard for their real needs. As one key practitioner of the list enhancement movement puts it, what we are promoting tends to be framed, all too easily, as solutions looking for problems. National and regional leaders of the conservation movement have often failed to build the kind of collaborative relationships with local groups that allow the self-identified needs of the grass roots to help determine national and regional strategies. Such leaders are often technologically ahead of the grass roots. We should not be pushing technology to the grass roots level.

Despite the progress that has been made by list enhancement projects to date, conservation organizations are not particularly adept at measuring the effect of their efforts to reach out to and mobilize constituencies. The development of new data management tools that include built-in feedback loops, to gauge the effect of communications campaigns, will help make it easier to evaluate programs. But without baseline data, which most groups do not collect, it is very difficult to measure results over time.

List enhancement projects are in a unique position to introduce measurement and evaluation methods that will provide participating groups with the tools to determine whether or not particular strategies worked. New evaluation methodologies should lead to definitions of best practices based on measurable results within the groups participating in list enhancement projects. This will be a major challenge, but at this early stage of development in the list enhancement movement, rapid development of methodologies that lead to measurable results should be supported above other approaches that are not demonstrably measurable. Over time, results should be rewarded, not only the development of promising approaches or technologies.

A national service bureau should be created to provide technical assistance to the emerging list enhancement movement. The movement has grown thus far thanks to the creative energies of several key database consultants, but all agree that a national bureau could more quickly and efficiently provide a variety of services needed by list enhancement projects. These might include enhancement of mailing addresses (adding ZIP+4, carrier route, and delivery point codes), identification of duplicate records (merge-purge), phone number additions and updates, geocoding and spatial referencing (to determine geopolitical attributes such as congressional, state or local legislative districts ), and basic name and address cleanup (to identify and fix anomalies). Several of these services can dramatically increase the voter file match rate of conservation membership lists, as well as dramatically reduce direct marketing costs, such as postage. A service bureau could also conduct basic analyses of lists, both in the aggregate and by organization, such as membership location by jurisdiction, membership by demographics and member/donor status by voting propensity.

Finally, a service bureau could serve as a broker to lower the cost and improve the value of data that are purchased from voter file vendors. In some cases, where there are no voter files or where confidence in the quality of a voter file available commercially from a voter file vendor is not high, it may even make economic sense for the service bureau to create the voter file themselves. If the state in question is not overly large, the long-term costs associated with repeatedly using a voter file certainly justify the short-term costs of building a file from scratch (visiting each county to assemble a state file, then enhancing it with demographic, census and other types of data).

We live in a conflicted culture: on the one hand, it is embracing the introduction of information technology with exuberance, while at the same time demanding more safeguards against the invasion of privacy that information technology can enable. Voter files, and hence list enhancement projects, are at the crossroads of this ambivalence. While voter files are public information, derived from data that are gathered and released by public agencies, there is a potential backlash from a conservation constituency that is in many ways latently (if not overtly) Luddite. It would be prudent for the list enhancement movement to address concerns over invasion of privacy—before a backlash occurs—through several concrete steps:

• Educate participating groups that they do not need to announce their enhanced knowledge of their constituency in their communications. Tailored communications to subsets of conservation databases that contain enhanced data simply need to reinforce a connection, not tell a recipient that, in effect, "we know lots and lots about you."

   

   

• Develop guidelines for each other and for participating groups about the ethical uses of data, especially when lists are sold to other organizations that do not necessarily share concerns over protecting our conservation members privacy.

   

   

• Conduct more research, in conjunction with civil liberties and privacy protection nonprofits, about the implications of privacy concerns, and the efforts in Congress and state legislatures to limit the use of publicly available data.

   

Conservation and environmental protection, as important as it is, ranks far down the scale on the list of priorities evidenced when citizens vote. Even conservation voter identification efforts—in which potential voters are asked about what motivates them—have reached this conclusion. Furthermore, public opinion polling and voter identification telemarketing consistently identify two striking paradoxes:

• Baby Boom and slightly older women, aged 35-59, form the largest group of conservation supporters among the voting public. Yet the public profile and recruitment techniques of most conservation organizations are appealing to a preponderance of older white men. There is a disconnect: conservationists are not appealing to their most receptive audience.

   

   

• Very few conservation organizations appeal to young people, age 18-34, whether they are registered or not, despite the fact that this age group consistently expresses the belief that environmental protections are very important and that government does not go far enough to regulate polluters.

   

The effect of these trends is mutually reinforcing over time: the reason that our organized constituency is older and more male is that there has not been an infusion of new generational energy for almost twenty years, and women have been most unreceptive to the appeal that conservation groups have traditionally projected.

Unless these trends are reversed, the conservation movement will follow other progressive social change movements into virtual oblivion. Coalitions, however, have often been forged to help strengthen the power of movements that would be powerless on their own. Coalition building is a difficult task, but the conservation movement is in a unique position to provide leadership. Conservationists, pioneering the use of databases for social change, can encourage coalition list enhancement efforts that could be mutually beneficial to many cross-constituency participants.

For example, the Voters for Choice Education Fund conducted extensive voter registration work in the 1996 cycle. Their approach was a bit different, and perhaps instructive for conservationists. They purchased the voter lists for targeted districts and reverse-matched them across commercially available phone lists to determine which demographically profiled women (those of child-bearing years who were more educated) were not registered to vote. Voter identification contacts were made, encouraging participation, which affected a number of electoral races.

The lesson for conservationists is that potential partners are organizing entirely different constituencies that are also demographically very receptive to conservation messages. The challenge for conservationists is to define why it is in the self-interest of the womens movement—as well as other social change movements—to join forces to expand the base of activists willing to act on behalf of mutual progressive beliefs.

Addressing this challenge will be especially important as conservationists—in partnership with other constituencies—address the public policy threats posed by impending term limits in state legislatures and redistricting at all levels after the 2000 census. Absentee and down-ballot voter participation strategies, both of which offer promise for conservation constituencies, also can be pursued to the benefit of other progressive constituencies. Conservationists should reach out to other progressive constituencies to help build majoritarian movements for social change. Some established conservation list enhancement projects, such as the New York League of Conservation Voters, are exploring this new direction to involve other progressive constituencies. These efforts should be supported. Such collaborations could potentially realize even more significant economies of scale than efforts limited to the conservation community. Conservationists have already piqued the interest of other progressives: a recent national meeting of state-based progressive coalitions demonstrated significant interest in developing list enhancement projects. Our movement can provide key leadership.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for the emerging conservation database movement is to extend list enhancement projects to operate in a new communications environment. All communications processes are fundamentally affected by the digital technology revolution most obviously manifested by the Internet. Today, any group with modest technology and a well developed database can work interactively with a large constituency based on the preferences and actions of individual conservationists.

Most conservation organizations have yet to realize this in any meaningful way. For all the resources that have been invested in efforts to get the early adopting conservation constituency on-line, organized conservationists are underrepresented on the Internet. Even the largest conservation do not exceed 2,000 registered users, and even the most visible conservation World Wide Web sites do not experience more than 10,000 per week. In the rapidly expanding universe that is the Internet, these numbers are very small.

Nonetheless, the future of communications lies in the Internet. List enhancement projects can help their participating groups prepare by advocating the collection of email addresses at every possible opportunity. For example, voter identification telemarketing efforts can solicit the email addresses of conservation supporters. Over time, conservation list enhancement projects will realize the benefits of collecting email addresses in several ways:

• Within just a few years, most communications will be conducted over the Internet, and the medium will still be virtually free. The economics of electronic communications will be especially important if conservation groups are successful at growing their constituencies. Otherwise, they wont be able to afford to communicate with larger constituencies using traditional media such as direct mail and telemarketing.

   

   

• Of course, because the marginal cost of email communications is close to zero, citizens connected to the Internet will be inundated with email. The most effective communications will be based on the one-to-one relationships building that only organizations with good databases can facilitate. List enhancement projects can lead the way in helping groups collect the kind of data that make these types of communication possible. For example, email sent to particular geographic locations is possible in enhanced databases in ways that listservs will never be able to do: listservs are databases, but they do not track zip codes of registrants. It is even possible for conservationists to register for regular delivery of the kinds of information they want to receive from organizations, via a World Wide Web site.

   

   

• Internet-based communications can also be interactive. Conservation groups dont need to limit themselves to broadcasting or narrowcasting content to their net-connected constituents. They can also interact with constituents based on communications that are directed to their organization. These interactions may be automated or they may be moderated by an internet organizer. Of course, an underlying database makes it possible to analyze the aggregate of interactive transactions so that successful campaigns can be repeated.

   

These are just a few of the implications of adapting to the impending sea change in communications brought on by the Internet. List enhancement projects, because they are in the vanguard of using technology to build conservation constituencies, can help our community adapt. If we dont, conservation groups will share the same fate as other non-adaptive businesses or biological organisms—they wont survive.

The challenge will be to adapt in such a way that builds on the best methods of traditional community organizating, augmenting and amplifying their effectiveness with tools that scale to new and larger constituencies without much additional time or money.

Finally, support is needed for efforts to grow the emerging field of conservation databases. These should build on the excellent Estes Park, Colorado meeting sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund in April, 1997, which convened most of the movements early practitioners. The meeting provided important professional development and a healthy exchange of views and experiences among colleagues all genuinely committed to building useful conservation databases. Much of the content of this report was derived from the Estes Park meeting, and its participants all acknowledged its value. An annual (or more frequent) gathering, with an independently facilitated agenda and broader sponsorship, is needed to foster community among the often-isolated political and database hacks who are inventing new technologies and methods to build the conservation movements base.

The development of conservation databases, as outlined in this report, represent one of the more promising strategies to engage large but latent constituencies of conservation supporters.

The potential of this new movement is at the convergence of two powerful trends: the anti-environmental political climate in Congress and most state legislatures; and the explosive growth of information technology. By every measure, the public strongly supports conservation, and the conservation database movement is simply developing new ways to identify and mobilize that support.

Foundations, as catalytic institutions, can play several critical roles in the development of the conservation database movement:

• Support the expansion of conservation database projects to identify and engage conservation supporters, especially women and youth, that could become new members of environmental groups. Organized conservationists are far too few in number.

   

   

• Support applied research to develop the tools and methods reinventing advocacy and organizing in an interactive and digital environment. All organizations—private, governmental, and nonprofit—are being forced to reinvent their relationship with constituencies in the Information Age. The nonprofit sector needs to devote more resources to the task of adapting its tried-and-true practices to communications defined by digital media.

   

   

• Support the development of human capacity in conservation organizations. Database technology is simply a means to an end, but without the appropriate strategic, political, media, organizing, and management skills widely distributed among the leadership and staff of conservation groups, the technology cannot be effectively used. Capacity-building organizations, as intermediary nonprofits, are an effective source of support for conservation organizations seeking to engage larger publics.

   

Above all, support a movement in its infancy. Its practioners are among the creative visionaries of the conservation movement, and need to be provided the support to experiment and evangelize.

Readers interested in exploring the issues addressed in the Conservation Database Report are referred to three excellent reports:

• Help Wanted: WEAVEs Environmental List Enhancement Project, published in 1997 by the Washington Environmental Alliance for Voter Education, P. O. Box 85194, Seattle, WA 98145, 206-527-7951, [email protected]. This report outlines the process of establishing a list enhancement project in Washington state, and highlights its major outcomes.

   

   

• Maximize Your Grassroots Power: Legal Guide to List Enhancement and Citizen Contact published in 1996 by the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, 1707 L Street NW - Suite 750, Washington, DC 2006-4201, 202-885-8683, [email protected]. This guide is extremely helpful for nonprofit groups that are concerned about the limits of permissible activities.

   

   

• Computer Networking for the Northwest Environmental Movement by Marshall Mayer and Liz Gans of Desktop Assistance, published in 1995 by the Brainerd Foundation, 1610 Second Avenue Suite 610, Seattle, WA 98121, 206-448-0676, [email protected]. This report contains the seed ideas for collaborative activist databases linked to the Internet.

   

Marshall Mayer is founder and Executive Director of Desktop Assistance, a Helena, Montana-based 501(c)(3) management support organization that has been providing constituency building technologies and related services to conservation groups throughout the western U.S. since 1990.

Mr. Mayer is facilitator of the Conservation Database Listserv, a low-volume Internet discussion group focused on building the capacity of nonprofits to build and use conservation databases. Readers of the Conservation Database Report interested in subscribing to the listserv should contact Mr. Mayer.

A computer file that organizes data. When organized, this data becomes information that can be analyzed. The database is usually accessed through a specialized computer program.

 

A formal agreement between groups involved in a list enhancement process which governs how the data from an individual group can be used. See Appendix B for a sample agreement.

 

Data that describes social characteristics of individuals or groups, such as age, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, estimated income, education level, etc. Much demographic data is derived from U.S. Census files based on where individuals live, while other demographic data is collected by groups to describe specific individuals.

 

An automated information dissemination system that utilizes email lists to distribute information. Most listservs are broadcast only, allowing an organization to quickly and cheaply deliver information to the listservs participants. Others are interactive, allowing any of the participants to send information to all other participants.

 

Data from conservation groups that has been enhanced with demographic, geographic, or voter data available through data vendors.

 

Impressions made on a Web site, usually as a result of a mouse click on a link in a Web page. Hits are the most standard measure of Web traffic.

 

The global network of computers that speak the same language, using standards-based protocols to exchange information between computers.

 

Data from groups that describes the attributes of individuals and their relationship to conservation organizations, such as intact information and membership status.

 

The process of combining two disparate databases to create one database. Often this process will result in duplicate records. See purge.

 

The process of disseminating information based on individual demographic, geographic, voter or other attributes. In distinction to broadcasting, which does not refine distribution based on individual attributes.

 

The process of removing duplicate data from merged databases.

 

A private company operated for the purpose of collecting publicly available voter data and selling it to organizations such as political campaigns. The voter data is enhanced with additional demographic and geographic data.

 

The history of when a registered voter participated in elections, by year and whether the election was general, primary or other. Each election is represented, and the values for each election are Y (for voted) and N or blank (no information).

 

An index which summarized an individuals propensity to vote based on their voting history. If someone voted in all four primary and general elections in the previous two cycles, their voting propensity index is 4.

 

The Northern Rockies Campaign conducted a list enhancement project beginning in 1995 with the establishment of the following security agreement. Groups that participated included many of the major local, state, regional and national conservation organizations active in public lands protection in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. While Desktop Assistance was the lead consultant on the project to build the database, the Northern Rockies Campaign manages its enhanced database.

Database Use and Security Agreement

This database use and security agreement is between the Northern Rockies Campaign, hereinafter referred to as NRC, and Participating Group.

Introduction

The NRC database is a critical component of the NRCs goal to pool our resources and to act in a collaborative manor across the region. The database is designed for the mutual benefit of Participating Groups and the NRC. It will change the way and speed with which the NRC and Participating Groups communicate with its members and activists, give us a true picture of our strengths and weaknesses, and prepare us for outreach activities.

Building and Maintaining

Each Participating Group will make its member list (for Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming) available to NRC electronically. After providing the list the first time, only additions and changes will need to be provided on a quarterly basis.

Depending on size, NRC may contract with a firm to build the initial database.

The database will be stored and maintained on the NRC computer system and will be password protected.

All names generated through direct Campaign activities will be added to this database and maintained (electronically) solely by the NRC.

Participant Groups can be added at any time to the database.

Database Enhancements

NRC will enhance the database. Enhancements may include any of the following: adding telephone numbers, geographic designations (precinct, districts, and county), voter registration information and other information as economically feasible and desired by Participating Groups. Enhancements will be made initially when the database is established and subsequently as the volume of new names warrants.

Any Participant Group is welcome to identify other enhancements that would benefit their group. If a critical number of Groups agree that they too would benefit from that enhancement and if it is economically feasible for NRC to make such an enhancement than it will be done.

All of the enhancements made to a Participant Groups portion of the database will be given, as available, to that group for their internal use.

To maintain the integrity of each Participant Groups names the database will contain a coded notation for each organizational affiliation.

Database Uses

NRC will ensure the names provided by a Participant Group will not be used by NRC or any other Participant Group for purposes of fundraising and/or member solicitation or as part of an electoral program or campaign in support of a candidate.

None of the Participant Groups names will be used for NRC activities without the prior approval of that Participating group. It is assumed that the undersigned party of this agreement has the authority to grant approval and will designate a second person who has such authority in their absence.

Any subset of the database can be used for NRC related activities with prior approval of the Participating Groups at the initiation of either NRC or Participating Group.

Names generated by all NRC activities will immediately be sent, as appropriate and if funding is available, Campaign material that promotes the groups involved in the Campaign and the issues the Campaign is working on. These names will also be made available for all Campaign activities (such as the tasks and tools of the Campaign Plan).

Campaign generated names will be made available to each participating Campaign group once per year for uses that promote that one group or for fundraising, provided that all material clearly identifies the group as a member of the Northern Rockies Campaign and promotes the groups work as a participant in the Campaign.

In addition, Campaign generated names will be made available as soon as possible to groups that substantially participate in coordinated Campaign activities that generate new names. These names will be provided to lead groups—usually the group that provided the most in-kind staff support for the project—who will decide among themselves contact efforts. In all cases, the contacts are made on behalf of the groups(s) for uses that promote the group(s) or for fundraising but must be clearly be identified as having resulting from coordinated group participation in the Northern Rockies Campaign.

All names obtained through demographic and license purchases by NRC will be made available to Participating Campaign Groups for NRC related uses including fundraising.

Unless requested by NRC for specific project purposes and approved by the Participating Group, organizational affiliation for individual records will not be indicated on any materials.

Payment of costs associated with use will be addressed on a case-by-case basis.

Length of Use

It is assumed that the database will be maintained and used by the NRC starting in January 1996 and running through which ever occurs earlier: December 1997 or until the NRC is dissolved.

If Participant Groups are interested in having the database maintained beyond December 1997 or the dissolution of the Campaign every effort will be made to find an organization who will be able to maintain the database. If this does not happen all of the Participant Group names will be purged and the database will no longer exist.

Any Participating Group can withdraw from this agreement at any time by sending written notice to NRC.

The following document was prepared by Desktop Assistance in response to repeated requests from groups about how to define contact fields in their databases. The recommendations made also represent a consensus of many database development consultants who specialize in working with nonprofit groups. These contact field standards have been incorporated into ebase®,the database application developed by Desktop Assistance for conservation organizations. While agreement has been reached concerning contact data standards, an obvious next step is to better define standards for other list enhancement database fields for civic, demographic, census, geographic and other data.

Organizations ask us often about which fields should be in their databases. This is becoming more prevalent as groups design their own databases, and intentionally design them to be shared with other groups. They want to know what the standards are for field structures.

Unfortunately, there are few standards for databases. There is nothing like the generally accepted practices of the accounting field. This is because there are almost an infinite number of data attributes that are being tracked by organizations. There are, however, many standards for keeping contact information for individuals, and this is generally what groups want to exchange.

Through our work in developing shared databases, Desktop Assistance has developed the following field definitions which groups could standardize on to make it easier to exchange information. In fact, these field definitions represent the lowest common denominator of more than two score local, state, regional and national conservation groups, as well as the standards that have been adopted by much larger groups (such as the US Postal Service).

Weve broken the fields into seven functional categories. Within each functional category, fields are defined by the most useful subcategories, usually defined by whether you need to select or sort on a discrete part of the category. If you want to share data with a minimum of expense, use the following field definitions, including standardizing on the field names.

Individual(s)

Each individuals name is actually the collection of several distinct parts, not all of which have to be present in each name:

• Prefix 1 - such as Mr.
• First Name 1 - such as Marshall
• Middle Name 1 - such as J. or John
• Last Name 1 - such as Mayer
• Suffix 1 - such as Jr.
• Salutation 1 - such as Marsh

   

We recommend adding a second set of individual fields to a database, to record the name information of a second person at the same address, but only if all other attribute data such as an email address or the answers to a survey are exactly the same (if the other attribute data are different for each person, its best to create a new related or householded record):

• Prefix 2 - such as Ms.
• First Name 2 - such as Liz
• Middle Name 2 - such as null (or no value)
• Last Name 2 - such as Gans
• Suffix 2 - such as null (or no value)
• Salutation 2 - such as null (or no value)

   

Many databases will allow you to concatenate (combine) Prefix, First Name, Middle Name, Last Name and Suffix fields to create name line fields, such as Full Name Line 1, Full Name Line 2, and Names Line (which concatenates Full Name Line 1 and Full Name Line 2).

Many databases will allow you to concatenate the Salutation fields into a Salutation Line. The concatenation formula can also be written to use the First Name field if there is no value in the Salutation field. This can speed up data entry, since it allows you to leave the Salutation field empty whenever the First Name and Salutation are the same.

Organization

These fields describe the individual, by affiliation, or if the individual fields are blank, the organization or business.

• Position - such as Executive Director
• Organization - such as Desktop Assistance

   

Address

A single address line, either a street address or a box address, is sufficient to deliver postal mail. Enter the address to be used for mail delivery in the Address\Delivery field. (Enter overflow address information that is to appear on a mailing label in the Address\Supplementary field. Other address information, such as a secondary address, can be stored for reference only in the Address\Memo field.)

• Address\Delivery - such as 324 1/2 SW Fuller Ave Ste C2
• Address\Supplemental - such as PO Box 234

   

A street address is made up of eight distinct parts, defined by the US Postal Service. Many of these parts have strict abbreviation rules which, if followed, greatly improve the deliverability of your mail using the Post Offices automated sorting systems:

• Number - such as 324
• Fraction - such a 1/2
• Predirectional - such as SW (always abbreviate, don't use periods)
• Street Name - such as Fuller
• Street Suffix - such as Ave (always abbreviate, don't use periods)
• Postdirectional - such as E (always abbreviate, don't use periods)
• Unit ID - such as Ste (for Suite, always abbreviate, don't use periods)
• Unit Number - such as C2

   

Generally, you do not need to keep the data in the address line broken out into its component parts. However, if you want to produce walk sheets for neighborhood canvassers, you will need to parse the addresses. Parsing is most successful when street addresses entered in the Address\Delivery field include only the address elements described above.

If the mail delivery address is a box address, such as PO Box 118, RR 4 Box 87A, or HC 68 Box 98, enter it in the Address\Delivery field using the abbreviations defined by the US Postal Service.

Other address information, such as a building name, should be kept in a separate field to ensure better postal delivery. This will also improve identification of duplicates if your list is to be merged with another list.

• Address\Supplementary - such as Mansfield Building

   

Use the Address\Memo field to record second addresses, such as a seasonal residence, or the street address for someone whose mailing address is a PO Box. This data will not be used on the mailing label and is for reference only.

• Address\Memo - such as Summer residence, May - September: 403 Cloud Canyon Drive, Helena, MT 59601

   

City, State, ZIP Code

These fields form the last line of a mailing label:

• City - such as Helena
• State - such as MT (always abbreviate to 2 letters, and CAPITALIZE)
• ZIP Code - the 5-digit ZIP code
• ZIP4 - the 4-digit ZIP code extension (keep separate from the 5-digit code)

   

Many databases will allow you to concatenate these fields (and add a hyphen between Zip Code and Zip4) into a single city state zip line.

Communications

These fields are for other forms of communications:

• Home Phone AC - such as 406
• Home Phone Number - such as 4423363 (no hyphens)
• Work Phone AC - see Home Phone AC
• Work Phone Number - such as 4423696 (no hyphens)
• Work Phone Extension - such as 11 (no X or ext.)
• Fax AC - see Home Phone AC
• Fax Number - such as 4423687 (no hyphens)
• Internet Email - such as [email protected] (include only deliverable Internet email addresses)
• Universal Resource Locator (URL) such as http://www.desktop.org (for personal or organizational Web sites)

   

Many databases will allow you to concatenate the area code fields with the phone number and fax fields. We recommend storing area codes separately from the 7-digit numbers because many area codes are changing (its much easier to replace them if the data is kept separately) and area codes can automatically be entered based on a Zip Code lookup table (when you enter the Zip code of an address, the area code of all the phone numbers and in some cases other geographic or spatial information such as the city and state are automatically entered).

Make sure you create fields to store contact information for more modern forms of communication. In fact, the email address field will be the most valuable contact information you can track for an individual (its cheap to deliver to).

Administration

These fields are very useful for internal administration but are also ESSENTIAL for the synchronization of shared databases (exchanging information the second time). Many databases can be set to auto-enter values in these fields.

• Record Number - ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL. This data must be numeric and unique for each record.
• Add Date - such as 01/06/92 (the date the record was added to your database)
• Add Time - such as 01:06:09 AM (the time the record was added to your database)
• Added By - such as JMM (a unique code for who added the record to the database)
• Contact Edit Date - such as 03/19/97 (the date contact information of the record was last edited)
• Contact Edit Time - such as 12:21:32 PM (the time contact information of the record was last edited)
• Contact Edited By - such as JMM (a unique code for who last edited the contact information)

   

Other

Depending on the nature of your database project, and the kinds of information you need to share with other organizations, there are any number of other fields that could be standardized. For example, if you want to coordinate collaborative actions on issues, you would want to standardize the way you track the kinds of actions individuals take and the kinds of issues that are priorities for them.

Many of the fields above have other attributes, such as the kind of data that can be entered. These attributes are beyond the scope of this memo, but we would be happy to share the attributes that we have developed for other shared databases. They are documented in our Data Dictionary, which we can forward to you upon request in ASCII text, dbf or FileMaker Pro format.

The following are contacts for more information contained in the Conservation Database Report.

Marshall Mayer
524 Clarket Street
Helena, MT 59601-5029
406-442-3363
email

Rob Stuart
Director
Rockefeller Technology Project
113 North Van Pelt Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103-1016
215-561-1932
[email protected]
www.rffund.org/techproj

Ed Zuckerman
Executive Director
Washington Environmental Alliance for Voter Education
P. O. Box 85194
Seattle, WA 98145-1194
206-527-7951
[email protected]

Fred Heutte
Sunlight Data Systems
310 SW 4th - Room 434
Portland, OR 97240
503-222-9572
[email protected]

Bill Roberts
Legislative Director
Environmental Defense Fund
257 Park Avenue South - 16th Floor
New York, NY 10010-7386
212-505-2375
[email protected]
www.edf.org

John DeCock
Associate Director of Conservation
Sierra Club
85 Second Street - 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105-3441
415-977-5646
[email protected]
www.sierraclub.org

Beth Sullivan
Executive Director
League of Conservation Voters Education Fund
1707 L Street NW - Suite 750
Washington, DC 2006-4201
202-885-8683 x234
[email protected]
www.lcv.org

Adam Eichberg
Rocky Mountain Field Director
League of Conservation Voters Education Fund
7475 Dalkin Street - Suite 410
Denver, CO 80221
303-430-5852
[email protected]

The League of Conservation Voters Education Fund also maintains a directory of its state-based projects and consultants. Contact John McComb, Network Manager, 202-785-8683 x250, [email protected].

[1] Words that are underlined in the Conservation Database Report are referenced in Appendix A, the Conservation Database Glossary. [back to text]

[2] The significant benefits of a list enhancement process, as outlined in this section, can be realized by autonomous organizations. However an organization is also more exposed to the potential pitfalls of list enhancement projects. Finally, list enhancement projects that are collaboratively implemented realize economies of scale that are much more difficult for organizations to achieve on their own. [back to text]

[3] A sample database security agreement is included as Appendix B. [back to text]

[4] Match rates the rate at which a record in a conservation database is found and matched by a record in a voter file vendor database are affected by several factors. For the most part a match may not be made because the contact information we have about a conservation member is not the same as what is in the voter file. For example, Bob Smith may be a member, but he registered to vote as Robert Smith. Or we may know his P. O. Box number, but he is registered to vote at a street address. These data inconsistencies account for most of the misses. However, other names may not match because some conservation members are not registered to vote. [back to text]

[5] Data from voter file vendors is not infallible. Voting records do not move from county to county if a voter relocates. Also, country registrars and voting officials, particularly in smaller rural counties, may not institute adequate data quality standards. However, these are factors that are beyond the control of list enhancement projects. [back to text]

[6] Takings is shorthand for compensation of property owners when government regulates private property for public purposes. The legislation sought to require compensation in a variety of circumstances, threatening basic environmental safeguards. [back to text]

[7] This block of conservation voters represented approximately 8% of the total number of registered voters in Washington at election time, a significant number. [back to text]

[8] "Astroturf" campaigns are fake "green" grassroots campaigns, organized by corporations to mobilize public opinion for or against political and public policy initiatives. They almost never represent constituencies that are organized into democratically-controlled groups. [back to text]

[9] It is not uncommon to hear that conservationists should be using new technologies because anti-environmental forces are. This attitude fundamentally misses the point. The reason that conservationists should embrace new communications technologies is because all organizations need to do so if they want to thrive and grow. The sea changes in the communications paradigm affect all sectors of our society, and those organizations that do not adapt just like any species will not survive. Anti-environmental forces, being on the defensive, successfully adapted first. [back to text]

[10] See Appendix C for an example of "standards-setting" related to contact information in conservation databases. An additional advantage of standards is that local groups are asking for advice, and will adopt standards if appropriate leadership is provided. [back to text]

[11] List trading among conservation groups is an effective strategy, and many list enhancement projects make this process much easier. The temptation for many groups, however, is to stop with what easily works, thus neglecting opportunities to grow the overall conservation constituency by recruiting new members that are not currently affiliated with any other group. [back to text]

[12] The database application, ebase®, will be released for use by other conservation groups in the first quarter of 1998. ebase is particularly well suited for adoption by groups involved in list enhancement projects because it puts all related data (contact, membership, donor, activist, civic, demographic, etc.) in one place for rapid analysis. Furthermore, ebase is designed as a modern communications tool, enabling organizations to send individually customized email messages to any size list directly from the database, as well as to automatically track response rates to any outreach campaign. Finally, it is designed as a human capacity building tool, educating conservation organizations about how to manage databases while allowing them to customize the application to fit their unique business practices. A conservation activist or membership coordinator need not be a dedicated database manager; rather, they can use ebase's very accessible interface to develop their own specialized scripts and layouts to manage communications with constituencies. For information, visit http://www.ebase.org, or contact the author to receive the ebase Business Plan. [back to text]

[13] The Grassroots Organizations Accessing Legislatures (GOAL) service, recently initated by the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, is a step in the right direction. GOAL is a free service that provides state and federal legislative district information based on street addresses submitted by environmental organizations. [back to text]

[14] Increasingly, redistricting processes are publicly accessible, thanks to the automation and digital distribution of geo-referenced census, civic and demographic information. Geographic information systems (GIS)—database management systems that produce maps as their primary output—will be particularly useful in redistricting processes, especially when used by progressives in reform coalitions. While the technology is fairly advanced, it is within the reach of many citizen-based organizations. [back to text]

[15] By comparison, the listserv that Guy Kawasaki moderates to evangelize the benefits of Apple computers (a tiny minority in the market) has over 50,000 subscribers. The NASA web site which served as the front-line information resource for the recent Mars reconnaissance expedition received over 300 million hits in its first week. [back to text]

[16] Recent efforts along these lines have met with less than successful results. In at least two list enhancement projects, email questions have been included in voter identification telemarketing scripts. However the question was posed as, "Do you have an email address?" without asking the follow-up to an affirmative answer, "What is it?" If 20% of the target population had an email address, as is the overall average in the U.S., 12,000 email addresses of conservationists were not gathered as a result of this oversight. [back to text]

[17] Such services are often called "push" technologies. At the time of this writing, there were no push services dedicated to conservation content. For an example of push technology, visit cnn.com and register for their Personal News Service. [back to text]

[18] Other contacts referenced in the report are included in Appendix D. [back to text]

Most nonprofits, when the amount of time and money they spend is accounted for, dedicate most of their resources to relationship building, communicating with their constituencies to build communities of interest. Yet twenty years after the advent of the personal computer, and several years after the internet boom, most nonprofits have not introduced technology effectively to help them build a community of constituents.

A major result is that nonprofits are less effective at their number one job, building quality relationships. They cannot communicate with their supporters in ways that other organizations do. Nonprofit constituents, who are also customers and citizens, now expect interactive and personalized content to keep them engaged. Unless nonprofits adapt technology to meet their needs, they risk losing their voice as their constituents pay attention to more effective communications strategies in the never-ending and ever-escalating battle for human attention.

Having said that, the more technology is incorporated by a nonprofit organization, the less likely the organization is effective at developing quality relationships with its constituencies.

This may sound like an argument against technology, and certainly there are a number of nonprofits that firmly believe technology gets in the way of relationship building. Smaller organizations often do not need sophisticated technology, but will as they grow and their relationship building needs to scale accordingly. What is needed is an approach that puts technology in service of a nonprofit's mission, technology to create community.

Data Disintegration

Consider the technological capacity of a typical medium size nonprofit:

• The nonprofit has a moderately powered computer for most of its staff. [1]
• Their computers are connected to each other by a local area network (LAN), and the LAN is connected to a broadband (usually DSL) internet connection.
• Staff have email accounts at their desktop, and access to websites with a browser.
• The organization sends occasional bulk emailings to its supporters, using an email client such as Microsoft Outlook.
• The organization has a contact database, but few records have an email address recorded.
• The organization has a website, it has an impressive number of visitors (compared to who walks in the door or calls on the phone) and the organization collects web statistics.
• The organization can accept contributions through links from website to a donation portal (such as Groundspring.org), but it does not have the ability to directly capture contact information of its visitors (such as an email address) nor sign up visitors interested in participating in the nonprofit's programs.
• The organization has a fundraising database, usually created by a consultant or by a volunteer associated with the organization. It records contacts and payments and produces mailing labels and letters.
• The organization conducts various programs, and program staff have adequate access to technology. They create their own spreadsheets to track information on program delivery and store them on their own computers.

Notice that all of the technologies are related to communications—relationship building—and that they all fundamentally rely on a database to track information about interactions with constituents:

• There is a database in the email client, the address book, one for each staff. It contains at least an email address, but may also contain a street address.
• There is a database at the website, that tracks at least page views. There may be an additional database that records email addresses and interests of web visitors.
• There is a database that tracks donations and each donor's contact information.
• There are probably many databases that track program-related information.

Also notice that all of this data is stored in separate databases. These databases are unrelated, meaning that if the email address changes in one, it is not changed in any of the others, unless someone does it manually. Data entry is still the single biggest expense in any database, and often data is not manually entered more than once, if at all.

It also means that an organization cannot securely share information about a specific individual. Sometimes this reinforces internal requirements of the organization, such as when program staff cannot have access to major donor information. But most times this separation of data means lost opportunities: it's clear that donors are more likely to be activists on behalf of the organization than non-donors. The people represented in the database know this best: they receive mixed messages from the organization because the people sending the messages do not have a holistic view of who the person receiving it is, and their relationship to the whole organization.

Customer Relationship Management Software

Thus, as more technology is incorporated into the organization, the effect is data disintegration. Now that basic technology infrastructure needs are being addressed for many more organizations by market mechanisms, data disintegration may now be the single largest information technology problem in the nonprofit sector. Business recognized data disintegration as a problem long ago, and customer relationship management (CRM) software was created to integrate sales and marketing with customer service data within an organization. CRM, when implemented well, becomes the central nervous system of an effective organization. Solutions range from Goldmine for small businesses to very customized and complex Oracle databases for large corporations.

The nonprofit sector has access to a few applications that could be called CRM. There are about 25 companies that publish commercial quality fundraising software (our corollary to sales and marketing), but most of them are quite small and the software is expensive and limited to fundraising functions (no other programs—the customer service departments—can use the software). The largest company, by a factor of at least two, has about 13,000 customers and their software starts at several thousand dollars (and costs much more to approach true data integration). The players in this market have not change appreciably in the past five years.

Recently, there are a number of application service providers (ASPs), companies that host databases that nonprofits access over the internet with a browser, that have entered the CRM market. Most ASPs focus on one aspect of a nonprofit, whether it is donor/membership relations, volunteer management or engaging activists online. Nonprofits that use more than one ASP are faced with more data disintegration because there are no widely adopted standards for the exchange of data between ASPs (it is not in an ASPs interest for you to be able to share your data with other ASPs—you might switch providers!). For the integrated CRM functions that are necessary in a growing organization (and provided by only a handful of ASPs) the start up costs and monthly subscription fees are high and add up fast.

Both traditional software publishers and ASPs are targeting their products for the high end of the market. It's a rational business decision: that's where the money is. However, the vast majority of small- and mid-size nonprofits, who often are in the best position to do quality relationship building, integrating online and on land strategies, have not had access to tools that can help them. Our estimate is that at least 95% of all nonprofits are not using commercial quality software to manage relationship building with their constituencies. The initial high hurdle of software cost is the major reason nonprofits do not have access to database solutions that are so critical to achieving their mission.

ebase®: CRM for Nonprofits

TechRocks began to address this need for customer relation management software several years ago by creating ebase, community relationship management software for nonprofits.[2] For community groups that need a database to organize people and information, ebase is a set of tools and community of users that is powerful, affordable, and accessible.

ebase was first released four years ago, the result of an iterative development process with nonprofits that had been experiencing data disintegration to such a degree that they could not effectively organize their constituents or collaborate with each other on coordinated message campaigns.[3] Today, ebase 1.0 is in use by almost 4,000 nonprofits worldwide to track contacts, engage activists, raise money, recruit volunteers - build relationships with anyone that can help the nonprofit accomplish its mission.

The primary reason ebase is in use by so many organizations is that we provide open access to downloading the application from the internet. As a nonprofit, we raise funds from foundations to develop ebase, and freely share the resulting code for public benefit. Of course, no database implementation is without cost , a mistake that nonprofits often make when downloading freely shared software.[4] Any nonprofit interested in using ebase will need a good computer with a reliable backup system, help converting legacy data to ebase, and above all training and technical support for staff to use and administer their database. By regranting the code, we have saved every organization that uses ebase approximately $5,000 (the average cost of a comparable fundraising database).

We encourage groups to use these savings to get professional training and technical support to implement the database in their organization. There are several dozen independent consultants and trainers that have specialized in providing support services for ebase 1.0 to clients in their communities, and there are also several self-organized ebase user groups that have been established. TechRocks will foster the development of these resources through the ebase Community Support website. We will also roll out our own affordable support services throughout 2002: telephone support, onsite and online training, and moderated listservs.

But perhaps the single most important "feature" of ebase is that it is open. We provide anyone that downloads the application access to the programming that makes ebase tick, so that they can customize the application to fit the precise needs of their organization. All nonprofits are unique in some respect, and providing access to the ebase "source code" enables them to have their uniqueness expressed in the application they use everyday. If a nonprofit purchases or is granted FileMaker® Pro,[5] they have access not only to the ebase code but to all the very same low-cost development tools that we used to create ebase. Most nonprofits that are currently using ebase have made some modification to ebase to make it work like their nonprofit does.

TechRocks has learned a tremendous amount about how nonprofits need to use databases over the past four years, and we have incorporated that learning in the design process of ebase 2.0, released in March 2002. For the nonprofit end user, we made major improvements to the application's ease-of use, security and internet features (ebase 1.0 was the first nonprofit application that could be used to send email directly from the database, in ebase 2.0 you can receive email right into ebase - for automated processing - as well as serve ebase data to and synchronize ebase data with a website). For the growing national community of ebase developers, trainers and consultants, we have completely re-architected ebase so that it is much easier to customize and support (not a single line of code from ebase 1.0 was used in ebase 2.0, though users of version 1.0 can migrate all of their data to ebase 2.0). And we continue to freely share the open ebase code for community improvement.

Example: Community Development of Grant-Seeking Functionality

To take one example of how making ebase open can benefit the entire community, consider how ebase can be used for grant seeking:

1. First and foremost, TechRocks did not receive enough requests for this functionality in ebase 2.0, so it is not included in its core feature set. (ebase 2.0 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, to define relationships between an organization and its individual donors.) But as you will see, this is not a problem. There are a number of uses for ebase that we did not have demand to create, but that the data structure can nevertheless accommodate.

2. ebase assumes not that you do specific things (like grant seeking) but that you have defined processes to do anything that can be expressed as item codes (short 4-5 word phrases such as "sent letter of inquiry"). Most organizations that create their own databases know what their idiosyncratic code system is: ebase provides a simple structure and tutorials that allows organizations to create item codes based on similar rules. Thus, groups create item codes in ebase that reflect the processes of grant seeking. These include the processes of prospecting, conducing research, contacting program officers, writing inquiries, developing proposals, lobbying, and reporting on grants received, each processing involving staff assignments and deadlines. Groups do not have to alter the ebase application in any way to record their item code structures. They only have to define and refine item codes, based on their successful use.

3. Furthermore, since it is easy to share item codes once they are defined and used successfully, groups of ebase users that need to do similar things (such as grant seekers) can develop item codes based on best practices. These item codes, along with documentation, can be made available to other ebase users - in the core application if they are community defined best practices - so that future users of ebase receive value from all past users of ebase.

4. Finally, additional functionality that cannot be accommodated by the ebase item code structure can be added to the application by simply creating an application that relates its data to the core application. In this way, for example, an index of document archives for inquiry letters and proposals can be created, html links that reference files stored external to ebase on an intranet. Again, modules that provide additional functionality and reflect best practices for ebase users can be included with all subsequent ebase downloads and supported as part of ebase.

By the time you read this, because an ebase community of interest is already being created, grant seeking item codes and perhaps even a grant seeking module will be available on the ebase Community Support website, again shared freely for continued community improvement. The community will have added needed functionality to its core application in just a few weeks. If there is sufficient interest, we'll set up specialized community support services to grant seekers using ebase. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. Imagine how you can connect to other ebase users eager to use the technology for greater effectiveness. Data and database development can become the currency of collaboration for the nonprofit sector.

The New Paradigm: Rapid and Community-Defined Innovation

This is a radically different approach to software publishing and support than traditional software companies follow, a paradigm that forces users to follow procedures defined by commercial software developers who are not nonprofit organizations. Over 100 nonprofits, consultants, trainers and developers contributed their time and talents to the development of ebase 2.0 in the past year, and almost 1,000 organizations participated in our public beta test process. Rapid and community defined innovation in ebase is made possible by its open architecture and community, an approach more suited to community collaboration as well as developing and maintaining the most effective tools for nonprofits.

Bob Schmitt, Director of ebase Development at TechRocks describes ebase this way: "ebase is not just software! Rather, it is first and foremost a community of users, developers, trainers and consultants that have created: a data structure that accommodates community standards, customs and best practices; a suite of software tools that reflect these standards and can evolve as the community does; and a support structure that supports each other and builds community. And it's great software that we use ourselves to build the ebase community!"

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the benefits of our approach is by letting one of our users, Laura Tam of the Northern Forest Center, get to the punch line of ebase:

ebase creates community! We have already set up an exchange with another nonprofit here in Concord where one of their staff is helping us think about our organizational development opportunities with ebase, and I am helping them learn FileMaker and customize their ebase program. It is so Win - Win!

This quote inspires us every day.

About the Author

Marshall Mayer is the founder and CEO of TechRocks, a national nonprofit that helps social change organizations use technology for greater impact. Marshall has extensive experience in creating database technologies for community and internet organizing, and provides leadership to a national team of staff, database developers and social change nonprofits to create the next versions of ebase. Marshall also founded and directed Desktop Assistance, one of the first nonprofits in the country to provide mission-specific technology assistance to nonprofits. Marshall was a founding planning partner of the National Strategy for Nonprofit Technology and currently serves as a board member of the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network.

Endnotes

[1] Data are from assessments conducted September 2001 for The James Irvine Foundation representing nonprofits with an average budget size of $5,300,000. Organizations of this size are spending 1% of their budget on technology, the vast majority of it on hardware. Smaller organizations have even less technological capacity, though they are spending more as a percentage of their budget. If this technology capacity does not describe your organization, it may soon: the market is working well to provide basic infrastructure technology at commodity prices.

[2] ebase is published and supported by TechRocks, a national nonprofit that helps social change organizations use technology for greater impact. TechRocks consultants specialize in helping nonprofits to integrate database, email and web strategies to increase organizational effectiveness. Organizations that work with TechRocks consultants are able to build quality relationships with their constituencies for sustainable social change.

[3] The coordinated messaging was aimed at garnering public support for protection in roadless areas of national forests in the Northern Rockies. The effort was successful on this scale (and was one of the first "list enhancements"— see the Conservation Database Report, and eventually led to the Clinton Roadless Rule, one of the largest victories for the environmental movement in a generation. TechRocks role in this campaign, which involved many database and communications strategies that generated 700,000 public comments from "netizens" on the rule, is at OurForests.org: Online Organizing Comes of Age. 

[4] To help you assess and plan for a database implementation, visit TechAtlas.

[5] ebase 2.0 is developed with FileMaker Pro, a database development tool published by FileMaker, Inc. FileMaker is known primarily for its ease of use, allowing non-programmers to create their own database applications. ebase, as it is available for download, includes all the software that a single user of ebase needs. For ebase users that need to customize the core ebase code or serve ebase across a local area network or on the web, FileMaker, Inc. grants FileMaker Pro 5.5 for Mac OS and Windows to nonprofit organizations through a product philanthropic alliance with Gifts in Kind International. See http://www.filemaker.com/company/donations.html.

Desktop Assistance is a nonprofit that makes technology accessible and affordable to citizen-based nonprofits that are building powerful constituencies to protect and enhance our quality of life.

Our Niche

Desktop Assistance is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization—serving nonprofits exclusively—established in 1989 to research cutting-edge information and communications technologies, adapt them for use by nonprofits, and help nonprofits use these technologies creatively. We focus on building the human capacity of organizations to succeed using new tools.

When Desktop Assistance was founded by Marshall Mayer, nonprofit organizations were just discovering that there was an Information Age. Initially, Desktop Assistance was focused on getting nonprofits "teched up" with hardware, software, and basic training on productivity software (word processing, spreadsheets, databases, email). Since then, Desktop Assistance began to work exclusively with nonprofit organizations that were actively growing constituencies for social change.

Desktop Assistance services included developing communications and information management tools and methods—using electronic networking and the Internet, nonprofit database management systems, and geographic information systems—that enabled nonprofits to succeed in their strategies to develop and service their constituencies. Desktop Assistance programs responded to needs that are consistently articulated by nonprofit organizations by translating and adapting modern technologies to help them accomplish their goals.

Our Accomplishments

Desktop Assistance has a timely and compelling mission: to empower nonprofits with information technology. Desktop Assistance served organizations all over the United States.

• We developed a free database template—ebase—that any nonprofit organization could use for managing interactive communications with their constituencies. Best of all, ebase was free under an open-source license (the software has not been distributed since 2017).
• Desktop Assistance was a pioneer in the burgeoning field of conservation databases and list enhancement projects. We helped establish the Northern Rockies Campaign Conservation Database, containing data on tens of thousands of conservationists and citizens in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming who were active in conserving the region's world-class natural resources. For example, we used the database to build solid public support for what evolved into the Clinton Administration's roadless policy initiative.
• Desktop Assistance led the strategic development of the conservation database movement. We authored the Conservation Database Report, an overview of developments in the field, as well as a set of recommendations about how foundations can constructively support the creative development of this emerging field.
• We co-authored with Interrain Pacific of Ecotrust and the Sierra Biodiversity Institute (along with us founding members of the Conservation GIS Consortium) the Conservation GIS Starter Kit, a beginning tutorial on how to use geographic information systems for conservation. The tutorial (without data) was freely available to explore.
• On behalf of the Conservation GIS Consortium, we founded and managed the Conservation Technology Support Program (CTSP), a national grant-making program that each year supported conservation GIS efforts with $1 million of in-kind grants of Hewlett-Packard and Apple hardware along with software and training from Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI).
• Desktop Assistance researched and prepared the strategic plan for the Brainerd and Bullitt Foundations that led to the founding of ONE/Northwest (Online Networking for the Environment, later called Groundwire, dissolved in 2015), establishing the Pacific Northwest as the nation's leading region in getting conservation organizations and activists online and using the Internet to protect the environment.
• We founded and operated WestNet, an online conferencing system and internet service provider (ISP) that connected hundreds of environmental and social activists throughout the intermountain West for several years. It was also the first public access point for internet email in Montana. WestNet was sold to OneWest.net (an internet service provider) when Desktop Assistance merged with the Rockefeller Technology Project in 1999.
• Desktop Assistance sponsored the Computer Camp, an annual donor education event that provides access to information technology to our supporters in a retreat atmosphere. The Rockefeller Technology Project of the Rockefeller Family Fund co-sponsored the 1997 Computer Camp.

Our Supporters

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, our programs are supported by foundations, corporations, and individuals. Our donors agree that investing in the human capacity of nonprofits—empowering them with information technology—is an effective way to change the world in the Information Age.

Our Status

Desktop Assistance granted its assets to the Rockefeller Technology Project of the Rockefeller Family Fund in 1999 to form TechRocks as a supporting organization to the Rockefeller Family Fund. The Rockefeller Family Fund discontinued operations at TechRocks at the end of 2002, and most assets were transferred to Groundspring at that time (Groundspring has since been dissolved). Currently, Desktop Assistance maintains its 501(c)3 status, with no revenues or expenses, and its only activity is to publish take-note.com (all activity is conducted by volunteers and all expenses are donated in-kind). Contact us if you have questions or comments about this website.

Using the Internet effectively in organizing is a challenging goal. The landscape of what's possible is changing every day, and there are, seemingly, no hard and fast rules to making it work. But, you don't have to feel like a rudderless ship. TechRocks has worked with dozens of groups, large and small, to effectively achieve measurable programmatic gains using the Internet. We've taken that experience and put it all together for you here in our Online Organizing Manual. Seven chapters outline the basics with real case studies, recommended tools, and actual examples.

You can download one chapter at a time below, or download all chapters in a self extracting zip file (it's 1.3MB).

• Why Internet Organizing Benefits Your Organization (this introductory document has been lost)
  We all know the perpetual plight of the non-profit: too few resources for too many issues. Whether it’s money, staff, or time, we never seem to have all the resources we need to get our jobs done. Which begs the question: why invest the time, money, and staff into developing and maintaining the systems and resources for an online organizing presence when you can barely keep up with the program work you’ve committed to? The answer is simple. Investing in online organizing strategies is the most efficient and effective way increase your organizing capacity. It will allow you to do what you already do better, and give you new avenues for your organizing. And it’s an investment in the survival of your organization.

• Planning: Preparing for Internet Organizing (115KB)
  Incorporating online advocacy into your campaign strategy can catapult your campaign into high-gear, but only if you have a clear plan and set of goals for reaching your activists, and affecting your target. The best way to plan for the Internet in your work is to treat it like any other campaign strategy, an integral part of your overall plan. Too often, groups build advocacy Web sites or send out email action alerts and expect them to generate political output without taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of online media, their organization's capacity to use the medium, or the other components of their campaign.

• Recruitment: Building an Email Action List (123KB)
  You may already be collecting email addresses from you constituents and engaging them in online organizing efforts. But the Internet is more than just a way to effectively organize the people you already know. It's the perfect opportunity to reach out to new audiences and engage new people in your organization.

• Building Ongoing Activist Relationships: Re-Engagement and Online Community (127KB)
  As most businesses know, it is much cheaper to keep your existing customers than to find new ones. Email is a cheap and almost instant way to keep in contact with your members and activists. The objective is to keep your activists coming back - without burning them out or frightening them away, and without letting your lists get cold. Although this is mostly common sense, it takes a little planning ahead of time to make sure your investment in marketing and recruitment pays off.

• Messaging: How to reach people online with your message (139KB)
  The Internet is jam-packed with information, and you are competing with all of it for your audience's attention. According to The Industry Standard, your site is just one of over 800 million Web pages out there. Your email newsletter is just one of over 432 billion emails that will be sent in the U.S. this year.

• Getting Heard: How to deliver your message in a way that will successfully affect public policy (131KB)
  Many traditional grassroots organizations have asked the same questions regarding online advocacy work. Do Decision-Makers really listen to online advocacy efforts? And can online advocacy really shape public policy?

• Evaluation: Measuring your success (193KB)
  Of course, the ultimate measure in evaluating the success of any campaign is whether or not the decision maker responds as we hope. But to reach that goal, we use strategies and tactics that we think will sway the decision maker, and we must evaluate the success of these strategies along the way to gauge the likelihood that we will meet our ultimate goal and to increase the effectiveness of future campaigns.

NOTE: These documents require Adobe Acrobat Reader. You can get it here. Some formatting may not be converted.

As information technology becomes increasingly important in the nonprofit world, more and more nonprofits are hindered by the limits of current software. Many organizations are unable to find software that meets their unique needs, can evolve as their work does, and is affordable. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that few nonprofits can afford to hire enough skilled computer staff to develop or modify software to solve their problems. Consequently, nonprofits too often find themselves at the mercy of software vendors who do not have the best interests of the sector in mind.

Open source software and the open source development model represent a heretofore-unrealized opportunity for the nonprofit sector to develop, disseminate, and provide support for software in a way that addresses nonprofits' particular needs and constraints.

However, nonprofits have not yet taken full advantage of the opportunities afforded by open source. In part this is because the nonprofit community is relatively uninformed about the world of open source. But it is also because the open source community was designed to serve its own members' needs, which do not always overlap with those of others in the nonprofit community. Open source developers excel at producing powerful, stable software. Less attention is paid to ensuring that software is easy to use, or to developing tutorials and documentation, or to providing support to less technical users. In addition, open source applications are more likely to be designed to serve the needs of a commercial environment, and less likely to incorporate features and functionality that address nonprofit's unique operational needs.

NOSI aims to bridge the gap between the nonprofit and open source communities. We envision a world in which nonprofits are an integral part of the open source community and in which technology development for the nonprofit sector is open, interoperable, useable, sustainable, and minimizes total cost of ownership.

To realize our vision, NOSI will initially focus on four broad strategies:

1. Educate the nonprofit sector about the benefits of open source, and educate the open source community about nonprofit culture and needs;

2. Provide concrete resources in the form of software, documentation and training materials to provide better access to open source software and expertise to nonprofit technology staff, consultants and end users;

3. Build communities of interest—both online and on land, involving diverse stake holders—each actively addressing aspects of nonprofit open source development; and

4. Disseminate existing community-based standards relating to data models and protocols, so that all aspects of nonprofit open source technology development can be leveraged for maximum public benefit.

In the development and implementation of each of these strategies, NOSI will strive to embody the values that overlap the heart of both nonprofit and open source communities: excellence, collaboration, practicality, generosity, integrity, and the volunteer ethic.

Additional strategies and tactics may be adopted in the future. However, NOSI's primary goal will be to evangelize the "conditions of synchronicity"—the environment—that will make rapid adoption of open source software and practices by nonprofits possible.

[For more information about NOSI, visit their website.]

On January 5, 2001, President Bill Clinton announced the largest federal land conservation action since the Carter Administration. By executive order, he permanently banned road-building and logging on nearly a third of the lands in the National Forests. All told, 58.5 million acres of forests in 39 states were set aside for special protection.

Clintons order was a landmark for the American environmental movement, and a tremendous victory for the Heritage Forests Campaign, an alliance of conservationists, educators, scientists, and clergy who came together to fight for permanent protection of roadless areas in the National Forests. Thanks largely to the campaign's work, citizens deluged the Forest Service in 1999 and 2000 with more than 1.6 million official public comments on its draft roadless-areas proposal, the vast majority of them in support of forest preservation. Hundreds of thousands more postcards, faxes, phone calls, and emails poured into the White House and congressional offices as well.

As a result, the Forest Service issued a final order that was considerably stronger from an environmental standpoint than the original proposal. Upon the order's release, a senior Clinton Administration official told the New York Times that the public had shown overwhelming support for forest protection.

Such a level of public participation in a federal regulatory process was unprecedented, and so was the campaign that made it happen. The Heritage Forests Campaign made extensive use of traditional organizing tools: door-to-door canvassing, college campus organizing, information tables at public events, phone banks, and direct mail. Most innovative, however, was the campaign's work to mobilize citizens via the Internet.

That effort was successful far beyond its organizers' expectations: more than 180,000 official public comments were collected online, and 520,000 more email messages were delivered to the president, the vice-president, and other elected officials.

Perhaps most importantly, the online campaign mobilized a large complement of citizens that environmental groups were not effectively reaching via traditional means. Because those citizens—all of whom have a demonstrated history of taking action—can now be contacted quickly and cheaply through the Internet, they will be a force to be reckoned with in future environmental battles.

Recruiting an Online Constituency

The Internet arm of the Heritage Forests Campaign was created and run by TechRocks (formerly the Rockefeller Technology Project and Desktop Assistance), a national organization with headquarters in Philadelphia and five field offices around the country including Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Helena, MT. TechRocks is dedicated to helping progressive nonprofits use new technologies to increase their effectiveness.

From the beginning, TechRocks had two major goals for the campaign. The first was to generate the largest possible number of official public comments and other emails pressuring the Clinton Administration to issue strong roadless-area regulations. The second was to develop relationships with those who sent such messages to government officials, building an engaged, responsive corps of online environmental activists. With both goals in mind, TechRocks designed an outreach campaign with the following major elements:

• A database-backed website, http://www.OurForests.org, designed to collect "electronic postcards" from site visitors to the Forest Service and elected officials, as well as contact information for those who sent such messages;

• Gateway pages, such as http://www.wildforests.com—providing the same functions as the main site, and connected to the same central database—on the sites of some campaign partner organizations;

• An email solicitation campaign;

• A paid electronic advertising campaign to users of the Juno email/Internet service;

   

• Banner advertising donated by 12 top Web sites and Internet advertising networks;

• Links to and/or banners advertising www.OurForests.org on the web sites of coalition partner groups;

• A paid advertising campaign to users of RealPlayer, free software that plays and provides a gateway to video and audio feeds from a variety of news, entertainment, and information sources;

• A downloadable Flash clip, featuring an animated mouse who asked people to "use your mouse to save America's wild forests!"; clicking on the animation brought viewers to the OurForests website; a message containing a link to the clip was emailed to activists, who were encouraged to forward it to their friends;

• The Web address included in all traditional organizing materials, such as flyers, petitions, print and television advertisements, and direct mail; and

• Traditional press outreach, to gain additional publicity for the campaign and the websites.

The OurForests website was more than a mere collections of text and images. Instead, it was designed to spur site visitors to become part of the campaign. Visitors to OurForests were greeted with a page that asked them to take action to help save America's last unprotected wild forests. To make it easy to get started, the front page included a simple online form for sending email to government officials, and clearly outlined additional steps for taking action, such as sending email to friends who also might be interested in the campaign. After visitors submitted what they entered—which usually included their name, mailing address, and email address, as well as the message they wished to send—the information was entered into the site's underlying database, which generated a personalized email thank-you note to each activist.

The actions suggested to the site's visitors varied over the course of the campaign. During the regulatory comment period, for example, visitors were asked to send an electronic postcard to Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck. At other times, they were asked to email President Clinton or Vice President Gore. OurForests also provided links to further information about the Heritage Forests Campaign and its partners, the dates, times and places of public meetings on the Forest Service proposal, and the latest forest-related news.

Email was used to attract visitors to the OurForests website. Early in the campaign, using ebase, a organizing database developed by Desktop Assistance. TechRocks sent email invitations to visit OurForests.org to a few thousand members and supporters of the coalition's partner groups. Those who responded became part of the campaigns own list of activists. The email campaign became much larger as the list of activists grew through the campaigns various promotional activities.

Probably the most important source of new activists was a paid advertising campaign to users of Juno, one of the largest email/Internet access providers in the United States. Juno, which built its business on providing free email access, collects information about its subscribers' interests when they first sign up. That information helps the company target advertisements, and helps its Juno Advocacy Network deliver custom-selected audiences for political campaigns.

The Heritage Forests Campaign at first targeted half a million Juno users who had listed hiking or camping among their favorite activities. The initial ad was so successful that the organizers selected an additional 2.5 million subscribers. The Juno advertisements popped up either when subscribers logged onto their email service, or while their email was downloading. All told, the Juno ads brought in more than 150,000 new activists to the campaign, and generated over 320,000 email messages to government officials.

Activists were also alerted to the campaign via a variety of paid and donated advertising. In addition to placing banners on campaign partner sites, TechRocks secured millions of page views of donated banner advertising from Internet advertising firms and major commercial websites. The group paid to reach RealPlayer users, who saw a "pre-roll" 15-second video public service announcement (PSA) when they clicked on the player's audio "channels." The users' requested content played immediately after the brief video, which offered a clickable link to the OurForests site.

Strategies for Success

The OurForests online campaign eventually generated a total of more than 700,000 messages to government decision-makers, and developed a database of 300,000 interested citizens. By the standards of traditional direct marketing, response rates for the campaign's various solicitations were remarkably high: email messages, for example, garnered between 3 and 22 percent response, depending on the mailing, and some other types of advertisements yielded as much as a 5 percent response. Theses extraordinary successes stemmed not simply from the campaign's innovative tools—websites, email, Internet advertising, and so on—but from the underlying strategies that informed their use. These included:

• Viral marketing: On the Internet, success builds on success. Motivating people to send messages to their friends is the key to so-called "viral marketing," through which a message becomes, essentially, self-multiplying, as each recipient forwards it on to several friends. Viral marketing was a central strategy of the OurForests campaign, and it helped messages sent initially to relatively few people to reach a much larger audience. Virtually every element of the campaign included a viral component: thank-you notes, responses to general inquiries, and the web pages reached after filling out email forms all asked activists to forward campaign alerts to their friends, family, and colleagues. Perhaps the campaign's purest viral strategy was the email pointing people to the Flash clip featuring an animated mouse saving a forest. It was also one of the most effective: more than 18 percent of those who viewed the animation submitted a postcard to the Forest Service.

• Clear messages: People respond best when an issue or problem is quickly and understandably stated, its urgency is obvious, and suggested actions are easy to take. TechRocks made sure that emails, advertisements, and web pages were brief and conversational in tone (not full of policy jargon), provided clear directions on how to take action, and provided tools, such as forms (or links to them) for activists to fill out.

• Use of compelling graphics and multimedia: The campaign found that well-designed graphics increased response rates substantially. For example, HTML-formatted email messages, which can include photographs, interesting typefaces, and colorful graphics, yielded much stronger returns than plain-text messages. Over 10 percent of the recipients of such messages sent electronic postcards to the Forest Service. Custom "jump pages" (web pages reachable only by links in specific emails or banner ads) were designed to match individual HTML email messages and advertising banners. Large websites, including America Online, Garden.com, and Women.com, and major Internet-advertising firms, such as Lot21 and Engage Media, donated more than 10 million page views worth of banner ads. While a relatively small proportion of banner ad viewers clicked on them, more than a quarter of all those who did so ended up sending a message to the Forest Service. Although multimedia did not play a particularly large role in the campaign, its limited use yielded some tantalizing results. Such tools may become significantly more useful as more Internet users move to high-bandwidth connections, such as DSL and cable modems, and as multimedia is more closely integrated into web browsers and operating systems.

• Integration with other elements of a campaign: While online organizing can be effective on its own, it will be more effective when reinforced by other efforts—and vice versa. For example, several thousand well-timed emails from constituents can certainly help a lobbyist gain the ear of a member of Congress—and the emails will probably have more impact when followed by the visit of a well-informed lobbyist. Emails can help get activists to attend public meetings in their area, and provide them with up-to-date information.

• An overriding focus on long-term engagement and retention of activists:Understanding such factors as where individual activists live, which issues they care about the most, and how they have responded to past appeals, can lead to better response rates—and help develop extremely valuable long-term relationships with them. People are much more likely to act when they identify with a cause, and get a sense that organizers understand their individual concerns. As TechRocks accumulated contact information and action histories for hundreds of thousands of activists, they were able to target a greater proportion of email messages by geographical and other criteria. For example, activists were alerted when the Forest Service scheduled public meetings in their state or region. Highly engaged activists—those who had repeatedly sent messages to decision-makers—were asked to volunteer in person at Earth Day events. After each effort, success rates were analyzed, helping make future targeting more effective.

The Internet as a Tool for Political Activism: Conclusions

2000 was the year that reality set in about the Internet. Unbridled hype gave way to stories on nonexistent profits for "dot-com" companies, stock prices plummeted, and previously heralded firms went bankrupt. Many observers began to question whether the digital revolution had really arrived. At the same time, however, the OurForests.org experience made it clear that the Internet had finally become a major medium for political organizing. While successful campaigns can still be conducted using only traditional methods, it is clear that the Internet offers an excellent, cost-effective additional tool beyond the traditional direct mail, phone banks, and face-to-face organizing.

Based on the experience with OurForests.org delivering comments to public officials through web-based activities is extremely cost effective. Consider the following. The Heritage Forests Campaign generated about 121,000 comments on the draft roadless-areas plan through a direct mail campaign. These comments cost approximately $20 per comment. The online campaign spent about $1 per comment to generate 180,000 through the OurForests.org web site and web marketing tactics. The cost per comment generated by the Internet campaign was fairly comparable to that of traditional face-to-face organizing, such as doorbelling, tables at public events, and so on, much of which is usually done with volunteer labor.

Dollars-per-comment figures don't tell the whole story, however: online campaigning offers three distinct advantages over other organizing methods. The first is its speed: messages are delivered in minutes, not days. The second is its exceedingly low marginal cost: it takes very little more effort or technology to send a message to 100,000 people rather than 1,000. And the third is probably the most important: a well-run online campaign yields a valuable long-term asset, in the form of ongoing relationships with large numbers of closely-engaged activists. The 300,000 people in the OurForests database are a tremendous political asset. And large activist lists have obvious fundraising potential.

Internet organizing tends to reach a different audience than traditional campaigns. Demographic analysis of such campaigns has revealed online activists to be much younger, on average, than those contacted via direct mail. Their overall demographic profile is also a much closer match to that of the overall voting population than the pool of activists contracted via traditional methods. Online organizing may be the only way to reach some potential activists: some people are simply too busy to do anything that takes longer than clicking on a banner ad or forwarding an email. It also may more effectively identify the most engaged activists, who, with the right encouragement, may move on to become organizers themselves, testify at public meetings and hearings, and lobby elected officials directly. With all this in mind, TechRocks was careful to integrate the Internet effort closely with the traditional campaign, and it is likely that considerable synergies were realized from the combination, though such effects are very hard to measure.

An often-asked question about Internet organizing is whether public officials pay attention to email messages. Conventional Washington wisdom holds that telegrams, phone calls, faxes, and letters all carry more weight in Congressional offices. While this may be the case on Capitol Hill, it is clear that, in the case of the roadless-areas proposal, the Forest Service treated all written public comments equally, whether they were submitted via email, fax, or postal mail. It is also clear that the tremendous number of email comments had an impact, especially given that public comments in support of the proposal vastly outnumbered those submitted against it. The Heritage Forests Campaign played a key role in moving the Forest Service to significantly strengthen its proposal after analysis of the public comments. Press reports about the huge number of the campaign supporters must have had an impact on the political calculus of the White House. In July 1999, the arrival of 170,000 messages supporting forest protection in the vice president’s email was newsworthy enough to make the front page of the Washington Post.

OurForests.org certainly proved the efficacy of online organizing methods. The campaign is an inspiring model for how the Internet can expand and enhance traditional organizing efforts. The Internet offers opportunity to increase citizen engagement on behalf of a variety of social change issues.

Endnote

The Heritage Forests Campaign was initiated by the Pew Charitable Trusts, funded by several other major foundations, and hosted by the National Audubon Society. Among its partner organizations were American Lands, the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, the National Environmental Trust, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and the Wilderness Society. The online campaign also received major support from the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the Brainerd Foundation, and the Bullitt Foundation.

Current Passions:

• Since 2008, when I retired, I have been traveling (COVID-19 contingent), to photograph for and publish on a website for social comment photography, take-note.com. Since 2023, I have also been involved in efforts to mitigate the effects of generative artificial intelligence on authentic photography by editing the bibliography for Writing With Light as well as exploring how to get smartphone users to adopt open-source, standards-based content authentication solutions in their photography to counteract the existential threat of generative AI to lens-based photography.

Work Experience:

• Founder of LiveModern, Inc., Helena, MT, January 2003—November 2008. LiveModern was a social networking enterprise making modernist housing products and services more accessible by efficiently connecting consumers with producers via the internet. As the primary marketing and sales representative for Michelle Kaufmann Designs from 2003 through 2008, LiveModern established MKD as the market leader in modern, green, prefab housing in North America (see this snapshot from 2004 of our website). Declaring my personal victory over paid work, I've been happily "retired" since the beginning of the financial crash. After 19 years online, the livemodern.com website went dark in 2020.

• Founder and CEO, TechRocks, Helena, MT, January 1999—December 2002. Responsible for the overall management of a leading national technology assistance organization formed by the merger of Desktop Assistance and the Rockefeller Technology Project, a sponsored project of the Rockefeller Family Fund. Responsibilities include program development, fundraising, and team leader of the software development and support strategies for ebase, free "open source" community relationship management software for social change organizations.

  Major TechRocks accomplishments include established ebase (988k PDF) as number three in national market share; helped a national advocacy nonprofit build communications capacity (149k PDF) for its chapters; directed organization during the first mass-scale public interest campaign on the internet; "wrote the book" (the first one) on internet advocacy and mobilizing; established TechAtlas (with NPower), an online technology assessment and planning tool for nonprofits; nominated for an Ashoka Fellowship; incubated the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative; helped found the national professional association (116k PDF) for nonprofit technology assistance providers; facilitated the national nonprofit technology assistance community's process to grant hardware and software to local and national conservation nonprofits by Apple, and upon its dissolution in 2002 (a casualty of the dot.com crash), negotiated the acquisition of TechRocks' principle assets by Groundspring.

• Founder and Executive Director, Desktop Assistance, Helena, MT, January 1990—December 1998. Served as founding director of a nonprofit organization, one of the first half-dozen of its kind in the country, that provided consulting, training, and technical assistance services on computers and internet communications to social change nonprofits in the Northern Rockies. Responsibilities include providing all services to clients as well as leading all facets of fundraising, organizational development, and management.

  Major Desktop Assistance accomplishments include invented some of the first internet outreach and advocacy tactics (222k PDF), including the "Step 1-2-3" process now used so successfully by MoveOn.org; co-founded the Conservation Technology Support Program, at the time the largest national integrated technology granting program in the country; provided the first public access to internet email in Montana through the WestNet BBS; and invented tools and techniques of "list enhancements" (197k PDF) for advocacy nonprofits.

• Computer Consultant, Desktop Type and Q Communications Group, Helena, MT, March 1986—January 2010. Helped start the first typesetting and graphic design business in Montana using exclusively Apple Macintosh equipment for typesetting and graphic design. Activities included evaluating computerized desktop publishing systems, getting equipment and staff up to speed, desktop publishing for clients, and consulting on business development activities. Desktop Type being a union shop, I also served as Secretary-Treasurer of the International Typographical Union local in Helena (ITU was the oldest union in the US at the time, before it was merged into the Communication Workers of America).

• Organizational Consultant, Northern Rockies Action Group, Helena, MT, June 1986—July 1989. Responsible for NRAG's Workshop and Events Program, development and implementation of new special projects including grant writing, organizing all facets of NRAG's Board of Directors meetings, and consulting with social change client groups on fundraising, membership and leadership development, publications, campaign management, and computer skills.

  Major accomplishments include securing $50,000 and $100,000 Apple equipment grants, $150,000 special project grant from Pew Charitable Trusts, and $100,000 regional grant from Hands Across America; co-chairing state-wide Constitutional Defense Campaign Against C-18; and lead consultant for NRAG's Computer Services Assistance Program. I got my first internet account in 1986 (on AppleLink, the Apple Inc. internal network which eventually became America Online, AOL).

• Director of Marcher Education, PRO-Peace, The Great Peace March, Los Angeles, CA, January—March 1986. Responsible for developing and implementing educational programs on peace issues for marchers on the Great Peace March. Involved in preparing workshops, organizing marcher discussion groups, creating a mobile library, and administering the College on Foot Program for academic credit.

• National Campus Coordinator, PRO-Peace, The Great Peace March, Los Angeles, CA, August 1985—January 1986. Responsible for mobilizing student and faculty support for the Great Peace March. Involved organizing a national campus recruitment campaign, creating the College on Foot Program and national Academic Advisory Board, and organizing PRO-Peace chapters on campuses. Also responsible for fundraising, project development, publishing newsletters, media and publicity, and developing educational programs and materials.

• Organizer, Los Angeles Local of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Los Angeles, CA, January 1984—August 1985. Responsible for all phases of organizational development for what was then the largest DSA local chapter in the country. Served on the national organization's elected board, the National Executive Committee, 1985-1991. Edited the DSA Local Organizing Manual as Chair of the NEC's Local Development Committee. At the DSA National Convention in 2017 (I remain a Lifetime Member), Joe Schwartz, also a co-founding member and national board member of DSA, introduced me to the delegates as, "The best organizer DSA ever had."

• Computer Consultant, National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, Los Angeles, CA, 1981—1985. Responsible for designing and supervising transferal as well as maintenance of 15,000-name national fundraising list and general office work to a computerized office system on a Commodore 8096 CP/M.

• Other previous Lives: finish carpenter, chef, "French service" waiter, professional photographer, college professor of photography.

Education:

• University of California, San Diego, Master of Fine Arts in photography and performance art, 1981

• University of Colorado, Boulder, graduate studies in photography, 1976

• University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, undergraduate studies in photography, 1975

• The Colorado College, Colorado Springs, B. A. in psychology and art, 1974

Personal:

I reside in Helena, MT. With the same life partner since 1976, one child (happily on his own and living in Colorado with his life partner and our grandson). I enjoy photography, hiking, travel, reading, cooking, craft beer, politics, and being Gramps, but not necessarily in that order.

I've always considered myself among the luckiest to have ever lived. I just want everyone to share in that privilege, no matter the circumstances of their birth or life.

Questions?

Contact me.

Portrait of Marshall Mayer by Phel Steinmetz, 1979.