Online advocacy at its best is about giving more citizens more power to act together in creating social change. At its worst, online advocacy is a fundraising technique and promotional strategy that can work, while generating some very negative inadvertent outcomes. Organizers working for the common good should do a better job of articulating good online advocacy strategies and resisting demands that our work be measured in dollars raised or a higher public profile.

What we have at stake is not (just) the integrity of our cause or organization, but the effectiveness of our mission. Good organizing is like voting: it always has power, even after the 20th time. Bad organizing is like spam: today’s Viagra message is far less likely to get you to buy some, even though there is more of it out there than ever before.

The conflict between the different ends of the online advocacy spectrum can be captured in a phrase: Mission over Membership.

When we focus on mission, we can sleep well at night, knowing that the actions we request from our supporters will in fact lead to the change we want effected. If on the other hand we use the language of change primarily in support of fundraising and organization building, we run a serious risk: that online advocacy messaging becomes devalued, along with emails from our organizations.

Here are some concrete examples.

Organization A has just got their hands on a nice constituent relationship manager with advocacy tools. Now that they can track the open rates and conversion rates of emails, they can better craft the messaging to increase those rates. The problem is that none of these statistics measure how close they are to achieving the mission of their organization.

Tracking those statistics is like entering a bubble: a high conversion rate on a particular campaign has little to do with meeting your group’s objectives.

One group I worked with (“The Council for Goodness”) used these tools to mimic some of the advocacy emails used by MoveOn, and then send them out to their own list. Their own supporters, even if they get MoveOn emails, are more likely to respond by sending an email to Congress if they hear from this other source.

During each fundraising push, the group would say, "Thanks to your support we participated in these broad based lobbying efforts. 345 Advocacy emails were sent. Please donate now to support our continued efforts."

Ignoring the well known secret that emails are a generally ineffective lobbying method for Congress, we should note a major difference between the MoveOn emails and the ones sent by this group: MoveOn uses emails in conjunction with on the ground activities, events, and uses a network of paid organizers and trained volunteers to extract the most out of their online supporters.

Using advocacy emails as The Council for Goodness does is dishonest, because they were part of a fundraising strategy, not an effort to pass legislation. They were a gnat on an elephant taking credit for hauling logs to make a fast buck.

The John Edwards Campaign sent me an email back when he still had a chance, asking me to sign a petition for health care. The email sort of promised that if I sign the petition, and get my friends to do the same, then (somehow) the dream of universal coverage will be achieved.

Um, no, it won’t.

It’s a lie. All signing that petition will do is add someone’s name to Edwards’ list, so they can get more emails from Edwards.

This kind of deceit is so common, it’s nearly invisible. While volunteering for the local MoveOn council, I noticed that some of the most active activists had not been signing petitions; they knew that it was a list building exercise that didn’t translate into anything, so why bother?

And so, petitions (like emails to Congress) have joined the ranks of tools that the most experienced and committed activists have learned to ignore; they are stunts that those of us ‘in the know’ use to pull in the rubes, who are still excited at the prospect of being heard by those in power, by entering in a few fields and clicking the submit button.

My good friend Annie deletes all advocacy emails and dismisses the entire field. She senses that it’s usually smoke and mirrors, so why bother? If the goal of your online advocacy is to organize people for change, then Annie’s understandable over-reaction should be front and center of your awareness. She represents the transformation of idealism into cynicism, a process that your organization should not help along.

Another bad example is turning your list growth into the end result of your advocacy. One advocacy landing page for an email to one named member of Congress reads “If you agree, we need you to join our coalition and call on Congress,” followed by a demand to vote against funding a certain unpopular war.

Imagine if this page had a little note at the bottom: “We realize that Congressmember X doesn’t respond to messaging from non-constituents, and that your email will likely never be read. But if we didn’t make it feel useful, you’d never join our list. And joining our list will surely help end the war.”

When you ask people to ‘do something’, connect it to your mission in a way that stands up to scrutiny: Will this action produce a result I support? Will signing Edwards’ petition influence health policy? Will sending this email to Congress ‘help end torture now’?

The Good Side

Fundraising, list building, and promoting your organization are all legitimate, worthy goals. There are many ways of messaging your supporters and target audience to generate responses.

That said, if your goal is online ADVOCACY, then your strategy needs to answer this question: How will my supporters have a meaningful impact on this issue?

Email strategy is a relationship strategy. Messaging on advocacy creates a meeting place: I show up as a citizen/activist/member, and you show up as an organizer, in my inbox. Don’t abuse my trust by asking me to do something that has no impact beyond improving your conversion rates.

A positive example is www.notmybreasts.org. Women are asked to ‘make a commitment’ to keeping their breasts healthy by adopting various behaviors. Fill out the form, click submit, and no one has made a promise they can’t keep. In fact, the user is really making a promise to herself. At the same time, this is clearly a list building and awareness raising sitelet.

MoveOn, of course, does great online advocacy work. Its emails have led the way in generating demand on the part of other organizations to ‘get in the game.’ But unlike many online groups, MoveOn connects the petitions and emails to Congress with congressional visits and the list-signer with the on the ground meeting. It’s treating organizing as something holistic that makes them successful. MoveOn does ‘organizing’, not just ‘online advocacy.’

My own contribution is www.thankyoukristof.org. This is a site built around a petition to say ‘thank you’ to one noteworthy journalist. It was modeled after thankyoustephencolbert.org/wordpress. The action requested -- say thank you -- accomplishes the result promised: it made Nick Kristof feel supported. (I know this because we emailed each other, and he featured the sitelet on his blog.)

What you need to combine is massive hard work and organizing savvy (MoveOn), creativity (notmybreasts.org), or a very small payoff (thankyoukristof.org). Big promises (this will end the war), lack of integrity (we really just want you money), and lack of creativity (support H.R. 4322) will be less effective at achieving your mission.

In an effort to make this as simple as possible, here is the Lenchner Rule for Effective and Ethical Online Advocacy: Keep the number of steps between your online action request and the change advocated to one or two, and explicitly relate the action taken to a probable and meaningful result.

This rule will probably not win unchallenged acceptance. Our ‘industry’ includes many fine individuals who get paid for the results of list-building and fundraising, not for how well emails produce legislative victories. I’m open to amending the rule as stated and engage in a conversation about how best to up the level of integrity in online advocacy and produce superior results. Post your thoughts below!

With thanks for Colin Delaney, Farra Trompeter, and Janan Compitello.