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By the end of August 2007 Union Review will have a community-driven online letter-writing campaign tool. Many of you probably have seen this at other sites you visit: The campaign issues are explained in a summary of sorts - and that leads into a formal sample of the letter you can send - you just sign up, apply signature, and off it goes to the recipient. This is technology I have been discussing with Prometheus, the folks who helped get Union Review online, and while that conversation is on-going, I wanted to focus a little on the actual campaigns we can potentially work on as a community.
Many of the emails from other campaigns I worked on go directly to House Representatives and Senators, others go to a company owner if there is an issue that is worthy of public attention. The idea is that whoever is the "decision maker" will not just hear from one or two people about the issue at hand, but by a whole community of people who believe action needs to happen.
The campaigns and petitions I have worked with were generated by either a union or labor council; a few campaigns I participated in were at other sites not directly affiliated with the workers or the union; for instance, I recently sent some stuff out from the labourstart.org site on some very important causes.
I thought it would be a good idea to have Union Review readers/writers start thinking of campaigns we, as a community, should start to focus on. For example, I would like to get a serious letter-writing campaign directed at the President of Nova Southeastern University, and I would appreciate seeing a campaign set up in favor of drivers at the ports in Miami and Broward counties in South Florida (among other areas). The two issues I mention have campaigns on-going with the unions (SEIU Local 11 and various Teamster locals) representing the workers; but I strongly believe we need to be heard on these and other issues as well.
As we work out the technology to make this happen, I wanted to see what issues readers/writers here would like to see us get behind as a community. Maybe it is not a fair opinion, but I believe that smaller locals are often ignored in these campaigns - we should change that.
If you have some thoughts on this, please help me start a thread/discussion for the next 30 days gathering opinions, ideas, etc. I am open to them all.
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very nice work :)
Importance of user supplied comments and other limitations
I have reservations about the effectiveness of email campaigns unless users are required to input a personal note to the email recipient.
Otherwise, it's far easier to program the server to just randomly spit out e-mails to the target at random intervals that say the same exact thing.
Also, I'm sure many recipients will just forward e-mail from a particular domain name or server to their junk/spam e-mail folder. They will largely go ignored.
Now, I don't mean to throw cold water on this kind of electronic activism, but it has limitations. This is a good first step but eventually I think we should push eachother to take things a step further than point and click activism.
True
I agree with you on the fact that a point, click and send feature would not be as effective. I had in mind, but probably didn't explain it well enough, that the program that I liked using is as you explained it -- where people can rewrite the message if they choose to do so.
What would really be interesting is if the person who comes to the site to send out the letter can a copy sent to them for their records. That is one thing that I wish I could have had with some of the SEIU letters I worked on. Later I began saving the content of the letters before hitting send, but if that it is not too hard to implement, I think it would be a cool option for a user.
Let me know.