Incorporating Activism into Your Website. You can create issue specific Web pages where users input their zip codes and contact information to generate a letter to their elected officials. Users can send a pre-written letter or edit the letter to their liking. The letter can be sent as a fax or an email, or printed out and mailed.

You can create an online petition where people signup with their names and email addresses. Get creative with the ways that somebody can then view and spread the word that they participated.

Once you have the activist functionality built in to your site, you'll want to promote this feature prominently on your home page, like the American Lung Association of California does (www.californialung.org). The association invites people to join its advocacy network and take action on the most recent alert. Users input their contact information, which is remembered by the system the next time they login with their email address and password.

It's most effective to send your activists email suggesting specific actions and targets, with the message already written. You can also configure the system to simply help your constituents identify and send their own messages to their elected officials. By typing in their zip code, users can identify their elected officials, get contact information, view committee assignments and voting histories, and compose messages.

If you have a one-time campaign with a specific target (i.e., you don't need to identify members of Congress or the State Legislature by the user's zip code), and you don't expect to engage in online activism on an on-going basis, your Web developer can write a simple script to send faxes via an inexpensive online fax service like faxcube.com.

Email activism. To grow your online activism, you should invite people to subscribe to receive action alerts by email. This is a great way to build your email list and notify people about your activist campaigns, rather than waiting for them to come to your site. When you send out an action alert, include information about the campaign and a link to the page on the site where people can take action. With sophisticated systems you can send personalized emails to your activists configured so they can either take action by replying to the email or by clicking through to a Web page that contains their pre-filled letter to their elected official. All they have to do is edit the letter (if they so choose), and click "send"!

Source: Groundspring ITS Topic 6