Interview with Jason Lefkowitz on E-activism: First things first

Sure Dave, thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here!

My background... I've been a tech/communications hybrid for pretty much my whole adult life. My degree is in political communications, but I took a minor in information systems as well -- this back in the early 90s, when crossing those two disciplines together was something that didn't happen very often.

I've worked on various projects over the last ten years, including several years as a consultant specializing in online advocacy and community forming. Before I came to Change to Win I was the online director at Oceana, an exciting advocacy group that's doing great work to raise awareness about the crisis that the world's oceans are facing. I also worked for a year with Democracy in Action, helping small nonprofits get the most out of their platform.

From 2002-2005 I also maintained a blog, Ant's Eye View (archived at http://anthillcommunities.com/), examining a lot of the then-emerging trends that coalesced later into 'Web 2.0'. I wish we'd had a good buzzword like that at the time, it would have saved me a lot of typing :-D

Because in my experience the things that do get talked about are not really relevant to many working e-activists.

I first started thinking about this when I attended the Politics Online Conference last year (I couldn't make it this year, alas). There were tons of sessions devoted to lessons learned from political campaigns, as well as to bleeding edge trends (Second Life and so on).

The problem is that these lessons aren't particularly relevant to many small and medium-size groups that want to (or need to) do online activism. Political campaigns raise huge amounts of cash and can hire big staffs to run their online program; many advocacy groups would consider themselves lucky to have a single full time e-advocacy staffer. (Often the best they can do is to have an "accidental techie" -- a staffer from some other discipline who gets e-activism tasks dumped into their portfolio.) Bleeding edge technology is fun to talk about, but it can cost a ton of money and time to work with, with unclear benefit -- and technology takes a long time to prove its utility. Consider that I have been evangelizing Web syndication (RSS feeds) for nearly a decade now and most people in our sector are only just starting to explore what they can offer.

I've actually had people who I respect who are in these organizations tell me that they feel guilty for not having a "Facebook strategy" or some such. And that's just crazy; when you have limited resources, you need to focus on doing a few things well rather than many things poorly.

So part of my message is to just let people know who find themselves in these positions that they are not alone, and that it is definitely possible to run an effective online program by yourself on a low budget if you pick your priorities wisely.

In thinking about the one-person e-activism team, I generally break things down into three categories: your Web site, your e-mail list, and the rest of the net.

Your Web site is your primary point of contact for people who don't know your organization; it needs to be effective at communicating your message and driving visitors to do what you want them to do (take action, give money, etc.)

Your e-mail list is your primary point of contact for people who you have an ongoing relationship with; it needs to be effective at nurturing those relationships.

The rest of the net is all the other sites and lists that aren't yours. The Cluetrain Manifesto (a must read if you haven't already: http://cluetrain.org) tells us that "Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die." The same is true -- maybe even MORE true -- of advocacy groups. You need to identify what community of discourse you belong to, and figure out some low-budget, high-impact ways to get your perspective into them.

Well, let's talk about the Web site, to begin with. When someone asks me what their Second Life strategy should be, I answer by asking them what Google search term their website should be the #1 result for, and where they show up on those results pages now. Very frequently these are questions that had never been raised before -- and they are much more critical to the success or failure of your online program than Second Life is.

So what can be done about this? Several things, most of which require only a little work:

* Look at the HTML for your site. Run it through the HTML Validator (http://validator.w3.org/) and see what comes back. A few errors are OK, but many sites have atrocious HTML that will return dozens or even hundreds of errors. Clean HTML helps search engines parse out the content of your page, and link it up to search results; so spend the time to clean up your markup.

* Look at how you're writing the copy for your pages. Are you using the keywords you want people to find you by? Are you including them in the TITLE tag of the page where you talk about them? Many of the vendors who sell "search engine optimization" services are simply snake oil salesmen, but there's a lot of simple SEO you can do at low or no cost that pays a good dividend.

* Evaluate the types of content you are providing. A great way to raise your search profile is to make your site into an authoritative source on something. That attracts links, and links are a key driver of search prominence. So look at your pages with a critical eye and ask yourself: who would link to this page? Why would they link to it? What can I do to make it more link-worthy?

* Break down content into smaller chunks. As much as possible, you want to make it so that people can directly link to specific resources on your site. So if you have a single page that lists every report your organization has ever issued, consider breaking it up into many pages so that each report has its own page. That way, anyone who writes about a given report can link directly to it, rather than having to link to the big list and then ask their readers to plow through it.

You can go through a similar set of exercises with your email list -- are you sending on a regular schedule (at least once every couple of weeks)? Are you using descriptive subject lines? Are you sending text and HTML versions of your message? -- and with the rest of the web -- do you know what the key sites are where people discuss your issues? Can you establish a presence on those sites as a guest blogger, commentator, or advertiser? etc.

Let's get this said right off the bat: E-mail is a broken medium. Until you've worked on the end of the business where you're responsible for e-mail delivery, you don't really understand just how much the system is held together with bubble gum and baling wire.

I would encourage everybody to go through the thought exercise of how you would engage with your activists if e-mail did not exist, because as time goes on and the spam wars make it harder and harder to engage efficiently over e-mail, you may find there are alternative strategies that are more cost effective. For example, while I was at Oceana we set up one of the first advocacy community sites, the Oceana Community (http://community.oceana.org/), specifically to provide a channel to engage activists and grow them beyond simply hitting 'send' on canned forms. If you don't want to go that far, you can consider simply building some community features into your existing site (the Center for American Progress does this very well, for example), or start building alternate channels through syndication feeds.

That being said, e-mail is still important enough today to be a core element of your strategy. Spending the time to optimize your e-mail performance, generally speaking, is time well spent.

See my answer above about the Oceana Community. These people are typically high-information activists; they want information-rich channels to engage over. This isn't a great fit for e-mail because your e-mail messages usually need to be engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

My standard recommendation is to have two channels -- email for 'casual' activists and a blog for the more engaged ones. This lets you feed the thirst of the engaged activists with lots of jargon and wonkery without cluttering up your action emails with it. And you can periodically go through your email list's subscribers, find the ones who consistently engage, and then send them a special invitation to come join the discussion at the blog (which is awful flattering to receive).

I would say there's three basic strategies you can follow, which each has their own set of metrics: the broad strategy, the deep strategy, and the opinion-leader strategy.

The broad strategy is to engage the widest possible audience. To do this, especially if you don't have a huge e-action team working for you, you generally need to simplify the message as much as possible, and push it out through low-touch channels like email and feeds. Key metrics for this strategy include list subscribers, unsubscribe rate, and overall traffic to web site.

The deep strategy is to build a smaller audience of higher-information, higher-engagement activists. For this you don't really care so much about total hits to your site, you care more about things like conversion rates (how many people who look at an action page actually take action?). A smaller list/lower traffic site with an awesome conversion rate can outperform a giant email list made up of people who don't really care about your issue.

Finally there is the opinion leader strategy; this involves not building your own community, but empowering people to take your message out through their own channels. A key metric for this would be how often your materials are getting cited and linked to. Blog search tools like Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) can be invaluable in establishing how effective you are being at creating a message that spreads, and where it has spread to.

The first thing to know is that it's not your fault. Generally speaking the tools on offer in this sector are of disturbingly low quality. People accept them because the alternatives are equally bad, or because they don't have a lot of experience with software and don't realize that better, more usable alternatives are out there.

That being said, the best way to avoid having to deal with obsolete tools is to avoid using tools that can become obsolete. The classic way you get stuck in this spot is to buy a proprietary tool from a vendor. Then the vendor changes strategy and throws out the tool, and you're stuck having to go shopping again.

There are some ways to mitigate this risk. First, look hard for open source alternatives before you lock yourself in to a proprietary offering. If no open source alternative exists, ask the vendor what protections they offer you in case they go under or change strategy. For example, vendors can offer a "software escrow" deal where your contract guarantees that, should the vendor go out of business, the source code to their tools will be released so that others can maintain them. Most vendors in our space don't offer protections like this, but my guess is that's because nobody asks them to. Asking hard questions like this up front can save you a lot of heartburn down the road.

This gets to what I was talking about earlier about the frustrations of e-mail as a medium. 15% may seem shockingly low but it is actually not that bad. A list with a 30% open rate is considered really strong!

Some of this is due to the problems of e-mail as a medium (and you might try offering alternate channels to see if they provide better performance -- ask your vendor, for example, if you can get an RSS/Atom feed of your messages), but some of it could be from the way you build your messages not being optimized.

Here's some simple tricks I've learned:

1) One ask per email. It's tempting to have a 'newsletter' with many stories and asks, but you will usually see better performance if you stick to one story per message, with one ask associated with it. (Note that by 'one ask' I don't mean 'only ask one time' -- I mean 'don't ask them to do two things'. It's a good idea to repeat your one ask two or three times within the message.)

2) Make the email scannable. The usability guru Jakob Nielsen established more than ten years ago that people don't read online (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html)-- they just skip around the page, looking for text that interests them. This means that if your message has loooong blocks of text, you risk people 'tuning out' because they can't quickly find what they need. You can fix this by shortening your copy (remember Strunk's Law: Omit! Needless! Words!) and using boldface to draw the reader's eye to key phrases. My rule is that the reader should be able to get the basic message of your email just by reading only the words you put in bold.

That's absolutely correct, and it gets to what I was talking about earlier with the "rest of the web" strategy. You need to figure out where those conversations are happening, and find a way to (respectfully) engage with them. For example, I post diaries at DailyKos, which is a huge progressive online community, and I have reached out to other DKos diarists who write about labor and workplace issues to help them learn about CtW and connect up with people in our various campaigns.

In this sense, your role is like being the host of a party -- your success metric is how many good introductions you're making.

A lot of this stuff is still evolving and developing, so there's no silver bullet strategy just yet. But I do think that having a few well-defined channels like I talked about earlier, and actively encouraging people to grow from the low-engagement channels to the high-engagement channels, is a sound strategy.

Definitely. For those who are interested, you can see our Smack the CEO Facebook game at http://apps.facebook.com/smacktheceo (Facebook account required).

The idea of the app grew out of a feature we have on our web site, a Flash calculator where you can put in your salary and see how it compares to that of the average CEO. When Facebook released their API, I thought it might be fun to try and add a social dimension to the calculator by letting you build a network, and see how many of your friends it takes to make as much as one CEO (answer: a lot). Because it was an experiment, we spent zero dollars on promotion, and the only development expense was my time -- I'm a reasonably good PHP programmer and hammered out the first version of the app over a weekend.

Considering the low expense, it was a valuable experiment. It earned us some favorable coverage on the blogs, who tend to have outdated views of labor and don't realize that we're as wired as the rest of the progressive sector. And it picked up a few thousand users, who got our message -- not what you would call "viral", but not bad considering the low cost (those goofy Flash movies people love to call "viral" can cost $50,000 and often perform about as well as Smack the CEO did).

That being said, I wouldn't recommend most people try the same thing. One thing we saw was that, even though we went out of our way to make the app game-like (unlike a lot of similar projects, which can be dry and policy oriented), the feedback we got was strongly in the direction of "make it more of a game", not "I want to know more about your policy message". Facebook users are looking for diversions, not education. That's great for Scrabulous but not so much for activists.

I'm sure that someday someone will crack the nut on how to engage these networks super-effectively for advocacy purposes. My advice is to wait until that happens, and then rip that person's ideas off :-D

In my experience you need a very large and engaged user base to make these types of competitions work. You should think of your actions as a set of hurdles, each progressively higher. Everyone should be able to clear the first hurdle (that's what your online petitions are for). Each hurdle after that will add a little more work the user has to do, and will have exponentially fewer people who participate.

Video contests work for MoveOn because MoveOn has a huge and passionate user base. But they didn't start with that, they built it over a decade with assiduous cultivation through email and the web. A lot of organizations want to skip that part and just jump right to the bit where they're the same as MoveOn, but I'm not sure you can skip it.

I guess if I was going to summarize my point in one sentence, it would be that you shouldn't worry about going to any of those sites at all until you were satisfied that you were getting as much performance out of your Web site, your email list, and your community of interest as you possibly can. When those things are running on all cylinders, they you can worry about social networking and podcasting and other related geekery.

Is Beebo a real site or did you just make it up? :-D

See previous answer. YouTube is great if you're already generating a lot of video content (most small and midsize advocacy groups aren't). Del.icio.us and similar sites are great for easily creating feeds of info for high-information activists. But those are still marginal compared to the core functions.

We used Scoop (http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/) to build the Oceana Network, and here is how I described the experience of using Scoop to the Progressive Exchange listserv last week: "If, for some reason, you feel the urge to use Scoop, just take a fork, cover it with salt and then stick it in your eye."

So, you know, don't use that one.

I don't have a lot of experience with other so-called 'white label' social networks, so I can't really speak to that. Six Apart's new Movable Type Community Solution (http://www.movabletype.com/products/community-solution.html) looks pretty nice though.

No problem! It's been fun. I blog periodically about this stuff at http://www.jasonlefkowitz.net, so if you want to keep up with what I'm thinking, that's the place to go. And anyone who wants to follow up can feel free to contact me at jason@jasonlefkowitz.net.

Thanks for the great questions everybody!