By Shane Thacker

Washington, D.C.

What is the sound made by over 300,000 e-mail messages landing in the White House inbox? To the people who have been working on the Heritage Forests Campaign, it sounded a lot like President Clinton's voice announcing a possible change in Forest Service policy on how our national forests are managed.

How did all of that e-mail get to the White House? Well, it's a story of a simple idea and some hard work.

President Clinton meets and greets people after making his announcement regarding National Forest policy.

As reported in Nonprofits & Technology's June 1999 issue, the Heritage Forests Campaign was established to help urge the federal government to change its policies towards America's 60,000,000 acres of unprotected national forests. Specifically, it focused on preventing road-building and other destructive activities in all national forest areas over 1,000 acres in size.

When looking for a way to help influence the Clinton Administration by allowing people to express their opinions about protecting the national forests, the campaign organizers hit on the idea of setting up an Internet initiative that would allow others to send e-mail "postcards" with the campaign's five points of forest protection to the office of Vice President Al Gore, known for his support of environmental causes.

Heritage Forest staffers originally wanted to get 60,000 respondents to use the system to send the Vice President e-mail with their names, address and e-mail address as validation. However, that strategy proved almost too successful, at least for the White House, says Sarah DiJulio, Internet Outreach Director for the campaign.

A response that ended up numbering 300,000 postcards pushed the White House mail servers to the limit.

While there isn't a provable causal link between the campaign getting so many people to send e-mail and the President's recent announcement of a 60-day comment period on possible stricter rules covering the forests, the people at the campaign can be forgiven for feeling like they've accomplished something.

After all, how often do most campaigns get hundreds of thousands of people to write the Administration to support their cause in less than a year?

"The exciting thing is that it works, we got so many people engaged and the Administration is doing the right thing," says DiJulio.

However, it isn't just a matter of giving people the opportunity. You have to work to get the message out, DiJulio says.

In the case of the Heritage Forests Campaign, work meant finding out the best ways to put the opportunity to act in front of people.

"Some things you'd think would work didn't," DiJulio says. "Some things you think wouldn't did."

One tactic that worked surprisingly well, according to DiJulio, was paying for advertising through Juno, a free, advertising-supported e-mail service for people without other kinds of Internet access. By sending out a Juno ad offering subscribers the chance to send an e-mail, the campaign got over an 11 percent response rate that added up to 160,000 messages.

Other tactics that the staff tried included "viral marketing" (an Internet Age version of word-of-mouth) -- which produced 10,000 responses from people taking action and forwarding the message to others, donated ad space on Internet sites, virtual volunteers that mentioned the campaign in newsgroups and chatrooms across the Internet, mailing lists and a few direct marketing experiments.

Of the people that took action, DiJulio says, the "vast majority" were not already affiliated with environmental groups.

By asking for e-mail addresses from all of those who came to the campaign's Web site to send out a postcard, the campaign staff has been able to send them periodic e-mail updates on the progress of the campaign and ways that they can help.

For others who want to try similar Internet campaigns, ideally the people who are in charge of the campaign should be the same as those who build the Internet strategy, DiJulio says. It is counterproductive to separate the technology people from the campaign.

Also, organizations that always want to know exactly what they are getting into may not like this sort of campaign. Since this use of the Internet is so new, DiJulio says, it "can feel like you are making it up as you go along." In a number of ways, the strategy and technology used in the campaign will be driven by the campaign.

As for new projects, the organizers of the Heritage Forests Campaign are trying to protect the trees, animals, ice caps and us from air pollution through urging car manufacturers to make environmentally friendly cars. GreenCar.org will see if 300,000 or so e-mail messages will convince automakers there is a market for green cars.

In the meantime, the work is not yet finished for the Heritage Forests Campaign. After proving that e-mail advocacy could work, the next step is to use it to affect the requests for comments on the possible new policies.

The Administration's request for comments period ends on December 20. For those who want to get their opinion and/or support heard, the campaign's Web site is offering e-mail postcards.

Shane Thacker can be reached at
shanethack@mindspring.com