Some considerations for those interested in electronic advocacy. E-advocacy is more than doing what you've always done, only via email.

One thing, it seems, you would need to do at the outset is define what level/scope of government you want to examine. This would speak not only to the type of institutional players towards which advocacy efforts are directed by nonprofits, but also the mechanism through (or around) those advocacy activities occur.

So if you were looking at a state legislature, you might start with an assumption that advocacy efforts are targeted toward individual lawmakers, some or all members of a committee, chamber leaders and chairmen, etc.-- through drafting/passing/halting legislation. If it were the judicial branch, you might say advocacy is directed towards some influence with respect to trials, the court system itself, or judges/juries/lawyers. If it were the executive branch, the targets might be governors, department heads, or agency personnel, and it might involve efforts to pass/stall/revoke rules and regulations, appointments, or facilitating comment by outside players on agency deliberations.

You would also need to define the types of advocacy interests and entities in which you are interested-- small or large groups, membership or non-association entities, grassroots and community groups, PACs, monied interest groups, etc.

Then you could define a more concrete realm of "e-advocacy" and/or "e-activism" which, more frequently than not, is synonymous with using e-mail or websites to direct communications to specific institutional players. Your e-advocacy basket, however, could easily begin to encompass things like monitoring of policy processes, coordination among groups, public awareness campaigns, etc. Some would even define online fundraising in support of a cause "e-activism" or "e-advocacy".

Another important distinction might be that between those who draft and send communications to government online, versus thus who only sign their names to existing online communications, or will forward some type of pre-written communication to an elected official under a coordinated effort. Your e-advocacy in the first case might involve activities such as media advocacy, public awareness, consciousness- raising, the second and third might involve activities such as gathering information, providing access to policy information, and steering word-of-mouth/grassroots outreach and coordination strategies.

As an interesting side note on this last point, consider the 11/8/01 results of an ethePeople survey articulating "Five Myths of Online Activism" (http://eapp1.e-thepeople.org/static/reports/5_myths.pdf). ethePeople (http://e-thepeople.org) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit effort to increase online civic participation by allowing the public to create, sign onto, and/or send individual letters or petitions to government officials at the local, state, and federal level.

The "myths" challenged were:

1) The only people politically active online are those active off-line

Letter and petition writers were roughly equally as likely to have joined or contributed to an organization, though both were less likely to have done so compared to the national average (determined by numbers from an earlier Pew study [http://www.people-press.org/socrpt.htm]). Petition writers were more likely than letter writers, and slightly more than the national average, to have attended some type of public meeting or town hall. There was a very small gap among letter and petition-writers, and the national average, for those likely to have engaged in union activity.

2) Petition writers were more likely, and letter writers less likely, than an average Internet user-- determined by numbers from Fulcrum Analytics (formerly Cyber Dialogue)-- to have a high-school education or some college education. Letter writers, however, were far more likely than petition writers, or the average Internet user, to have completed college.

3) Online activism is only done by those who complain a lot. 86% of the letter writers and 70% of the petition writers were first-time ethePeople users, and only a quarter of petition writers and less than a third of letter-writers wrote more than one communication during the first half of 2001. The significance pointed out by the findings is that those who wrote letters came across the service in response to a particular need, not as a regular activity.

4) Recipients on online activism communications don't respond. The ratio of response expectation versus actual response/acknowledgement of online communication was 60% to 55% for letter writers, versus 45% to 24% of letter writers. This means that while there was a somewhat small gap between the expectations of those who sent letters versus petitions, those who sent letters were more likely to receive some sort of response.

ethePeople posits that this is because letters tend to address more specific concerns, but I might speculate as to whether the signatures on electronic petitions raise red flags as to whether they are from actual constituents or residents (in which case some officials or staffers would chafe at trying to verify them, unless they represent supporters of a particular issue or activity). What isn't addressed, though, is how many of the individual letters were part of a targeted online campaign, that is, if individuals were encouraged to write their own letters on a specific subject to a particular target (or set of targets) within a specific time period.

5) Online activism is never successful. Here's where things get dicey. ethePeople draws a distinction between a communication's success versus it's perceived effectiveness, saying that if a letter or petition did not generate a response, it might still be deemed successful. Slightly more than half of letter writers, and slightly less than half of petition writers considered their communications "somewhat effective". Interestingly, 30% of letter writers versus 6% of petition writers considered their communications "very effective"; and 45% of petition writers-- compared to 19% of letter writers-- did not consider their communications effective by any means.

In general, then, online letter writers were more likely than petition writers, through the same online service to perceive their communications as effective on some level, though it's not stated exactly how this might be so. I would guess that if a problem is solved without a letter/petition writer receiving an e-mail response, that counts. It might also mean that new "activists" who have the potential to stay engaged around an issue over a longer period of time have been identified.

Overall, the survey presupposes a notion of "online activism" as communicating with government, through a particular online service, rather than through a separate, more localized mechanism. It begs the question of why advocates would channel communications through a single online source, versus sending a letter on their own, or making an in-person office visit with an official, etc.

The study also seems to have more emphasis on individual activity rather than advocacy groups, per se-- although it's likely that advocacy groups simply designated an individual to serve as the point-of-contact for communication placed on the service.

The ethePeople findings also suggest that e-activism, in order to be viable and legitimate, has to create a more direct and accountable medium in which senders and recipients interact, has to provide guidance as to what type of communications are most effective and when, and has to have some sort of capacity to collect and disseminate "success" stories.

So, that said, you would also need to include some assessment of the degree to which government activity, subsequent advocacy (if indeed it is in response to a specific government action, or part of more frequent or ongoing activity), and the government response all occur within the same medium.

For example: does an agency, as part of its rulemaking, ask for and actually accept online comments (especially through a special form), do advocates generate comments through that form or through other means, and does the agency actually acknowledge receipt of those forms, and what's the follow-up procedure?

In looking at this, you might also need to assess to what degree the online mechanisms for e-government and e-advocacy potentially incorporate/consolidate and/or replace existing forms of participation-- and if they potentially exclude or discourage certain groups of participants. Are only those familiar with legislative process or comfortable with online chat rooms or message boards most likely to participate in an electronic town meeting?