Call to Action is a new book that advocates a stronger emphasis on direct response marketing techniques on the web.
According to Jeffery and Brian Eisenberg, the book’s authors, “Virtually all Web sites have a persuasive purpose: to get someone to subscribe, to register, to inquire or to buy something,” and the extent to which the website content and design serves to drive visitors to take these actions should be the crucial measure of success.
The book is targetted to an e-commerce/business audience, but the core points hit home for nonprofits and campaign activists - especially around typical action items such as advocacy, volunteer recruitment and online donatons. Website visitors should be able to identify in a handful of seconds exactly what it is that you want them to do - if not, then they are more likely to surf off somewhere else without engaging with your website beyond a cursory glance.
Web Marketing guy Gerry McGovern has posted a review of the book.
This reminds me of Steve Krug’s excellent book on web usability Don’t make me think, which has become my personal bible on website design. Well worth the read for his common-sense analysis of how a web design that understands and responds to basic human nature can greatly enhance the usability, and hence, the popularity of your website.
Whether you like it or not, a central part of online campaigning is the numbers game. If you want to make an impact online or offline, then you need to attract and mobilize large numbers of individuals. Chaining is a specific tactic that can help boost numbers of participants in a your core set of online engagement activities (signing up, telling others, sending petitions, etc.).
Specifically, chaining is the linking of online actions together so that completing one action leads into the call to another action. For instance, the feedback message that appears after someone signs an online petition can include a specific followup action such as forwarding a message to friends, or joining a mailing list.
Chaining is an important way to captialize on the initiative that drives a casual visitors to “take action” and encourages actvists to go deeper and engage in other forms of action. A supporter who signs an online petition is acting out of a strong sense of connection with that cause or organization, and may be very open to other activism encouragements - for cyberactions, or volunteers, or even online giving. This is where the tactic of “chaining” can be most effectively employed. The confirmation pages and autogenerated Thank You emails that can follow an online sign up or petition signature are the prime opportunities for chaining to other actions, as these messages are sent within seconds of the initial action, and can engage the participant before he or she moves on to something else.
Here’s an example of a chaining action from the welcome email autogenerated by signing up for Greenpeace’s recent No Whaling campaign. The chaining action asks the new “activist” to engage in a simple viral action followup by forwarding a pre-wrtten recruitment message to their friends/family/personal contacts.
Thanks George
We’ve already published your photo! When we march together on June 19 in Ulsan South Korea, your voice will be there. Now please go the next step in helping us to keep the whales alive.
… [clip] …
Please help us to preserve these wonderful mammals for generations to come. Make a secure online donation now.
And if you haven’t already done so, please ask your friends to participate in the Virtual March by forwarding them this email below. If you have time, put it into your own words. It will be that much stronger.
Thanks for all that you are doing to support this campaign,
Shane Rattenbury
Head of Oceans
Greenpeace International
Forward to your friends
————— Message start ——————–
Dear friends,
Despite an international moratorium on whaling, 2137 whales will be hunted this year and the Japanese government is aggressively campaigning to lift the ban on commercial whaling.
Greenpeace is organizing a massive photo protest to not lift the ban. The idea is that your picture, along with thousands of other peoples, will be projected in front of the building where delegates from hundreds of governments meet on June 20 to decide if the whales live or die. The meeting will be in Ulsan, South Korea.
I just sent my picture to Greenpeace to add my voice to the No Whaling Virtual March and I’m calling on you to do the same. It just takes a minute and the more pictures we have, the better are the chances that whales will live. Go to: http://whales.greenpeace.org and follow the easy steps – do it NOW!
Thanks in advance and see you in South Korea! 
————— Message end ——————–
Chaining actions should be simple, and require just a few clicks of a mouse button, for instance: signing e-petitions, sending e-postcards, subscribing to email mailing lists, and forwarding messages to friends.
Chaining is part of a strategy that engages new contacts more deeply, drawing them further in, and bringing them to different parts of the campaign - including fundraising,advocacy, public awareness and volunteerism. Chain can help you get the most value out of every email contact and web visitor by engaging them in numerous campaign activities. Chaining is also a central process in the construction of a campaign “gauntlet” that can rapidly swell the ranks of campaign supporters by stringing together a series of quick signup and spread-the-word actions into a single stream.
Extreme Democracy is a collaborative online book that has been assembled by a dream team of politics and technology writers, such as Joi Ito, Jon Lebkowski and Britt Blaser. The book has been filled out over the past year as a series of articles published online, and was launched in published book form at the Personal Democracy Forum 2oo5 held in New York City on May 16th.
As a published book, Extreme Democracy has 18 chapters, including several that focus onthe use of online tools for grassroots mobilization: “From the Screen to the Streets” by Howard Rheingold, “Social Network Dynamics and Participatory Politics” by Ross Mayfield. The web version (individual chapters are available in pdf format) continues to grow, with new commentary and follow-on articles.
Here is a brief intro from the Extreme Democracy website:
“Extreme democracy” is a political philosophy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process. It suggests a deliberative process that places total confidence in the people, opening the policy-making process to many centers of power through deeply networked coalitions that can be organized around local, national and international issues. … Extreme democracy emphasizes the importance of tools designed to break down barriers to collaboration and access to power, acknowledging that political realities can be altered by building on rapidly advancing generations of technology and that human organizations are transformed by new political expectations and practices made possible by technology.
Welcome to Shake the Pillars.
This is a new blog site that will be looking at how activist organizations are using grassroots mobilization tools to engage their supporters and work for social change. This is an emerging trend in online activism, but one that is rapidly moving into mainstream. Shake the Pillars will be a guide to some of the new thinking and best practices that are out there right now.
I want to start off by quoting Britt Blaser from his Inescapable Logic blog, where he has suggested that instead of Grassroots Activism, we might do better to think of Strawberry Roots Activism:
Your front lawn is dependent on you for seed, feed, water and weeding, each seed pushing out just a few blades for us to admire. Rhyzomes, like strawberries and crabgrass, are more creative. Once started, they shoot out opportunistic runners which put down roots in hospitable circumstances. If the new plant prospers, it puts out multiple runners, and so on. Strawberry roots activism may be the future of politics.
