Political Pages > Using the Internet for campaigning > E-mail viral marketing

E-mail Outreach

Everyone wants good schools, a clean environment and a safe place to live, but today's world has left people with less time to get involved. The Internet has the potential to reach busy voters and bring them back into the community, where they can have a voice and make an impact with as little effort as it takes to send an e-mail message. To a campaign, this means the ability to tap hundreds, even thousands of volunteers, in a matter of minutes.

E-mail is a fast, inexpensive way to share information and build communities of like-minded people. By using it to notify someone about an event where they can participate -- either by acting or passing along information -- a single e-mail message can snowball into a series of many messages, all carrying the same theme to a group of individuals who can then chose whether to follow through with the requested action, be it by hanging a window sign, voting a particular way on Election Day of donating money to a campaign.

This ability to reach volunteers and potential supporters via e-mail saves campaigns time and direct mail costs. In addition, since we're talking about contacting people who are likely to be interested in a particular issue or cause, the recipients are more likely to respond to the action called for in the e-mail.

MoveOn.org is perhaps the best-known example of this. In September 1998 the husband and wife team of Wes Boyd and Joan Blades of Berkeley, Calif. set up an online petition calling for Congress to censure President Clinton and move on after the Monica Lewinsky story broke. Boyd and Blades sent 100 e-mail messages to family members and friends asking them to add their names to the petition and pass it along to others. In a few months, they had gathered more than 500,000 names. In addition, people pledged more than $13 million to candidates running against members of Congress who tried to impeach the President.

Boyd and Blades reactivated their list in the wake of the Littleton, Colo. high school shootings, this time sending it out to back gun control. Moveon.org has taken on other issues as well. While during the impeachment trial the organization started from scratch, it now has an instant list of 300,000 people it can reach via e-mail -- all for the original $89.50 it cost to put up that Web site.

For news stories on the use of e-mail, click here.

• Flash Campaigns: Online Activism at Warp Speed, The New York Times, June 3, 1999

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