The action alert is dead! Long live the action alert!

California’s State Capitol.

The email action alert used to be the backbone of nonprofit advocacy, a way for grassroots organizations to capture and focus thousands of activists to a single issue effectively. For a lot of reasons, those action alert emails don’t have nearly the impact that they used to have, but that doesn’t mean you should stop using this tool. In fact, you should be using it more than ever.

What is an email action alert?

There are several different ways to do an email action alert, but what I’m talking about here is an email call-to-action sent via email to your audience, usually using a CMS (content management system) such as EveryAction or Luminate. These database systems offer different levels of complexity, but typically they allow your members to send messages to their specific elected representatives with one or two clicks. If you have a large mailing list, you can get thousands of people to advocate on your issue directly to their elected officials in just minutes.

Why don’t they work as well as they used to?

I once met a guy who claimed to have invented the action alert, only he did it before the onset of email. His system used faxes. One would go to a primitive website, enter your information and message, and the system would automatically send a fax to the legislative office. He said that almost immediately after they launched their system, they got angry calls from the legislative offices complaining that the messages were clogging their fax machines. “Tough shit,” my friend responded. “This is representative democracy.” Did the offices respond by buying more fax machines and carefully reading the messages? Of course not. They unplugged their machines and moved them to secret phone numbers that weren’t made public.

For a long time, the email action alerts moved mountains. I was working mostly at the state level in California, and I saw a number of electeds change their votes on conservation bills based on the number of emails they were getting from constituents. It was particularly useful on smaller groups of elected officials who perhaps weren’t used to learning that their actions were getting a lot of visibility. County and local officials, used to making important decisions in meeting halls with only a few people watching, suddenly had to reckon with the reality that thousands of people were watching. Even if they weren’t reading the emails—and let’s face it—no one could possibly read them all (and why would you, when they were almost all identical?). But at least they could count the numbers, and that was real.

But then, eventually, elected officials began to respond to the emails the same way their earlier counterparts responded to my friend’s faxes. They stopped giving out email addresses for the offices, prompting the systems to dig for them. Then they stopped accepting general emails at all, moving to online forms. While eventually the CMS providers figured out how to map their systems to the forms, another shift had taken place, a much bigger one: legislators just began to ignore the emails altogether. First they claimed that they were somehow less legitimate because they were prompted by advocacy organizations, that they were less real because they were so easy for voters to send. Then the hyper-partisanization of current politics made it even easier to ignore large swaths of the electorate as long as you were serving your base/donors. There were other factors, too, but the overall result is inarguable.

Is the action alert dead?

The action alert as we used to know it is pretty much done, but I still recommend using this tool, perhaps more than ever. If that sounds contradictory, it’s not, that’s because the world of advocacy has evolved, and technologies have evolved.

Why I still recommend using action alerts

They still can occasionally work. While the days of moving legislative votes with 1,000 or 4,000 advocacy emails is long over, if you’re able to hit astronomical numbers—and I’m talking six figures here—that can make a mark. Also, as noted above, action alerts can still be very effective when directed toward bodies that aren’t inured to them, like city councils, local commissions, and independent agencies. Flood your local parks district with emails, and they will notice.

Engagement matters. Don’t think about alert participants as mere senders. Think about them as volunteers, people who are engaged with your mission at the most basic level and are only at the beginning of their journey with you.

Showing you care. When you send an action alert to your audience, you’re doing more than just asking them to participate. You’re letting them know that you are tracking this critical issue and others like it, and you’re doing something about it. If they don’t get that email from you, they may never know that you’re on top of things.

Launching platform. If you’re going to get something done in the advocacy space these days, you need a strong multi-pronged approach. You need to combine emails with social media, phone calls, letter-writing, physical protest, earned media, and a host of other things. Your action alerts are a great way to create awareness and inspire people to take other actions that might have more impact.

Broadening your audience. If the term list-building bothers you, then think of it as growing your audience. When you give people the opportunity to speak out on an issue that they care about, that also brings them to you. Properly shared through your social media and from your members to non-members, action alerts can do amazing things for building your members and larger audiences.

Fundraising. As I mentioned, action alert participants are volunteers, and as every development officer knows, volunteers are often your best donors. Action alert participants give a damn, and if you interact with them appropriately, they will also open their wallets for you.

Action matters. This reason is a little more vague than the others, but I still think it’s important to place some value on people simply doing things. One of the biggest obstacles in advocacy is simply getting momentum, and getting a few thousand people to click on something, to put some thought into an issue, to feel something if only for a moment—well, that’s worth it. Often, that’s the start of something important, and that’s certainly worth doing.