Communicating With Elected Officials

At Advocacy Central, we believe that the Internet has fundamentally changed the Advocacy landscape. According to a poll conducted by Juno Online Services, Inc. and e-advocates:

• Among U.S. citizens with Internet access, online advocacy is quickly becoming the preferred method of communicating with elected officials.

• The survey, which generated over 155,000 responses, indicated that Americans prefer email-based communications with elected officials over snail mail or telephone communications by a margin of over 2 to 1.

• Eighty-one percent of the poll respondents said that it is "important" or "very important" for Members of Congress to maintain a public e-mail address for constituent communication.

Viral Marketing through Personal Web Sites

An essential part of Advocacy Central's vision is to make your organization aware of the incredible impact personal web sites can have on your marketing/PR efforts AND to provide your organization with innovative online tools so your members can create their own dynamic, interactive web sites. We believe that Personal web sites are a vastly underused viral marketing / PR tool for organizations. (Note: Blog, short for Web log, is another word for personal web site).

• Personal web sites [Blogs], according to Microcontent News, are spreading like wildfire - by some accounts, the market is growing as high as 25% a month with its incredible viral growth. Blogs influence A Billion Google Searches A Week..weblogs are the voters in this political system. In other words, weblogs don't get elected by Google... but the sites they voted for (i.e. linked to) do.

• According to John Hiler, an authority on WebLogs, personal web sites can be used as an extraordinary venue for grassroots reporting. Many people are looking to weblogs to help address media bias. By adding to the diversity of original content, weblogs have added a whole new layer to the Media Food chain. That puts weblogs at the base of the food chain, generating the sort of grassroots journalism that the new Media Ecosystem has grown increasingly dependent upon. Because bloggers are closer to a story, they'll often pick up the sort of things that traditional Journalists miss.

• According to the Public Relations Society of America, if a recent decision by the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, to offer a graduate-level course in blogs is any indication, these Personal web sites are going to become increasingly vital to the news media landscape - and more vital to clients who require targeted media outreach.