Choose Responsibility's Online Strategy

In 1984, Congress added a new requirement to federal transportation funds. Before the federal government would distribute money for highway projects, states were required to raise the legal drinking age from 18 to 21. In the 1970s, many states had lowered the legal drinking age for returning Vietnam War veterans who wanted to buy beer after serving their nation in combat. Every state complied with the near-mandate, fearful that massive interstate projects could not be completed without the federal money. Mothers Against Drunk Driving supported the change. Today, MADD reports more than 20,000 lives have been saved over the following 24 years, as the older legal age kept drunk drivers ages 18 to 21 off the highways.

But John McCardell, president of Middlebury College in Vermont from 1992 to 2004, noticed a different trend over the same period: underage students started drinking in secret. Only upperclassmen could drink in bars and restaurants, where they drank socially with family and friends. Underage students had to hide from campus police and resident assistants in the dorms. Drinking became something done quickly and furtively before starting an evening out. McCardell thinks the higher drinking age has led to a rise in binge drinking, and establishes a disregard for the law that carries into adulthood.

“If binge drinking has never been worse, why do we think the legal age 21 has been successful?” McCardell said to the Boston Globe in a June 2, 2007 article. “Drinking is taking place in out-of-sight places and in settings that increase the harm to the individuals who are consuming alcohol and anyone who finds themselves in their path. I think we can do better.”

When McCardell retired as college president, he started a nonprofit, Choose Responsibility, to advocate moving the legal drinking age to 18.

Choose Responsibility is a small operation. In addition to McCardell, it employs two staff members, an executive director and an assistant, who work from an office in Middlebury. Because of McCardell’s stature and connections, the group has received widespread coverage in the mainstream media, with pieces appearing in the Boston Globe, Newsweek and USA Today during 2007 and 2008, along with segments on CNN, C-SPAN, and Fox News. McCardell does radio and television interviews in smaller markets across the U.S. This fall, “60 Minutes” on CBS will air a piece on the debate over the legal drinking age.

The group’s online operation has not been as successful. Choose Responsibility has pages on Facebook and MySpace, but the group only has around 3,000 “friends” on Facebook. Considering the number of high school and college students who would support lowering the legal drinking age, there is ample room to grow the number of friends. An online petition to lower the national drinking age to 18 has been signed by 30,000 people, but again, this could be expanded. Choose Responsibility has posted multiple video clips of television interviews to YouTube, but the most popular clips have only been viewed several thousand times.

The Web site, chooseresponsibility.org, is professional and easy to navigate. A first-time visitor can quickly achieve their purpose: donating money, learning about subject or volunteering. Choose Responsibility has smartly set up an automatic e-mail tool. The e-mail explains the group’s mission in a formatted message, and it can be sent to a person’s entire address book. There is a “daily update” section of the site, where new information about alcohol use and health is posted. This gives the site some immediacy, something I felt was otherwise lacking. The site felt static. Perhaps a crawling message board, or some other type of movement, would enliven it. Overall, it did not feel like a “young” Web site. The group’s target audience is legislators, who must be convinced to change the law in individual states. The site reflects McCardell’s academic background. Evidence supporting a lower drinking age is available, along with information responding to the arguments put forward by groups who oppose a change, such as MADD and the federal government.

Legislators will be important in this debate, but military veterans, parents and young adults are key groups, too. Creating a Facebook page will not be enough to rally national support. Through e-mail, Choose Responsibility should target campus influentials at colleges around the U.S. and offer to help them set up a Choose Responsibility chapter. The national group could hold regional training sessions where college students leading their chapter could organize awareness-raising events. Overall, the groups must increase their visibility on the Web in a manner that translates into action and public discussion. Creating message boards on the site could help, allowing interested parties to debate the topic, plan events, and organize. I did not detect a large Choose Responsibility presence in the blogosphere. A handful of sites linked to mainstream media articles, but none of the blogs were among the most widely read, such as The Huffington Post. McCardell might want to write pieces for several influential blogs, making it easy for readers to click over to chooseresponsibility.org. Expecting people to stumble across the Web site is not enough, although the “60 Minutes” piece may drive traffic to the site. They need to be ready to capture this wave of interest, and put it to work.

ProPublica

Sometimes, a source will ask when a piece I’m writing will appear in the newspaper.

“I don’t get the paper,” they say cheerfully. “Can you send me the link when it runs?”

This started happening four or five years ago. Now, rarely a week passes without a source asking me to e-mail them a story. I can’t recall the last time I mailed someone a news clipping.

Sources are quick to call when a story fails to appear on the Web, too. “I can’t e-mail it to anyone,” a local politician recently grumbled to me. I transferred him to the online newsroom, which posted the missing story in minutes.

Every week in class, we see another graphic showing how newspapers are hemorrhaging readers, at least readers of the print product. In total, though, readership is up: The Washington Post has several million online readers, many of them living outside the D.C. area. Arguably, the journalism of U.S. media outlets is reaching more people than ever before.

So Americans are consuming news—they just think it should be free. Or, free after they pay their Internet provider.

But I don’t think the mainstream media will ever disappear. I do think it will look something like ProPublica.

ProPublica is a non-profit organization that does what most national newspapers already do: investigative journalism. But ProPublica will not answer to shareholders. It will accept donations to finance the long, expensive, difficult work of being a public watchdog. Then, it will allow major print and TV outlets to air their work. An article in the July 9, 2008, Time Magazine elaborated on ProPublica's mission:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1821376,00.html?cnn=yes

I have not done much investigative reporting, but the little I've done was maddening. I've spent hours sitting on a metal chair in a court clerk's office, hunched over boxes of documents. I've been paralyzed by the enormity of trying to explain a complicated problem to the public in a readable way. There's no Robert Redford, no midnight chats on the lawn at Ben Bradlee's house. Just you and way, way too much information. It's also solitary work. Other reporters in the newsroom start to wonder why you've been given a week or two to write a single story, when everyone else is cranking out five government stories a week.

ProPublica's founders, philanthropists Herb and Marion Sandler, understand that investigative journalism is waning as newspapers seek to increase productivity and shed staff. It has hired some of the best investigative reporters away from major papers. Leading the effort is Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.

What does this mean for PR practitioners? I think it means we still have to pay attention to the mainstream media, along with the blogs and emerging forms of social media. The mainstream media may move online, but groups like ProPublica will be capable of cranking out blockbuster investigations that can prompt a crisis for any organization falling under scrutiny. ProPublica is fairly new, so many of its investigative pieces are underway. I imagine once they are posted to the Web site, ProPublica will be linked from many blogs.

I'm excited to read their work. As Steiger said in the Time piece, "We're going to try to do stories such that, by shining a light on an abuse of power, we'll give the public the information it needs to effect change."

MoveOn.org: A Primer

MoveOn.Org: Democracy in Action

•Introduction
MoveOn.Org is “an online assemblage of 3 million souls who co-exist in cyberspace and who are exerting a leftward pull on the Democratic Party in particular and the nation’s politics in general,” wrote veteran political reporter Carl M. Cannon in the Dec. 2, 2006 National Journal. MoveOn.Org has grown from a grassroots Web site into a political force in less than a decade. Today, it has more than 3.3 million members, people with progressive views who gather on the site to find information on policy issues. Then, instead of simply mulling the issues over at home, they take action. MoveOn employs a staff of 15, and along with more than 200,000 volunteers, the site organizes Get Out The Vote drives, online petitions, congressional visits and protests. MoveOn’s reach has spread to every state and congressional district. And, perhaps most importantly, it learned how to use the Internet to raise a substantial amount of money. In 2004, MoveOn raised more money for political candidates than the National Rifle Association or American Medical Association.

•History
MoveOn.Org began as a conversation between a husband and wife. Joan Blades and Wes Boyd founded Berkeley Systems, a gaming software company, in Berkeley, Calif. In September 1998, the couple decided they were tired of watching the Republican majority in the House of Representatives focus solely on President Bill Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. “We were increasingly frustrated by the paralysis of the government, particularly the failure of elected leaders to get back to the business of governing,” Blades and Boyd wrote in their 2004 book, MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country. “Nobody needed to be educated about the situation anymore. People had well-formed opinions, and the vast majority leaned toward ‘Get over it! Censure the guy, and get back to the serious business of running this country.’ But the folks in [the district] seemed to be living in a parallel universe ⎯ one that didn’t put the needs of citizens above the advantage to be gained by partisan politics.” Blades and Boyd felt as many Americans did at the moment. For most couples, the conversation fizzled out over dinner. But the software owners did something different. They e-mailed a one-sentence petition to around 100 family members and friends. “Congress must immediately censure President Clinton and move on to pressing issues facing the nation,” the petition read.
Focusing on their sentiment ⎯ move on ⎯ they set up MoveOn.Org’s first Web site. Their petition gathered a following as the original recipients forwarded the e-mail to their friends, and it had more than 100,000 signatures in a week. This is a phenomenal response for a petition. Obtaining the same number of signatures by hand would have required an enormous amount of human labor. By the following winter, the petition would have more than a half million signatures, and had generated more than 250,000 phone calls about the impeachment debate. Their efforts did not stop the House from passing articles of impeachment, but political scientists think MoveOn’s petition, and the organized opposition it created, was a significant factor in the Senate’s decision not to force Clinton out of office.
MoveOn maintained the Web site after the impeachment crisis, and moved on itself to other political issues. It created a Political Action Committee to raise money for political candidates through its MoveOn PAC, today called MoveOn Political Action. The social activism and media reform arm of the organization remains as MoveOn Civic Action.

•2008 Election
MoveOn plans to spend $35 million in the 2008 presidential election. Most of that money will be raised online, through small donations of $100 or less. The average donation is $45. MoveOn’s PAC cannot accept donations exceeding $5,000.
During 2007, MoveOn held virtual town halls leading up to the Democratic presidential primary. MoveOn wanted candidates to address its membership using YouTube and podcasts. The three topics were Iraq, global warming and health care. The largest debate, on global warming, drew 100,000 people to the Web site. MoveOn tied the debates to external cultural events. For instance, the global warming debate occurred the same week as Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts.
It has refrained from endorsing political candidates. However, now that Sen. Barack Obama is the presumed Democratic nominee, he has the group’s full support. MoveOn is currently trying to raise enough money to air a pro-Obama ad on MTV.

•Move On.Org and Strategic Communication
MoveOn proved the political power of the Internet in two important ways. First, it demonstrated that it could be used to raise millions of dollars through $5, $10 and $25 donations, and that it could organize individuals around an issue in a way that led to action. After the impeachment trial of President Clinton ended, Move On noted which members of Congress voted for impeachment against the wishes of their constituents. If the incumbent had not voted in sync with their district, MoveOn began raising money through its PAC to support opposition candidates.
Using its growing collection of e-mail addresses, MoveOn developed a targeted e-mail network. Through trial and error, it developed an e-mail pattern that is copied today by many political campaigns. It walks the fine line between pestering and informing members through e-mail blasts every few days. The e-mails update people on the progress of a campaign, keep them motivated, and ask for donations only periodically. They can also be targeted by congressional district, which has been a useful Get Out The Vote tool.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, recent college graduate Eli Pariser, 20, started a Web site opposing war as a response to the attacks. He addressed a petition to President Bush with a similar message and e-mailed it to 30 friends. Within two weeks, more than a half million people from 192 counties had signed his petition, and his Web site was among the 500 most-viewed sites on the Internet. People began e-mailing Pariser, asking him whom they should call or write with their anti-war message. Pariser turned to MoveOn for assistance, and helped the organization start MoveOnPeace, an anti-war group, which has become part of MoveOn Civil Action. Pariser’s collaboration with MoveOn made it one of the most visible opponents of the Iraq War, before the war began and after operations commenced in March 2003. MoveOn circulated online petitions opposing the war, and helped organize member visits to their representatives in Congress. It coordinated political rallies. Its members attended one of the largest anti-war rallies on Feb. 15, 2003, in Washington, with satellite protests held around the world.
MoveOn regularly facilitates constituent meetings in local congressional districts on a range of subjects. Members meet as a group and speak to their member of Congress. MoveOn understands that while national online petitions are important, it is also vital that representatives hear directly from MoveOn members who live in their district, and vote.
Their methods have attracted critics. MoveOn often has a specific fundraising goal when it e-mails members, another successful tactic, such as raising money to run an anti-war advertisement in the New York Times or Washington Post. It may ask members to contribute a low sum, $5 or $10, toward the goal. With more than 3 million members, the money can be collected quickly.
This fundraising effort led to the controversial full-page ad that ran Sept. 10, 2007, in the New York Times A section. It ran the morning Army Gen. David Petraeus, commanding general in Iraq, was testifying before Congress about troop levels. The MoveOn ad had a headline that read, “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” It said Petraues was not being honest about the security situation in Iraq, and that he would not admit Iraq is “mired in an unwinnable religious war.”
The ad got an angry reaction from Republicans and Democrats, and the New York Times received 4,000 critical e-mails. Also causing controversy, Move On paid a “standby” rate of $64,575 for the full-page ad, when it should have paid $142,083. An advertising employee made an error, according to the Times, but it left the public with the impression that the newspaper made an exception because it agreed with MoveOn’s message.
In an influential column about the incident, New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt said the ad and payment error “backfired” on MoveOn and the Times. “It gave the Bush Administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze star with a V for valor,” Hoyt wrote. Personally, Hoyt thought the ad was a “low blow” at a soldier.
MoveOn has also stumbled on member-submitted content. In 2003, it asked members to send them homemade commercials opposing the re-election of President Bush, called “Bush in 30 Seconds.” It received more than 1,500 submissions. Two MoveOn members submitted ads that compared Bush to Hitler. The ads were posted on MoveOn’s site long enough to gain attention before they were taken down. The ads were denounced by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the Republican National Committee. MoveOn apologized, but noted it had not created the ads, and that the RNC had chosen to post the ads to their Web site. The satirical news site The Onion ran a spoof piece about the incident with the headline “MoveOn Curls Up in Corner.”
Yet MoveOn has rebounded from both incidents, and continues to be a political fundraising and organizing force for the Democratic Party. It is also targeting concerns that may matter to younger voters. Early in 2008, MoveOn targeted an online petition at the social networking site Facebook. It asked Facebook to stop using Beacon, advertising software that tells Facebook users what their friends have been doing on the Web outside of Facebook. For instance, when a Facebook member makes a purchase on Overstock.com, their purchases is trumpeted on the member’s profile page. The online petition has more than 50,000 signatures. Facebook has compromised, allowing members to opt out of Beacon messages. MoveOn would like a direct notification of this option.
On MoveOn, people can join a conversation about politics, a subject that is often deemed inappropriate to raise at work, school and even among friends. MoveOn is a civic sanctuary for people who enjoy politics, at least politics from a liberal to moderately Democratic point of view. It will be interesting to watch how MoveOn adapts if there is a Democratic majority in Congress and a Democratic Obama Administration in the White House. The group has spent most of its existence fighting for causes when it was outside of power as the scrappy underdog. The true test of its power may be watching to see who remains when the group becomes disenchanted with the leaders they expected to lift the nation out of war and an economic crisis.

•For Further Information

Hamm, Theodore. The New Blue Media: How Michael Moore, MoveOn.Org, Jon
Stewart and Company are Transforming Progressive Politics. May 2008.

Move.Org’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find Your Political Voice and Become a Catalyst for Change. 2004.