Do e-mail petitions work?

Chain letters and spam rarely impress politicians -- but they might listen to a more personal breed of Web activism.

By Katherine Hobson

May 10, 1999 | You've probably received an e-mail petition protesting a proposal to cut Congressional funding for public broadcasting and the arts. In fact, you've likely received it more than once.

What you may not know is that it has been making the rounds since 1995, when two University of Northern Colorado freshmen -- who, like most people at the time, were new to the Internet -- e-mailed it to their friends. Recipients were supposed to tack on their names, pass it along and -- after every 50th signature -- forward a copy to the authors.

The petition snowballed, and not in a good way. The university's server was inundated with replies, many of them venomous.

"A lot of people consider those things spam," says a programmer at the university's information services department, who asked not to be identified. "There were a lot of suggestions as to what to do with the creators, most of them not very kind."

The pair's frosh mistake was to presume that flooding e-mail inboxes with a well-intentioned petition would be well received. But as this ceaselessly circulating petition and many others have shown, e-mail activism doesn't always have a WD-40 effect on the wheels of participatory democracy: It backfires as often as it succeeds. The secret to making online activism effective seems to be knowing when to turn to e-mail and what to use it for.

There is, of course, a distinction to be made between using e-mail to communicate and using it to reproduce spam-like petitions. Chain letters have proven themselves to be fairly useless; more sophisticated petitions, posted to a Web site that collects signatures, have garnered more respect.

Plenty of people argue that e-mail simply doesn't lend itself direct communication between the people and their representatives. "You want to make noise as an advocate -- you want the walls to shake," says Jonah Seiger, co-founder of Mindshare Internet Campaigns, a Washington new-media political consulting firm. "E-mail has no weight, no mass. It comes in quietly."

Seiger says e-mail is best used by an organization to communicate with its members. "It's the single most important tool in its ability to keep people informed and keep them interested in something," he says. Groups ranging from the World Wildlife Federation to the National Rifle Association have e-mail action alert lists, and many provide standardized letters on hot-button issues that can be edited and then sent to members of Congress by e-mail or fax.

But some groups say e-mail's uses go beyond information and mobilization -- it can also bring concrete results. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) uses e-mail to rally support for its Arctic wilderness campaign. The effort aims to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which the group claims is the only area along Alaska's north slope not open for oil and gas drilling. By urging university students to e-mail British Petroleum, ARCO and Chevron (Exxon, as far as U.S. PIRG can tell, has no public e-mail address) and ask them to cancel their drilling plans, the group has sparked three separate waves of e-mail protest.

"We got their attention and held it," says Athan Manuel, director of the campaign. A month after the first Arctic action day, the group got a call from BP, its biggest target, he says. "We've met with them three or four times now, and each time, we met with someone more and more senior -- the last meeting was even with someone who was British! That was a first."

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