5 Ways to Apply Business Practices to Activism

- Proofread before sending! Make sure your facts and spelling are correct and that any embedded links work properly.

- Track your success. The for-profit community tracks "click throughs" to measure an email campaign's success. As a grassroots activists, ask recipients to "blind cc" you on emails sent in response to your alert so you'll know roughly how many activists responded and what action they took (phone call, letter, etc.). This will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your action alert.

5. Exploit Google. For better or worse, Google is the indispensable online partner for many businesses. That may change tomorrow, but for today, companies spend countless hours working to increase their page ranking on this particular search engine. A higher ranking, so the theory goes, equals better business performance. Google offers free tools that an activist can take advantage of too.

One of Google's greatest features is its ability to deliver specific news stories right to your email in box. And not just news stories, either: you can receive blog postings, videos, Web pages, group postings--just about anything covered on the Internet. Since Google essentially catalogs all this for users, you can ask Google to email content to you whenever something relevant to your activism is posted. It's called Google Alerts, and here's how it works. Let's say you have a passion for protecting wildlife, and you want to be sure your elected officials know about it. You go to google.com/alerts and, for example, type "endangered species act" into the search terms field. Type in your email address, select how often you want to receive alerts and be sure to choose "Comprehensive" as the type, so all your Internet bases are covered. Then every time a media outlet, blogger or other online user posts a story about the Endangered Species Act, you'll know about it, and you can contact your elected officials to voice your concern, for example, if the Act is being threatened.

This is also a great tool for letters to editors. Using search terms like "factory farming," "vegan" or "animal rights" in Google Alerts, you'll know when a newspaper has published a story on the issues you care about, and you can respond with a letter to the editor, furthering your cause. You can use the same tool to find out if your letters have been printed; just type your name in the search terms field and links to letters signed by you and published in newspapers that are searchable on Google's news page will be emailed to you automatically.

Google Maps are another excellent resource. Activists in the animal rights community, for example, are using Google Maps to locate animal enterprises like fur farms, and this function can obviously be used for environmentalism and other types of activism. 

The largest animal protection groups in the world, including Animal Aid, HSUS and PETA, have staff people devoted to Internet marketing. They're investing energy into online efforts like those above because they work. With even a little time, grassroots activists can take advantage of many of these same tactics, bringing awareness to their cause.

One more thing: Businesses that succeed do so because they take the time to do things right. Whether you're a volunteer for a group or just someone at home who wants to make a difference, make your activism successful by devoting time to it. Shut off the television, video games or whatever else may distract you. Do whatever it takes to carve an extra hour or two from your day to dedicate to your cause. It's a good feeling.