Page 160 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Environmental Advocacy 18:0
allows you to get at a centrist audience. That’swherewe’re doing some-
thing different. We’re hoping to cultivate people to act.” 83
ED and other organizations employ highly developed practices of
selective mobilization for working with the new class of members. One
element of information-intensive selective mobilization involves their
profiling citizen interests. Web sites permit the groups to collect and
update very readily records about quite specific environmental concerns,
such as protecting dolphins in the Pacific, saving Caribbean turtles, or
banning logging in the Cascades. Using these records, the organizations
are able to target appeals for political action to just those individuals with
particular interest in the issue at hand. This increases responsiveness and
reduces appeal fatigue on the part of citizens, since turtle supporters do
not receive messages about saving wolves, and for that matter neither do
people interested in Minnesota wolves receive messages about an action
that would affect Arizona wolves. ED also uses the zip codes it collects
to target citizens whose representative or senator is a key player on a
particular issue.
Thisisinformationabundanceatitsfullest:exploitinganinformation-
rich environment to connect small groups of targeted citizens with spe-
cificofficials in government who represent them and who play a role
in a key decision. Other groups do the same. Defenders of Wildlife, for
instance, reports that it never targets all members of Congress or even
all members of a key committee when it mobilizes affiliates. 84 Instead,
it targets only swing votes, which typically means something like ten
senators and forty representatives. Unlike traditional, information-poor
mass mail campaigns exhorting an entire membership to “write your
congressman,” this kind of information-intensive mobilization means
that different members of the same group may receive dramatically dif-
ferent numbers of calls for action over the course of a year, aimed at
different issues and different decision makers. It also means that the
number of affiliates the groups attempt to mobilize varies dramatically
across issues, from only a few hundred to thousands, and that in any one
week or month, a particular environmental organization may constitute
in effect many different environmental groups.
Response rates to this kind of action can be comparatively high. De-
fenders of Wildlife reports that its average response rate to calls for action
is about 5 percent. Environmental Defense claims that as of mid-2000, it
was averaging between 7 percent and 13 percent, with occasional peaks

83 84
Defenders of Wildlife interview. Ibid.
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