Widening your Base
The more you communicate with your supporters, the more they will begin to share your values and be willing to assist you. Here are some tips on how to do so:
- Media: Get a weekly opinion column in your school newspaper and have different members write it each week. This allows you to promote your group and its campaigns to thousands of students for free.
You can also work with existing alternative media or start your own newsletter.
- Internet: A good webpage will get hundreds, possibly thousands of hits. You can include pictures (and even sound) from your rallies, media coverage of your organization’s campaigns, information on your major issues. Also, you can advertise your weekly meeting, list contact information for leaders and different committees and provide links to other progressive organizations (like www.seac.org). Set-up an automatic email list so that your members and supporters can have discussions about your campaigns and related issues. Ask your computing services department for assistance. Email listservs increase communication and can promote organizational democracy if a large number of people participate through them. You will probably want one email list of all of your supporters that you can use for official announcements about once or twice a week and a separate higher traffic listserv that will include discussion.
- The Pamphlet: use Page Maker or a word processing program to make a pamphlet that explains what environmental problems exist, what your group is doing to stop them, and how people can get involved. This all-purpose pamphlet should be distributed at all of your events, and you can even stick them in newspapers or just leave stacks lying around as a form of outreach. To save time, you can get a digital copy of the national SEAC pamphlet and modify that by including your campus-specific details.
- Postering: make a poster that advertises your regular (hopefully weekly) meeting and make sure that it stays up all year. You can also do issue postering (picture of a clear-cut, an environmental cartoon, a landfill, etc) to raise awareness.