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Colorado Women's Agenda (NPT Pilot Project)
Colorado Women's Agenda is a statewide network that champions economic security, social justice and political power for all Colorado women through public education, political advocacy, communications and grassroots activism. As a leading voice for women across the state, the Women?s Agenda seeks to advance public discussion about issues affecting women and families, to promote effective communications and collaborations among women?s groups, and to galvanize diverse, grassroots women to participate in the democratic process.
Background
The Women's Agenda uses database and Internet/Web tools to facilitate communication among individual women, women's and progressive organizations and policymakers. In the summer of 1999, Colorado Women's Agenda sent surveys to approximately 300 women?s groups throughout Colorado soliciting information on their uses of technology.
Based on a total of 135 responses, we learned that 84% of organizations report that they are connected to the Internet, with 78% using email, 64% browsing the web, 14% using listservs, and 6% using discussion groups/chats, a 5% taking advantage of online tools for research. Other uses mentioned included networking, public relations, scholarships/job search, software updates and legislative information. Fewer than half (45%) of the organizations were satisfied with the speed of their Internet connection. More than half (55%) of responding organizations had a tech support person who is paid staff, a volunteer or consultant.
When asked about their use of a database, 86% reported that they use some sort of database, with Access the most popular (44%), followed by custom-built (9%), Filemaker Pro (7%) and Foxpro (4%). The primary uses for the databases were: mailing labels (73%), donor management (54%), client management (47%), tracking demographic information (46%), membership management (41%), and program evaluation (30%). Two-thirds of organizations (67%) were satisfied with their current database. Among those that are dissatisfied, the leading reasons are: staff/volunteers do not have adequate database training (17%), maintaining the database is too time-consuming (10%), the database does not provide useful information (6%), and maintaining the database is too costly (4%).
Among all respondents, 38% had developed an electronic communications technology plan of some sort, and 46% had budgeted funds for purchasing or upgrading communications equipment or computer hardware or software. Two-thirds (65%) of organizations rated their level of technical sophistication as ?average? while nearly two in five (19%) say they were ?below average? and 14% say they were ?above average.? The most commonly cited barriers to using online communications were: insufficient staff time to learn/use (47%), lack of training (36%), lack of technical support (35%), inadequate equipment (35%), cost of Internet access (17%), not part of organizational plan (11%), organizational culture (6%), and lack of funding (5%).
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CO Women?s Agenda Project Budget 1999-2000
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Level of Innovation
Our project centered around the development and administration of the Women?s Agenda website and WE CAN! (the Women?s Electronic Communications and Action Network) during 1999. This included contract services from Environmental Defense (formerly EDF) for use of their email-to-fax action alert system during the 1999 Colorado legislative session.
In an effort to lay the groundwork for stronger community building among our activists and women in the state, we have developed a comprehensive website for the women?s movement in Colorado. Our website contains a statewide calendar of events in the women?s community, listings of job and volunteer opportunities, information on public policy issues and relevant research, the Agenda?s on-line newsletter and other public education materials, links to other state and national women?s organizations, and detailed information about other programs of Colorado Women?s Agenda.
Because we must educate our members about the issues and legislation at the same time we are asking them to take action, they often need more information than will be read in an email. Therefore, our website works in tandem with the email alert system. The website contains background information on our policy agenda and relevant links that allow the activists to take more informed action. It also contains our Colorado Women?s Legislative Scorecard, an annual voting record of state elected leaders on issues of concern to women.
A database of our grassroots activists was enhanced with demographic and voter file information through the League of Conservation Voters list enhancement project. The activists are then matched with their elected leaders whose contact information and, in the case of state legislators, committee assignments are available to us through EDF. This information gives us the ability to target our members for action based on past political participation and residence.
Our alert system uses email, which allows for inexpensive, timely and targeted communications to multiple recipients. During 1999, subscribers to the system could reply to the email, generating a fax to their elected leader. In January 2000, we converted to the newer web-based system developed by Environmental Defense (http://www.actionnetwork.org). Now, each activist has her own web space in which to edit, send and track her responses to the alerts.
Measures of Success
The goal of our technology project was to engage women and women?s organizations in creating positive social change by connecting them with each other and with policymakers via the Internet. For that, they needed good information about issues and the democratic process, an understanding of the relevance of public policy on their own lives, and tools that mitigate very real barriers of time and distance.
Our primary expectation in launching the technology project was that we would be able to involve more women and women?s organizations in Colorado public policymaking by providing a comprehensive source of relevant information and timely calls to action. This expectation has been met as we have seen membership in WE CAN! and in Colorado Women?s Agenda grow steadily throughout the past 15 months since launching the action alert system. We currently have more than 450 activists online, with an aggressive goal of increasing that number to 2,000 by the end of 2000. We have also increased our paid membership in the organization by 200 percent since 1998.
We exceeded our expectations by kicking off the alert system in January 1999, a year earlier than originally anticipated. When EDF generously offered to allow the Women?s Agenda to piggyback on their email-to-fax system, we jumped at the chance. We considered the 1999 legislative session a ?pilot? of our network, and therefore limited the number of subscribers recruited and bills tracked. We found that the pilot phase was vitally important to us as we developed our organizational capacity in the technology tools, community partnerships and staffing.
Prior to developing and implementing WE CAN!, we had no good way of communicating about or responding to the fast pace of a 120-day legislative session. We also had difficulty connecting with women outside the metro Denver area (which is where the legislative leadership is). We also did not have a tool to share with other groups that made them eager to contribute their information and strategies to us. WE CAN! is involving women in public decisions at a new level by making it simple to take action on the Web and in their communities.
Our organization remains very small: we have 2 full-time staff members, 1-2 interns, approximately 20 volunteers who are very active on committees and 450+ electronic activists. During the past year, one of the most common responses we have had from people who come to a member event or visit our office is that they imagined we were a much larger organization. Like Oz behind the curtain, our small organization appears powerful because of our uses of technology. We are able to disseminate the most current information regarding the policies that affects Colorado women?s lives. We can mobilize grassroots activists, literally within minutes.
One specific instance where we saw the impact of our alert system was our fast and strong response to a threat by our new conservative governor to cut family planning funds to Planned Parenthood and other women?s health providers who offer abortion services. The Women?s Agenda was able to get information out to women around the state more quickly than even Planned Parenthood and Colorado NARAL could through their networks.
We generated many calls to the governor and the press, and along with the reproductive rights community, contributed to the (partial) backing down by the state health department. The advantage of the email system was that our activists communicated back to us the misinformation that was coming out of the governor?s office, which we then gave to the press. Our ability to act on this issue strengthened our relationship and partnership with Planned Parenthood, NARAL and other women?s groups who are concerned about reproductive rights.
Another major public policy activity of the Women?s Agenda is Women?s Vote, our voter education and voter participation project. In May 1999, we were able to use the activist network as a tool to get out the women's vote in the Denver municipal elections. The website, WE CAN! and the web-based discussions will be integral strategies for expanding our Women's Vote 2000 project statewide.
Our new partnerships have supplemented our resources, with the policy expertise we lack and their grassroots networks. Even with our small size, we have been able to offer the power of the network to smaller groups that do not have access to these types of technology tools. We also get regular feedback and input from our members, which means that we stay in touch with their priorities and concerns. All of these advantages have translated into real results, such as our 1999 success in amending extremely punitive drug testing measures out of a welfare reform bill.
WE CAN! has created a new grassroots voice at the state legislature. That voice is supported by a strong collaboration among women?s and progressive groups who are sharing information, strategies and resources through the network. The members of WE CAN! are women?s organizations and advocates, policymakers, individual women already engaged in the policy process as activists or voters, and those not yet involved but concerned with women?s issues. They all benefit by having increased access to policy research and legislative information, additional tools for communicating and organizing for change and a direct, cost- and time-effective way to communicate with their elected leaders.
WE CAN! tracks state legislation that concerns economic security for women and their families, civil rights, health, community and domestic violence and work/life balance. During the 1999 legislative session, we monitored 24 bills as they moved through the process; in 2000, we are following 30 bills. Bill descriptions and links to the full bill text on the State of Colorado website are located on the Women?s Agenda website. Our website is updated daily during the session with the status of each bill.
During the past year, the Women?s Agenda made significant progress toward engaging diverse Colorado women as advocates and leaders in shaping public policies that affect them, their families and communities. We have also greatly increased our effectiveness in communicating and collaborating with other women?s and progressive groups on Colorado women?s key concerns: economic security, civil rights, health, work/life balance and community and domestic violence.
In collaboration with our approximately 12 partnering organizations (9to5: National Association of Working Women, Colorado NARAL, Planned Parenthood, Colorado Children?s Campaign, Colorado Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Colorado Progressive Coalition, Women?s Lobby of Colorado, Equality Colorado and the Senior Lobby) which provide much of the content for the activist network, the Women?s Agenda sends action alerts to the activists who reside in the targeted policymakers? districts.
Activists are given a brief overview of the issue, links to more information, and several easy steps to speak out. In 1999, we used the EDF system to send out 5 email-to-fax alerts, which generated more than 100 faxes to state legislators. We sent 13 email alerts that urged phone calls or attendance at hearings or rallies. We also sent 17 communications that contained information on women?s issues (including a response to the Columbine shootings) and events (such as statewide Women?s History Month calendar).
One area where we have adjusted our expectations is in developing and maintaining discussion lists for advocates, nonprofit staff, academics and elected leaders. We had anticipated that in 1999, we would build and manage email discussion groups for organizational staff and other activists who are working for social, political and economic justice for women and want to work together to achieve those goals.
Our website is now set up for web-based discussions, but we have delayed launching these discussions until after the 2000 legislative session (May 2000). The postponement is a result of our limited staff resources (which have been concentrated on developing the action network) and of some lessons about buy-in, scheduling and promotion that we have learned from other organizations currently doing these type of discussions.
Finally, we have become recognized within the women?s community as an innovator and leader on the uses of technology for social change. We had anticipated that, as a leader in this area, we would be in a position to provide training and technical assistance to other organizations in their uses of technology.
This has been done to a limited extent through presentations at several women?s and progressive conferences, and through informal technical assistance (our staff person working with other organizations on a one-to-one basis to review and advise on their technology plans), including the Colorado Social Legislation Committee, the national Grassroots Women?s Leadership Retreat, Kentucky Youth Advocates and the Rocky Mountain Regional Beijing+5 Summit.
We have also participated in the newly formed Colorado Nonprofit Technical Staff Roundtable, which includes technical staff of the women?s, environmental, civil rights and direct service communities, and seeks to pool technical knowledge, resources and collaborative efforts around the use of technology by nonprofits. We now believe that in order to do this effectively, we (as part of some collaborative effort) would need to fund a circuit rider position. We will reexamine the feasibility of performing this function during our strategic planning process in June 2000.
This pilot project has fostered tremendous innovation and organizational development at Colorado Women?s Agenda, at a critical time, when we were ready to move ideas into action. The regular communications from the project were a valuable resource as we dealt with many of the same issues facing other organizations. While the sheer volume of information was a bit overwhelming at times, we always knew there was an answer (or at least a better question) available to us.
This has been an exciting year for the Women?s Agenda. Our technology project has given us programmatic focus and effective tools for carrying out our mission. In turn, we have attracted new members and supporters who are sustaining that momentum. WE CAN! is making women?s voices, so often silenced, heard at the statehouse. We believe that those voices can make a real difference for our families, our communities and our futures.
Lessons Learned
The Web is a key tool for building an online community of women who can share knowledge, experience and strategies, and work collectively for social change. Our overall experience with the system was one of continuous innovation and problem solving (in other words, ?winging it?. We found that we needed to piece together the tools, piggybacking on better-funded and more established programs. On the one hand, it has been fortunate for our organization that other groups have been willing to assist us in our development by providing their systems and expertise. On the other hand, their systems did not always provide the functionality, flexibility or responsiveness we wanted.
In developing our website, the greatest difficulties arose from trying to find an affordable and reliable web service provider that could offer all of the services we wanted. Instead, we had to piece together services as they became available to us. As a result, we had an email alert system that did not link to our website. Because we did not want advertising-based sites for our discussions groups, we had to wait until free services became available in late 1999. And although we got Cold Fusion donated, we could not get our database of women?s organizations on our website right away because we had trouble finding affordable hosting with a reliable provider. By early 2000, we have found most of what we need, and we are also reviewing a proposal from a website development firm to assist them in developing an activist web module in exchange for that and other products.
A significant problem that arose from contracting with another organization for the email alert system in 1999 was that their administrator was not always available to send out our alerts with the timeliness they required. Our organizational partner also experienced some system problems that kept our alerts from being distributed. To get around this problem, we created an in-house backup system, but this did not allow for email-to-fax conversion capability. When the email- to-fax system was available to us and worked properly, it was too confusing for some of our users. It was also not compatible with some email programs. Our current web-based Action Network is much more user-friendly and as a result, we see a much higher rate of response to our alerts in 2000.
The EDF systems (both email-to-fax and the web-based Action Network) have not offered as much flexibility for targeting activists or policymakers as we would like. Because we work on a very broad agenda and track dozens of bills and actions, it would improve our system if we could send alerts just to those interested in specific issues (e.g., civil rights or health care), not only by legislative district. Members of WE CAN! have found that responding to the email-to-fax alerts has become much easier since we moved to a web-based system. Sending a fax from the email was confusing and kept some members from taking action. Now, we are receiving consistently positive feedback from our grassroots activists. A few examples:
?Thank you for...the wonderful job the Women's Agenda is
doing to make responding to bills like SB 45] and HB 1147
[banning same-sex marriage] so easy.?
?Thanks for having such a venue to express our opinions to
legislators. Without WECAN, I probably would not have spoken
out on issues thus far during the 2000 legislature. What an
easy and provoking way to get citizens activated.?
?Wow, good work! Love this way to keep up with what is
going on!?
?It?s great to hear about these specific bill from you since
the paper doesn?t always do a great job of coverage, and
sometimes I miss it anyway.?
?What a wonderful job you did with this. I have taken
steps 1 and 2 and have 3 in my calendar... I love how you
outlined the issue and included multiple options that people
could do, making it easy for us to carry it out!?
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In working in the states, it is also important to advocate at the county level, where most decisions are made about welfare, economic development and growth. We are sharing these issues with Environmental Defense as they continue improving the Action Network.
In 1999, we were able to track legislation affecting women by collaborating with other organizations (e.g., Planned Parenthood, 9to5) and using interns. This approach allowed us to follow a relatively large number of bills (20), but limited our effectiveness on issues where there was no existing organization with policy staff. In order to make sure that important pieces of legislation do not ?fall through the cracks? and that we can fully capitalize on the work of other groups, we are adding an additional staff position in 2000.
Statewide coverage is also an issue for our activist network. Because the Women?s Agenda is located in Denver and our membership is concentrated in the Denver metro area, we have been slow to recruit WE CAN! members throughout the rest of our large state. That has been a significant problem because our membership is located in the state?s most progressive districts. As a result, we often see that the legislators who are consistently hearing from our grassroots activists are those who we can expect will vote ?the right way? on our issues. To address this issue, we will hold 6 advocacy trainings in 2000 in communities throughout Colorado (including more conservative rural counties in northeast and western Colorado and the city of Colorado Springs).
A final issue that we must address is the Digital Divide. If our network is to be a tool for grassroots women to affect positive social change, it must be available in all communities, to women of all races, abilities, ages and income levels. If access remains an obstacle for women of color, rural and inner-city women and women living in poverty, we will not have the full representation of voices that must be heard in the policymaking process. To that end, the Women?s Agenda has begun preliminary discussions with a grassroots welfare reform group and a mentoring project located in a public housing development about how the activist network can assist their organizing efforts. If the activist network can be a relevant and effective tool in their work, their participation will help expand the network as well as shape and move our broader agenda.
Next Steps
Our website is comprehensive, but static. It will be expanded this year to make it more interactive and to include more resources, including a searchable database of more than 450 Colorado organizations with programs serving women and girls. Keeping the site updated is time-intensive (it is updated daily during the legislative session), so we are also considering options for allowing some of the updates (such as calendar events or job listings) to be posted by visitors to the site.
We will continue using the web-based Action Network for our email alert system at least through June 2000. Because we would like a more integrated system residing on our website, we will also explore options for a customized site. The customized site would allow us to requests we have had from other women?s organizations to administer activist lists for them. These groups lack either access to the technology or staff to administer the system. We are exploring this as a possible revenue generating activity in the next year.
In the coming months, we will add a dynamic database containing information about more than 450 Colorado organizations that serve women and girls. We are also preparing to launch web discussions related to the 2000 presidential and legislative elections.
[This is one of six nonprofit project evaluations supported in part through OMB Watch's Nonprofits' Policy and Technology (NPT) 1998 Nonprofit Technology Pilot Projects for effective use of technology in public policy activities.]