Printable Version Email to a Friend |
Advocacy Through Education: Center for Environmental Citizenship (NPT Case Study)
Introduction
The Center for Environmental Citizenship (CEC) is a national non-partisan 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1992 by young activists to encourage college students to be environmental citizens. CEC is dedicated to educating, training, and organizing a diverse, national network of young leaders to protect the environment. Our goal was to develop a national online resource for student activists interested in the environment and campus environmental organizations, in order to help stakeholders network, take action, and connect with an expanding online community.
Background
The EarthNet online resources are used to educate college students about a broad array of environmental issues, organizations, and opportunities. Each week, we focus on a different environmental issue and direct students to resources (other environmental organizations) for more information, and encourage them to become civically involved (e.g., send a letter, attend a public event, lobby their city council) in the issue. Frequently, national environmental organizations without student outreach programs request assistance from EarthNet to reach young people on their issue. For example, in the past we've assisted NRDC on their road-less campaign, Alaska Wilderness League on national monument status for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and Save Our Wild Salmon on dam removal in the Pacific Northwest.
The EarthNet Action Center teaches new voters how to take civic action by explaining the issues, how legislation and regulation affects these issues, and who and how to contact to influence the outcome. These are lifelong skills that are no longer taught in secondary or college classrooms, and directly relate to our mission. The jobs and events databases build leaders by demonstrating to young people that careers in environmental advocacy are possible and explaining how to find these positions. The EnviroNation directory is a unique resource that can be utilized by our staff, our student base, and environmental organizations to enhance the participation of young people in the environmental movement.
Our weekly newsletter, EarthNet News, has been gaining in popularity for several years and now has over 7,000 subscribers and 20,000 readers. Each week, the emailed document includes legislative and corporate alerts, jobs, and events. Until this project, however, we had no method of archiving this information except through static web pages that were time-consuming for our staff to create and for our users to search through. In addition, our readers -- all young people new to the democratic process -- had no easy method to locate their Representatives in order to send a letter regarding the action alert.
|
CEC Project Budget FY1999/2000
|
Level of Innovation
We selected technology tools that would be inexpensive to develop, easy for our staff to modify, and robust enough for several thousand users per day to utilize online. The jobs and events databases use Microsoft Access and their corresponding webpages use Visual Basic and Active Server Pages to dynamically display the information. We purchased a legislative action center subscription from Capitol Advantage.
The EarthNet Action Center allows readers of our weekly newsletter, EarthNet News, to quickly take action on our legislative alerts by emailing sample letters to their elected officials and regulatory agencies. We also invested in a redesigned website that included a online database for our jobs, event calendars, and EnviroNation directory of campus environmental groups. The EnviroNation directory uses the same technology. Our decision to purchase the Capitol Advantage legislative directory and action alert technology was based on reputation, cost, and the quality of the information in their database.
Measures of Success
CEC's mission is to network and educate the next generation of environmental leaders. The technology tools we have implemented have allowed us to be more effective in terms of staff time, the number of people we educate, the ease with which our website users can network, and our ability to assist other environmental organizations with reaching out to college students. The system we implemented has met or exceeded our expectations in terms of quality. The databases have been easy to modify and upgrade, and we have been able to change the user interface several times in response to user suggestions. The website has attracted a much larger audience, increasing in usage by 300% in the last year (from 500 users per day in January 2000 to over 1500 users per day in December 2000).
Our expectations were that EarthNet News readers would use the Action Center, allowing us to track our effectiveness and discover which stories attract the largest response. We projected an increase in website users, which would in turn increase the number of EarthNet News subscribers (because users can subscribe from our website). We expected the job listings, event calendars, and EnviroNation directory to be utilized by students and environmental organizations.
In the past year, EarthNet Action Center users -- mainly young people ages 18 to 25 -- have sent over 4,300 letters to elected and agency officials. Over 1,000 young people per day, corresponding to approximately 250,000 users in the past year, access the EarthNet Jobs database. In addition, EarthNet Jobs is almost self-sustaining (in terms of outreach and staff effort) with dozens of environmental organizations posting their job offers each month. The total number of jobs and internships we've announced in the past year exceeds 2,000. Our EnviroNation directory includes contact information for more than 500 campus environmental groups. Both students seeking groups to join, and environmental organizations looking for nearby student groups, use this directory.
As an organization with two full-time technology staff (a Webmaster and an EarthNet Director), we are interested in how cost-effective our in-house model is as compared to the current dominant model of technology assistance organizations. While we did hire consultants to create our original online databases, we have required no further outside help for our website or our system or network administration in the past two years.
Most organizations our size (less than 20 staff) hire, instead, consultants from non-profit technology assistance organizations to maintain their websites, databases, and networks. We believe that our model is more cost-effective in terms of raw dollars as well as organizational efficiency. The EarthNet Action Center and other resources now available on our website have enormously enhanced our ability to reach out to young people and inform them of environmental issues and opportunities. The number of EarthNet subscribers and website users has tripled as a result of our efforts. We are also able to track our successes, and assist other organizations by putting their alerts on our site. The EarthNet Action Center has worked well, though an in-house system would allow us more flexibility.
Lessons Learned
Our first obstacle was a lack of in-house skills to modify the HTML, SSI, and ASP code for the new website. We incorrectly assumed that the new website would come with a "manual" written by the Web designer. Classes in Visual Basic and SSI scripting are extremely expensive, so we addressed the problem by purchasing books and quickly training ourselves on the types of programming required for our site. We also attended classes in advanced Access development offered by The Support Center of Washington.
A second, more long-term, difficulty was marketing the resources to a population that is constantly changing. Our marketing campaigns have included banner ads placed on student-oriented sites, content-sharing agreements for EarthNet alerts on sites such Rock The Vote, Yahoo, and Student Leader, and our Web-based EnviroCitizen.com Email service that currently has over 500 users.
A third obstacle that had not been addressed was the lack of a database to track the users of our EarthNet Action Center. Capitol Advantage tracked the number of users on a particular issue, but did not collect their names and addresses into a database. Our tracking and future goals (targeted and regional alerts) depended on keeping the names, addresses, and issue interests of our users in a database.
Next Steps
Our future plans include splitting our website (EnviroCitizen.org) into three separate sites. The original site would be for general information about our organization and for students we have worked with on campus through our trainings or field organizing efforts. It would host information about our activities on campuses, our Academies, and our alumni yearbook and networking efforts. The second site, EnviroNation.org, would host our jobs, events, directories, and online action resources. EnviroNation would attract a larger audience and funnel them to our campus and training efforts on EnviroCitizen. The third site, yet to be named, would host our press wire service, the National Environmental Wire for Students. There are multiple reasons to divide our site, but the primary rationale is the depth of our current site. Due to the extraordinary growth of our website, we simply have too much to display on a single site, and our resources are buried too many layers down. We are also researching alternatives to Capitol Advantage, so that we can continue our EarthNet Action Center and also capture the names and addresses of our users.
Though our results are outstanding, and our organization has benefited immensely from our technological improvements, we have encountered enormous difficulties obtaining further funding for our online/technology efforts. Instead, most of the technology funding is directed toward organizations dedicated to technology assistance, rather than organizations like CEC that are capable of supplying their own technology expertise. We encourage further efforts that direct money to tech-savvy advocacy groups with clear objectives and constituencies that can benefit greatly from online technologies.
[This is one of five nonprofit project evaluations supported in part through OMB Watch's Nonprofits' Policy and Technology (NPT) 1999 Nonprofit Technology Pilot Projects for effective use of technology in public policy activities.]