Why Be Online?

Getting your campaign online is a critical part organizing in the 21st century. Why? For one thing, consider the different audiences you might connect with while organizing in person. You would meet different people through a church group than you would at a farmer’s market than you would canvassing a particular neighborhood. Your campaign’s online presence allows you to connect with yet another audience, as the majority of folks in your community might not attend every in-person event you go to, but many of them are likely online.

Having your campaign online allows you to:

• Reach new audiences.
• Have a central means of communicating with your existing supporters (such as an email list or a Facebook Group) and asking them to take action.
• Have a central means of collecting information about supporters of your campaign. As you move supporters up the ladder of engagement— enlisting them to first take a simple action, like signing a petition, with the hopes of encouraging them to attend an event, then maybe become an active volunteer down the road — having information about your supporters is crucial. It really helps to know who has indicated they’re interested in volunteering, who has RSVP'd for your event(s), and who has signed on in support of your campaign.
• Have an open, public presence, which helps demonstrate your campaign’s goals and success to the media and to decision makers. An active online campaign with several hundred documented supporters makes a huge difference to how your campaign is perceived.

Sierra Club helps volunteers and their teams access easy-to-use online tools like AddUp that helps teams solidify their success. These tools allow teams to host campaign actions in a single online destination, facilitate easy communication with supporters, and gather information about all supporters that can be easily accessed.

AddUp

AddUp is the Sierra Club’s online campaigning hub where we create campaigns that folks can use to take a variety of online actions on national and local environmental issues. The platform allows us to integrate many individual online actions on a single contiguous campaign "homepage" in support of a broad goal. This gives activists a one-stop shop for engaging on a campaign, in a variety of ways, and helps them understand how each individual action is connected and contributes to a broader, more easily understood goal ("Support a just and equitable transition to 100% clean, renewable energy for all in Michigan by 2030,” for example).

Also, crucially, we can write and email quick updates to all supporters of your AddUp campaign. This way we can keep supporters in the loop about new actions they can take, victories won, milestones made, and news.

Sierra Club staff and volunteers have already created hundreds of local campaigns on AddUp to organize the fights for 100% clean energy in cities, towns, and counties across the country.

Here’s an example of a 100% Clean Energy AddUp Campaign in Manatee County, FL:

Create Petitions

Online petitions are one of the best digital tactics in any organizer’s toolbox for generating support for your campaign. Even at the very beginning of your campaign, they help you build a list of supporters whom you can communicate with going forward through AddUp’s campaign update feature. By reading personal messages, you can identify supporters with compelling personal stories and lived experiences that can help move decision makers, make for compelling op-eds, and could be team volunteers. And AddUp's signature counter shows in real time to decision makers and media that community members are ready for 100% clean energy.

Here’s an advocacy action (from this 100% Clean Energy campaign in Manatee County, Florida) set up to collect petition signatures to deliver later to county commissioners, and which allows supporters to add their own personal messages:

Host Events and Communicate With Attendees

Having events posted online helps you attract potential attendees you’re not already in contact with and keep track of who is attending so you can follow up over phone or email. This follow-up tactic can increase attendance rates by 30%, and AddUp allows you to easily email event attendees for an event you’ve created.

Tweet at decision makers or new supporters

AddUp’s Tweet action allows supporters to spread the word about the campaign, or to tweet directly at decision makers to encourage them to do the right thing. This will help amplify your campaign to new potential supporters, or incentivize decision makers who seldom see engagement on social media.

Tip: Remember to use hashtags to help connect and amplify your work to the rest of the movement. Use related hashtags like #CleanEnergyForAll. Here’s an example from this 100% Clean Energy campaign in Arlington, Virginia:

Recruit volunteers

With the volunteer action, folks can sign up to help the campaign in up to six different ways: canvassing, phonebanking, speaking at events or hearings, writing letters to the editor or op-eds, supporting events logistically, or fundraising. See this example from this 100% Clean Energy campaign in Manatee County, Florida:

Email all your supporters automatically with updates

AddUp’s Campaign Update feature allows you to share news with your supporters. You can send news stories and updates letting your supporters know you’ve submitted their petition signatures to decision makers, or sharing a new event or opportunity.

Once you’ve created the content for your update, AddUp will automatically email everyone who has taken action on your AddUp campaign so far. There’s no need to set up a Mailchimp account or manually compile your entire list of supporters into an email!

Learn more on the AddUp Help website.

How To Get Started

Sierra Club uses a tool called AddUp for online campaigns, actions, and events. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the general AddUp Help site covers a lot of the basics.

Once your AddUp campaign is live, it’s time to make the most of it! The first big step is to actively promote your new AddUp campaign to your community and supporters: maybe you have an email listserv, a Facebook Group, or website where you can share it. You can use AddUp to collect signatures at an event, skipping the need for paper petition sign-ups entirely. As your campaign evolves, you can change your actions or add new ones, and communicate with your AddUp supporters about your progress. And you can download lists of your supporters to send to decision makers to encourage them to commit your community to a 100% clean energy transition.

AddUp Help Site:Managing & promoting a live AddUp campaign

Topics covered:

• How to promote your campaign on email, social media, and websites
• How to send a campaign update email to ALL of your supporters
• How to use AddUp to collect signatures in person or upload paper signatures
• How to update, change, or remove actions from your campaign
• How to download petition signatures and deliver them to decision makers
• When & how to end your AddUp campaign
• Who to contact for help