Writing Online

Sites we like that offer quality low-cost images

davida — 2008-10-10T20:32:47Z

A picture is worth a thousand words and thanks to many low-cost and free photo websites finding images for your site may only cost you pennies. Here are some great websites to scour if you want to find the perfect image for your website.

Keep in mind you always have to make sure you read the copyright information to ensure you are using the image as allowed by the copyright owner.We also suggest you make a note of where you got the image and what the licensing restrictions were when you upload it to your site (in Plone you can add this information to your image description).

If all else fails, just take some pictures yourself! You can get a lot of mileage out of carting a digital camera around with you. Best of all, you own the rights to your own photographs and no one else will have used them first.

iStockPhoto

A large and inexpensive stock photo library. http://istockphoto.com/

Flickr's Creative Commons pool

Flickr is photos and they have a great listing of photos that have the creative commons license attached to them. http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

Stock Xchng

A favorite around ONE/Northwest. They have both free and low cost photos available. http://www.sxc.hu

Openphoto.net

Openphoto has a great assortment of photos and has the items tagged so it is easier to find an image by subject. http://www.openphoto.net

Rhizome Images

An exclusive collection driven by images of positive, negative, and alternative green concepts, the archive includes rights-managed and royalty-free images of solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, mining and general power images along with landscapes, architectural and botanicals images to name a few. A dynamic alternative to traditional big-box image libraries, the collection now holds more than 1,000 images. http://www.rhizomeimages.com/

ELATED ImageKits

These are images you can download for free to help you build your website. They include buttons, bars, animations, stock photos and more - all created by the Elated team. http://www.elated.com/imagekits

Photoshare

Photoshare is a service of The INFO Project helping international non-profits communicate health and development issues through photography. Images are for non-profit educational use. Their online photo database currently contains more than 13,000 cataloged images shared by colleagues around the world for documentary use. http://www.photoshare.org

Mondolibrary

Mondolibrary is a quality image library, tailored to the needs of United Nations agencies, civil society organizations and public interest communicators, where you can find and download issue-relevant photos for your website or publications. Becoming a member is free. http://www.mondolibrary.net/

Dreamstime.com

At Dreamstime.com you can find a large variety of royalty-free stock images. http://www.dreamstime.com

Preparing Images for the Web

sknox — 2008-10-06T15:39:37Z

Digital images can come from many places: your digital camera, the web, digital scanners, and other sources. Before uploading your images into Plone, you must often do some preparation first to optimize them. Common problems encountered with images that aren't ready for the web are:

images that are too large and overwhelm your pages visually
images files that are too large and slow down your page load time
images that are in a non-standard file format and don't load properly

Fortunately, there are some easy steps to take to prevent there sort of problems. It's a good idea to go through your image library before uploading your pictures into Plone. There are three main things to check before an image is ready to be uploaded:

Image dimensions: How big (in terms of pixels) is the image? Your website's content area has a fixed width generally around 350-400 pixels wide. So what's the best size to use? The simple answer is that the smaller you can use, the better. Under 200 pixels square is best for most images. Only use larger images if you need to display maps, groups photos or landscapes.

File size: How big (in terms of bytes) is the image? Just like image dimensions, the smaller the better. Under 100 Kb is good; under 50Kb is even better. The more images you have on a page, especially large ones, will slow down the time it takes for a visitor to load the page. Slow loading pages will drive people away from your website.

File format: What file format is the image in? The two formats that are cross-browser compatible are .jpg and .gif. Either one will work for a particular image, although .jpg is best for photo-realistic images while .gif is better for simple graphics. Avoid formats such as .tiff and .bmp

Image Software

In addition to these guidelines, you may also need to crop your images to focus on one part of the image. Plone does not have the ability to perform cropping, compressing, or re-sizing and must be done with software outside of Plone. Here are some ideas for software and web applications that can perform these tasks:

Adobe Photoshop - Expensive and probably overkill

Abode Photoshop Elements - Inexpensive

ShrinkPictures.Com - Free through-the-web tool

GIMP - Free and Open Source

Creating Pages Effectively for Browser Compatibility

sknox — 2008-10-02T21:53:48Z

Different browsers display webpages slightly differently from one another. There isn't one standard for HTML that all browsers conform to, so part of good web design and writing for the web involves checking your work in more than one browser.

Additionally, things may look a little different to you as a logged-in user than to someone simply visiting your website. Here's our recommended method for editing and checking the pages that you write for your website:

Use Firefox as your logged-in browser
Check your pages, but don't login, with Internet Explorer (PC users) or Safari (Mac users) AND with Firefox
Look at your website occasionally with a few different computers than the one you usually work on. It's helpful to see your site with different hardware/software setups to get a sense of how your audience sees your site

You should be looking for discrepancies between the not logged-in browsers. If you do notice differences (such as text not wrapping around an image or spacing differences) you may be able to fix the problem yourself. One common problem is the way that HTML tags are nested, and how each browser interprets the code. If you know a little HTML, look at the source code and see if there are differences in the tags.

For example, let's say you have two images on a page.

One might be written as

<p><img class="image-left" src="myimage.gif" /></p>

and the other

<br /><img class="image-left" src="myimage.gif" />

Each browser will display those two snippets of code slightly differently. The goal is to provide consistently formatted HTML for all your webpages. This can be challenging when you use your visual editor becuase they are not 100% accurate. Line breaks can creep in where you want paragraph breaks and vise versa.

If you aren't familiar with HTML you can use keyboard shortcuts to help. Use shift+enter to force line breaks instead of paragraph breaks. If you can't resolve the problem yourself it's possible that there is an error with one of the stylesheets. Stylesheet discrepancies almost always appear on Internet Explorer because that browser doesn't conform to CSS standards. You'll need to file a support ticket if you believe this is the case.

Tips for Using Visual Editors

sknox — 2008-09-09T15:52:58Z

Visual editors, also known as WYSIWYG editors, are commonplace today on the web. You use them when you post a blog entry, review a product, edit a webpage, or format an HTML newsletter.

Visual editors make writing HTML easier. They operate much like word processor software does in that you can format your text using a variety of icons and pull-down menus to get effects like: bold, italics, text alignment, font size, and so on. As you type away, push enter, and use formatting icons, the visual editor writes HTML code that the website, blog, etc will use to display your content.

The trouble is that sometimes HTML tags are entered that you didn't intend on, which can make getting the page layout you desire more difficult. One of the most common problems is that too much space gets put in between lines or paragraphs.

Below are some easy, but powerfully useful tricks when using visual editors on the web, to achieve a greater degree of control. Some of what is described below is specific to Plone, but the concepts are the same for any visual editor.

Paragraph vs. Line Break

When you push the Enter key on your keyboard, Plone (and most other visual editors) assumes that you are starting a new paragraph. There is a certain amount of space between lines that is used to demarcate paragraphs and sometimes it is more space that you need. If you want to force a single line break, you need to hold down the Shift key, then press Enter. Here's an example:

sampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletext

The Enter key was pushed between each of those lines above. Notice the amount of space between those lines. Now look at the same lines of text, this time using Shift+Enter:

sampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletext
sampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletext
sampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletext

There is a bit less whitespace between lines in the above example. Shift+Enter can also be quite useful for positioning text in relation to images. If you need to go the other way, shift+delete will erase a single line break.

Paragraph Style and <no style>

Similar to paragraphs and line breaks, the drop-down style menu in Plone also has an effect on how your lines are spaced.

Highlight some text on your Plone site, and look at the style drop-down menu in the toolbar. If you chose a regular block of text (not a heading or table), you should see the words Normal Paragraph. Normal paragraph, is the standard text style used in Plone. The style gives each line a particular height, and the font a particular size and color.

Sometimes, you may encounter lines of text that appear closer together than they do with Normal Paragraph. This is because, somehow or another, the text isn't recognized as being in a paragraph. When this is the case, you'll see the words <no style> in the drop-down menu.

The above paragraph was written with the Normal Paragraph style, but this one has <no style>, and therefore each line is rendered a bit closer together. Usually, you do not want to keep things this way, because your information is harder to read with the lines so close together. Fixing it is easy, though. Simply highlight the offending text and select Normal Paragraph from the style drop-down menu.

The Bottom Line

No visual editor is 100% accurate. By not having to learn HTML, they make our lives easier, but at the cost of a little control and accuracy. However, with the simple keyboard shortcuts mentioned above you'll find that some of the frustration can be overcome.

Writing Email Newsletters: Best Practices

sknox — 2008-07-30T16:10:11Z

For more ideas on writing email newsletters, visit the Vertical Response Blog

Writing an effective email newsletter is an exercise in brevity and restraint. It's very tempting to dress up your monthly newsletter with attractive graphics and lots of articles - much like how you might write a printed newsletter. However, an email newsletter and print newsletter are very different forms of communication. The average internet user receives dozens of emails every day. With your newsletter you are competing for a person's attention. Long, elaborate looking emails tend to be ignored.

Below are 8 things to consider when crafting your next email newsletter:

Keep it short! And link to your website whenever possible. Your newsletter should not contain the full text of each article (unless it's very short). Write a headline and lead-in paragraph, then link to your website for the full text. The idea is to grab people's attention quickly with easily digestible bits of information.
Use a minimum of graphical elements. Focus on useful and informative content, not pretty pictures. E-mail is just not the place for creative graphic design. E-mail messages based mainly on graphic images often are caught or blocked by SPAM filters. Also, most email clients turn images off by default unless the recipient explicitly turns them on.
Be consistent. Decide on a standard number of articles and a standard format for writing articles and stick to it! Always use the same colors and placement of elements within your newsletter. This will help in a number of ways: you'll build "brand identity" with your subscribers, they will find it easier to scan and read your newsletters if things are always in the same place, and you can do more effective analysis of your statistics.
Optimize for the preview pane. A large percentage of people only read email in their preview pane. This means that the top 200-300 pixels of your message is what people are going to see first. If all you have there is a large banner image, you won't get as many reads as you might if you include the titles of your articles in that space. Also keep an eye on the width of your newsletter. Under 700 pixels is best to account for low screen resolutions that some of your subscribers will have.
Use a table of contents. Put the titles of each article toward the top of your newsletter and use anchors to link to the text of each one. This allows people to quickly scan the articles in your newsletter.
Make your content scannable. Ideally you should have between 3 and 5 articles in each newsletter. More than 5 articles is just too long. Prioritize which articles you want to use and maybe keep some for the next newsletter. Use bulleted lists and boldface help make your articles scannable.
Use links properly. Avoid "click here" links. Instead use actionable language such as "read more . . .", "donate", or "unsubscribe". If you find that an article is more than about 200-300 words, cut it off and link to your website for the complete article.
Test, test, test! Send tests to a variety of email clients such as Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail. You can avoid embarrassing mistakes by viewing your newsletter in different environments.

At ONE/Northwest we do our best to create HTML templates that are optimized for delivery via email. However, the template is only part of the story - how you write your content can have a profound effect on deliverability and readability.

Additional Resources:

Outing Brownie: How a Story Leapt from a Seattle Political Blog to the New York Times In Three Days

jon — 2008-07-22T22:24:10Z

Most ONEList readers no doubt recall the kefuffle that led to the firing/resignation of FEMA Director Michael Brown right after Hurricane Katrina. The trigger event that was the fact that "Brownie's" last job had been a rather undistinguished tenure as the head of the International Arabian Horse Association.

What you might not know is that that fact emerged out of a local Seattle political blog, and catapulted into international headlines in three days. Brown was out on the street a week later. David Goldstein, who blogs at HorsesAss.org, tells the story

The story of Brown, the horse show commissioner cum FEMA chief, adds much needed color and context to accounts of the Bush administration’s disastrous disaster relief efforts, and its haphazard approach to political appointments in general. And the story of the story – how an angry email from a longtime HorsesAss reader moved international headlines – is a vivid example of how the blogosphere can amplify the voice of the people, so that any one citizen can speak as loud or louder than the most obstreperous talking head.

Truth is, I didn’t really even know what I had. I rarely cross-post to Daily Kos, but since this was a national issue, and I was angry, I thought, what the hell. My original headline was a profane rant, and the first few comments insisted that this was too important a diary to be lost due to a non-descriptive headline. I followed their advice, changed the headline, went to bed… and awoke the next morning to find the story featured on Kos, and the traffic flooding in. Then the calls and emails from the MSM [mainstream media] started coming, and I knew we were going to move headlines.

So if any of you out there believe that you cannot make a difference, let this be lesson to the contrary. A single email from a horse breeder to the proprietor of an oddly named local blog provided the angle the MSM needed to expose the Bush administration cronyism that doomed thousands of Katrina’s victims to a week of unimaginable – and unnecessary – suffering, and which may have condemned thousands of others to an untimely death.

Some lessons that we think you should draw from this:

Blogs have a tremendous amount of power to influence the frames of fast-developing news stories. And in certain circumstances, they can "break" facts that emerge from the concerned public.
"People who know things" (like Brownie's sorry job history) and other whistleblowers are often willing to "come forward" to bloggers.
There is a rapidly-evolving media ecosystem that includes hundreds of local or small blogs, up to larger national blogs like DailyKos and into the mainstream media. Stories can move in both directions, because many journalists now read blogs regularly.
Advocacy organizations should think more about how to cultivate relationships with bloggers -- or how to become bloggers themselves. Our friends at Green Media Toolshed have some thoughts on this topic, too.

Action Alerts: Best Practices

sknox — 2008-07-21T21:02:49Z

Writing an effective action alert means staying focused on specific actions you want your supporters to take. It's tempting to include donation links, latest news, or other content. The problem is that these are often distractions from the purpose of an action alert.

Here are several ways to improve the effectiveness of your next action alert:

A good subject line is critical. It's your chance to catch the attention of your members and supporters.
Use the body of the action alert to describe what the issue(s) are, why it's important to care, and how to take appropraite action.
Keep the content short and action focused. It's tempting to include many things in your email communications, but for these everything should be related to the issue you are trying to address and the decision makers you are trying to influence.
Link to your petition (or other center of action) many times in the body of the alert to increase the chance that people will go there. Use different wording for each link such as "Take action", "Tell your representative", or "Write a letter".
Images should be used sparingly. It's best to not use them at all unless you have one that helps tell the story. Examples could be a compelling image (of a strip mine) or informational graph (such as carbon emissions since 1950), but be sure that the bulk of the alert is text based.

Additional Resources

Ten Tips for Writing Effective Action Alerts

Techsoup's Writing Effective E-mail Alerts

Moment Stories and Movement Stories: Four Rules for Effective Email Alerts

jon — 2008-05-20T16:11:25Z

Ever wonder just how organizations like MoveOn structure their email alerts to make them as effective as possible? At a 2008 New Organizing Institute training in San Francisco, Ben Brandzel, former MoveOn.org Advocacy Director provided the following four rules for effective email alerts. ONE/Northwest staffers Drew Bernard took notes and adapted his talk into this text. Any wisdom is Ben's; any mistakes are ours.

Rule #1: Cut the fat

Keep alerts short and think like a reporter: put the most important stuff up top. Get rid of the wordy, patronizing "happy talk" that we all tend to start articles with. See Jakob Nielsen's article "Writing Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace" for more.

Rule #2: Track what works

Pay very close attention to what works and what doesn’t work. If an alert fails, don’t just assume it was an anomaly, figure out what was wrong with it and make the next one better.

Rule #3: Include a "Moment Story"

The first section of your email alert, before the action link, should be a Moment Story, which consists of three elements:

The “Cris-i-tunity”: a combination of crisis and opportunity: usually a reflection of something in the media or the opportunity for the campaign.
Reader-focused theory of change (RFTC): a chain of events that begins with the reader and ends with the crisis being happily resolved or opportunity has been achieved. Ask yourself, "Am I telling a story about a chain of reaction that leads to success."
The Ask: the first action that will trigger the chain of events that you have just outlined in your reader-focused theory of change that will resolve the cris-i-tunity

The last thing to do is to look for weak spots. You may find that some of it may be a stretch for your readers. Some of it may not seem realistic or credible. Edit until it does.

For example: Bush won’t actually back down on his global warming platform even if we flood him with emails. You might want to include a historical example. If you identify a weak spot in your RFTC to back up your point, then you might need to re-think your whole approach because it may not be compelling enough.

Rule #4: Include a "Movement Story"

The "Movement Story" is the part of your email in which you (briefly) recount the story of the movement that brought us to this opportunity for action.

The moment story draws you in; the movement story is what is going on. Tell stories about what is going on and how we got to this moment. Reflect back on the organization. Be specific in the story you are telling. Give people a story of success and that we are growing and getting better.

People often like to start their emails with the movement story. This is natural, but wrong! Move it below the action link.

Share Your Work. Keep Your Rights: Why You Should Be Publishing Your Content With Creative Commons Licenses

jon — 2008-02-05T18:06:00Z

Northwest environmental organizations (and nonprofits everywhere) create tons of fantastic original online content. In many cases, we want to widely share this content for others to use, re-use and adapt, while setting some clear limits on what others can and cannot do with our work.

For example, we might want to let others use our work for non-commerical purposes, but reserve the right to sell our work for profit. We might want to require that other users of our work attribute it to us. We might want to let others copy and distribute our work verbatim, but not create derivative works based upon it.

Whew! That sounds like a lot of lawyering, doesn't it? And what environmental activist has time for dealing with intellectual property law? That's where Creative Commons comes in.

The public-spirited legal minds at Creative Commons, led by noted intellectual property lawyer Lawrence Lessig, have created a point-and-click set of content licenses that you can quickly attach to your work to let others know exactly what they can and can't do with your work.

ONE/Northwest strongly recommends that all nonprofits develop a policy for licensing their online content --and offline content too -- under an appropriate Creative Commons license. Why?

Sharing information is the essence of what activists do. Creative Commons provides a simple, standard, legally solid way to give others permission to use and share your work.
Letting others use your work is a great way to build reputation and recognition for your organization.
Creative Commons is the framework for promoting a "gift economy" that aligns deeply with our organizations' values.

At ONE/Northwest, we've chosen to use the "Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike" license, which means that you can freely re-use our materials for any non-commerical purpose, provided that you give us credit and that any derivative works you create are licensed under a similar license. The whole process takes about fifteen minutes, and has already saved us tons of time answering the question "Hey can we re-use your materials?"

You can read much more about Creative Commons and how it works on their website at http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/. Also worthwhile: a comic that explains Creative Commons licenses:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Howitworks_Comic1.

It's a fantastic example of how to communicate complex ideas visually.

Intro Text: Cut, Keep or Kill?

jon — 2007-10-02T16:36:13Z

Web usability consultant Jakob Nielsen offers his advice on how to write effective introductory text for web pages:

The introductory paragraph(s) found at the top of many Web pages is what I call blah-blah text: a block of words that users typically skip when they arrive at a page. Instead, their eyes go directly to more actionable content, such as product features, bulleted lists, or hypertext links.

The worst kind of blah-blah has no function; it's pure filler — platitudes, such as "Welcome to our site, we hope you will find our new and improved design helpful."

Kill the welcome mat and cut to the chase.

People read very little on Web pages. Don't waste word count on generic, feel-good material. It's not going to make customers feel good anyway. They care only about getting their problems solved as quickly as possible so they can leave your site.

Intro text serves the same purpose for an interior page as the homepage does for the entire site and the tagline does for the homepage itself. For all three scenarios, people need to know what they are getting into before they dive in.

A brief introduction can help users better understand the rest of the page. Even if they skip it initially, they might return later if it doesn't look intimidatingly long and dense. If you keep it short, a bit of blah might actually work. So, prune your initial draft of marketese and focus on answering two questions:

What? (What will users find on this page — i.e., what's its function?)
Why? (Why should they care — i.e., what's in it for them?)

Writing Online: Best Practices

sknox — 2007-07-23T23:25:58Z

Following are some guidelines, tips, and hints for writing more effective web content. This is a wide-ranging article, but we hope it will help whether you are writing for a web page, email newsletter, action alert or anything else that will primarily be read online.

Keep it short!

Above all other advice, this is probably the most important point. Online writing needs to be much shorter than other writing. Research shows that people scan much more than they read every word. Therefore, you want to make it easy for your visitors to scan for information quickly.

Large blocks of text are much more difficult to read online than in print. Long paragraphs that run on and on with nary a break will drive all but the most dedicate visitors away. Break up your writing into shorter sentences, and shorter paragraphs than you would for print.

On your website, avoid including lengthy descriptions about your mission, achievements, history, etc on the homepage of your site. Your site's "About Us" section is usually better for those things. Use your homepage to showcase what's new and to guide difference audiences towards the content that will help them accomplish their goals.

Subheadlines, lists and boldface make content easier to scan

Along with writing short, easily digestible chunks of text, you should also make good use of boldface, lists and subheadlines. These elements help guide readers' eyes towards the most important content, and make it easier to absorb large content.

Another way to break content up on a page is to use a bulleted list. Write a short sentence and then support it with bullet points. Example:

Here's some ways you can reduce your carbon emissions:

Commute to work
Drive a fuel-efficient car
Turn your thermostat down when you leave the house
Turn lights off at work when you leave for the evening

You don't need to end sentences in a bulleted list with a period. They tend to stop the eyes from scanning anyway.

Use hyperlinks effectively

Write short, to-the-point pages and link to other pages on or off your site to allow visitors to find more information. The average time new visitors spend on any one page is around 30 seconds. Take advantage of that short attention span by providing lots of links to explore.

Web usability experts discourage the use of the phrase "click here" for links. Instead use an accurate description of the linked content worked into a sentence. For example, instead of

"To see our most recent annual report, click here"

try

"For more information, see our most recent Annual Report."

This is a usability issue because if a vision-impaired person is using a web reader, "Annual Report" will tell them about the content, while "click here" gives them no real information about where the link will take them.

Build trust with citations

Many people are wary of linking off to other website for fear that their visitors will simply spend time on other sites instead of theirs. This is not necessarily so. You want people to think of your site and the center for good information whether that information lives on your website or not. The idea here is to build confidence in your site visitors that if they want information about a subject, they'll come to you first. People prefer websites that provide "click worthy" links to good information.

It is particularly hard for people to assess the accuracy and quality of information they find online, so consider citing your sources whenever possible.

Use active voice

Never use a passive voice construction like "Marketing and communications plans are being developed." Instead, try "We are developing marketing and communications plans" that make it clear who is performing the activity. Using the active voice is one of the best ways to write more clearly and more directly and to avoid getting caught in a dead, dry, bureaucratic voice.

Use "inverted pyramid" construction on top level pages

Sometimes called the "Model T" method, the idea here is to load your most important information at the top of the page and at the top level of your website. Often this is little more than a few sentences or bullet points. You are trying to capture the interest of your site visitors early on. Save the more specialized and lengthily pages for deeper levels of your site.

Downloadable file or webpage?

We all use word-processing software to generate at least some of our content. Often, web content is generated from a collection of various word processor documents, PDFs and spreadsheets.

When is appropriate to copy that content onto a webpage and when is it better to simply upload to original document so that your visitors can download it themselves? It's a difficult decision, with no clear right and wrong.

We suggest three criteria:

1) If the content is longer than about 10 printed pages, or intended to be read as a whole, you should probably post the document for download. Few people have the patience to read such long documents online -- they will probably print them out anyway. Long documents often benefit from the additional formatting that you can do in print. Finally, it can be very cumbersome to convert that much text to HTML.

2) If your original document contains complex graphics or layouts it is better to post it for download. Complex documents generally can't be faithfully rendered into standards-compliant HTML.

3) If your content is short and non-graphical, it is probably best to turn it into a straight-HTML webpage. It would be silly to make your visitors download a one-page Word document. If you have a longer document that visitors may only want to read a short section of, you should consider breaking the document into a series of shorter HTML pages.

Additional reading

Following are some online resources that contain more great tricks and tips for writing more effectively online.

How Users Read on the Web

Writing for the Web

Headlines are Critical Content

How to Communicate Effectively Online (PDF)

Got a favorite of your own? Leave a comment and let us know!

Communications Toolkit for Nonprofits

jon — 2007-07-13T19:06:49Z

Cause Communications from Santa Monica, California has recently released their Communications Toolkit for Nonprofits. They describe it as:

...a comprehensive resource offering practical information in virtually every area of communications based on findings from national qualitative and quantitative surveys of what nonprofits want in the area of communications.

We think it's a thoughtful overview of how to think about who you need to reach to achieve your mission and how best to find those people on a shoestring budget. It covers a range of communications concerns from how to write print ads, what to consider when designing a logo, best practices in direct mail, events planning, websites and media relations. It provides some helpful statistics what percentage of groups do the activities they suggest as well as resources to dig deeper into each of the categories.

It's a polished and easy-to-read 77-page publication that we highly recommend you consider downloading and putting beside your bed or on your office coffee table.

http://www.causecommunications.org/clients-cause.php

Why You Should Publish News, Not Press Releases

jons — 2007-03-06T18:05:55Z

Climate Solutions recently published a series of feature stories called the "Smart Energy Bulletin." (Read 'em at http://www.climatesolutions.org). The last story in the series highlighted their recommendations for building a "smart energy sector" in the Northwest.

By framing their information as a news story with the headline "Northwest Positioned to Lead Global Smart Energy Industry," Climate Solutions found that influential clean energy geek/green design pundit/ sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, editor of the "Viridian List" (http://www.viridiandesign.org), picked up their story and republished to his couple thousand readers with a glowing comment about how amazing Climate Solutions' work was. This provided Climate Solutions with a great hit of publicity that was laser-targeted at the "opinion leader" community they seek to influence.

What should you learn from this? Climate Solution's experience illustrates the way that ideas can spread very quickly through the Internet when they're presented as news. Why? Because the evolution of Internet publishing means that there are lots of editors out there who have built substantial online audiences by repackaging interesting outside content. If you produce materials that are in a format that can be "picked up" by online editors without requiring extensive editing, then you have a good chance of finding that others will republish your materials.

Ten Tips for Writing Effective Action Alerts

jons — 2007-03-06T18:05:54Z

Activists have always searched for the most efficient and effective way to publicize their issue. In the past few years, the Internet has emerged as a primary vehicle for publishing "Action Alerts." An action alert is a message that someone sends out on the net asking for a specific action to be taken on a current political issue. For your issue to be compelling enough for someone to act, your alert must be geared to fit the Internet and its offspring, email and the World Wide Web. Both offer amazing opportunities to you and your issue for widespread exposure and action.

Action alerts on the Internet are modeled on alerts that have historically been published on paper and lately via fax machines, for a long time. The Internet's main advantages are 1) it is a lot cheaper, and 2) the distribution is potentially global. A networked alert can travel extremely far from its origin by being forwarded from friend to friend and list to list, without any additional cost being imposed on the original sender. This phenomenon of chain-forwarding is important, and it behooves the would-be author of an action alert, whether a single message or a whole campaign, to think through its consequences.

When you are constructing your action alert, think about the following:

Identify your issue. Put a good, clear headline on it. Make that one line that everyone reads so compelling that the reader has to continue to the body of the alert. This is sometimes the most difficult part of the alert, as you try to condense your entire issue into a few words. The headline should not be more than one line long.
Put a date on it. Always include the time-frame in which your action alert is valid. Action alerts can travel through the net forever. Don't count on the message header to convey the date, as people who forward net messages frequently strip off the header. If your recommended action has a essential time-line, (e.g., write your senator by March 21st, 1997), then state that clearly.
Make your alert self-contained. Don't assume your readers will have any context for your issue. DO assume that your alert will be read by people who have never heard of your or your cause. This is one of the wonders of the Internet! Provide background or historical information about the subject of your alert, but keep it short and concise.
Be compelling! If you want to inspire someone to do something, be inspirational! Speak from the heart about why this issue is important, what could be lost, and what can be saved, with the community's help. Be careful about being histrionic, though.
Check your facts. In the quest to inspire, however, don't exaggerate the facts. Remember, your message may circle the earth, and may be received by tens of thousands of people. When you make mistakes, you can cause great disruption, as well as discrediting yourself, your organization, and the whole idea of network action alerts. Never fail to be accurate.
Provide action steps. Always include a "What You Can Do" section in your alerts. People care more about an issue when they become actively involved in its progress. Keep the steps clear and concise.
Lead readers to further reading. Remember that your action alert can compel people to want to learn more about your issue. Help them find background information by providing a short bibliography of sound references for them to pursue. Point to web sites that can further understanding of your issue.
Include your organization's information. This helps establish authenticity of your alert, making is more credible to the activist community, and allows readers to know where to go for more information or clarification.
Evaluate your action alert's success. Ask to be copied on emails, letters, etc., so you will know when someone has taken action. When the campaign is over, try to derive some lessons for others to use. Take some time while the experience is still fresh to measure the value of your efforts. What problems did you have? What mistakes did you make? Who did you reach and why?
Email is just a part of a larger organizing strategy. An action alert is not an organization; it's just an alert. If you want to build a lasting political movement, at some point you'll have to gather people to work together on an issue. Email is simply a tool, albeit a very effective one, in an activist's toolbox.

Especially for email alerts:

Include a phrase like "post where appropriate" so that people aren't encouraged to send your alert to mailing lists where it doesn't belong.
Put clear beginning and ending markers on your alert, such as a row of dashes at the top and bottom, so that any additions made by people other than yourself will clearly be modifications to your original.
Use short paragraphs. Email will frequently be read in a document window with scrollbars, making it harder to track long paragraphs. Consider breaking up your paragraphs to only a few sentences a piece. Inserting some blank space in your alert is also easier on the readers' eyes.
If your information is sensitive and you don't want the alert forwarded to other lists, make sure you say so. Be aware of security risks whenever you are transmitting information.
Don't overdo it. Action alerts might become as unwelcome as direct-mail advertising. Postpone that day by picking your fights and including some useful, thought-provoking information in your alert message.

Does "Fair Use" Allow Nonprofits To Reproduce News Articles on Their Websites?

jon — 2007-03-06T18:05:51Z

Does your organization republish news articles in their entirety on your website? Are you aware that in doing so, you may be exposing yourself to a copyright infringement lawsuit? Here's what you need to know about copyright, news articles and "fair use."

"But," you protest, "everyone is doing it. It's 'fair use,' right?"

Maybe, maybe not.

It's true that lots of websites, including some very popular ones like CommonDreams.org, reproduce the full text of copyrighted news articles along with a "Fair Use Notice" that reads something like:

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

But does this really provide legal cover?

Maybe, maybe not.

ONE/Northwest offers nonprofit organizations the following four recommendations on reposting copyrighted news articles:

In most cases, we recommend that you avoid reposting news articles in their entirety on public websites.
Instead, we recommend that you summarize, quote, discuss and/or link to the original article.
Making copies of articles for an internal archive or other non-public-facing repository is probably pretty safe. Not only because you're unlikely to be discovered, but because it would be much easier to show that you're not harming the market for the original work.
In most cases, the actual risk of a small nonprofit getting sued for reposting a few news articles is probably pretty low.

(Obligatory disclaimer: we're not lawyers. You should probably talk to yours about this stuff.)

Whether or not a specific use falls under the protection of fair use is a very grey area of the law. There's no way to tell in advance whether a given use is "fair" or not -- the only way to find out for sure is to get sued! If you get hauled into court, the judge will consider four factors:

The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes -- Courts are more likely to find fair use where the use is for noncommercial purposes.
The nature of the copyrighted work -- A particular use is more likely to be fair where the copied work is factual rather than creative.
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole -- A court will balance this factor toward a finding of fair use where the amount taken is small or insignificant in proportion to the overall work.
The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work -- If the court finds the newly created work is not a substitute product for the copyrighted work, it will be more likely to weigh this factor in favor of fair use.

(Thanks to EFF for this summary.)

If we apply these tests to a case where a nonprofit organization has republished news articles on its public website:

Commercial vs nonprofit educational: One might well argue successfully that the use is a "nonprofit educational use." However, this doesn't mean that nonprofits have blanket permission to copy anything, nor do "educators."
The nature of the copyrighted work: News articles are somewhere in the middle between highly creative work and hard facts.
The amount of the work that is reproduced: A pretty clear slam dunk against fair use here.
Market use: Some newspapers charge a fee to access their older archives, and most newspapers sell advertising space on their website. This means that reproducing the article on your website would very likely be found to infringe on the market for that article.

There's been only one similar well-known case -- in 1999, the highly-trafficked conservative website FreeRepublic.com lost a lawsuit in which they raised a fair use defense.

Although the... Court found that the primary purpose of posting articles to the Free Republic site is to facilitate the discussion, criticism and comment of users, it nevertheless held that the commercial elements of the websites operations cut against the fair use defense. Because Free Republic solicited donations from visitors to its website, facilitated links to other webpages where donations to Free Republic and its affiliates were solicited, and ran advertisements for its parent company, its use of the newspapers articles was considered to be commercial.

The fact that the newspaper articles were republished in their entirety also weighed heavily against the fair use defense. Where media criticism is concerned, one can well understand a critic arguing that an offending article must be viewed in its entirety to assess the context and any subtle bias of the author. But the Court was unmoved by that argument, and it held that the Free Republic had failed to show how full-text copying was essential to its discussion forum. The Court implied that posting summaries of the articles or providing a link to the newspapers websites where the full articles could be read were alternatives that Free Republic should have employed. Finally, because the availability of the papers articles in full text on the Free Republic site fulfilled at least some demand for the original works on the papers own websites, and because widespread copying of this type would have a deleterious effect on the papers markets, the fourth factor weighed against the fair use defense.

In the end, in fact, the Court found that only one factor favored the fair use defense: that newspaper articles are predominantly factual rather than expressive in nature. Accordingly, the fair use claim was stronger than it would have been had purely fictional works been copied.

For more information

Stanford Copyright and Fair Use

EFF Fair Use FAQ

University of Texas Fair Use Information

TechLaw Journal's discussion of the FreeRepublic case