Internet Advocacy Roundtable

The Internet Advocacy Roundtable is a monthly forum brought to you by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.  We feature in-depth discussions about digital technology strategies for  advocacy and policy campaigns.  We strive to help the advocacy community use digital technology more effectively and provide a gathering for those working in this space to network and learn from their peers.  Our speakers are drawn from experts in the field and our audiences typically include many other experts, as well as people new to the field.  The format is designed to maximize discussion time.  As a result, we have consistently lived up to our reputation that our speakers will learn as much from the audience as the audience learns from the speakers. The Internet Advocacy Roundtable was started in August 2005 and now carries on the tradition of our earlier Online Progressive Advocacy Network (OPAN) series.

If you are curious about past Roundtable events, scroll down this page to see videos and other materials from them.

Upcoming Events

The Rise of Online Independent Media

FRIDAY, July 25, 2008, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm

In response to concerns that the mainstream media (MSM) has abandoned its commitment to doing real investigative journalism, a new breed of individual citizen bloggers emerged to fill the vacuum. But with a few notable exceptions, bloggers working alone or on small teams are hard pressed to marshal the resources and access necessary to truly meet the challenge of providing hard-hitting, investigative political reporting. Rising to fill this gap between an MSM who won't and bloggers who want to, but often can't, a new cadre of independent media websites are meeting this challenge head on. Backed by the financial and staff resources of non-profits and independent news organizations, independent news websites are combining the best of both worlds, bringing us timely and well-researched investigative journalism once again.

Join us for the July Internet Advocacy Roundtable on FRIDAY, July 25, 2008 for a chance to talk with a panel of independent media publishers and editors drawing from the new online-only and the older offline-gone-online independent alternative media.

Speakers
Roxanne Cooper, Associate Publisher, Philadelphia City Paper
Ali Savino, National Program Director, Center for Independent Media
James Pindell, Managing Editor, Politicker.com
Faiz Shakir, Editor-in-Chief, ThinkProgress.org

Previous Events

Reaching Diverse Audiences Online
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Identifying your audience is a key first step to any advocacy campaign. After that, you have to figure out how to reach them.  Are they online? Where? Are they using SMS or Twitter on their mobile phones? What blogs do they read? What social networks and social media websites do they use? And where else online do they gather? The answers to these questions will determine the strategies and tactics you use to reach them. The June Internet Advocacy Roundtable presented a panel of experts who are in the trenches, targeting diverse audiences.

The Future of Emailing Congress - New Solutions Offered and Old Myths Busted
Thursday, May 15, 2008
With Congress receiving hundreds of millions of emails a year, the workload for staffers is crushing. Despite the soaring numbers of emails flowing into Members' inboxes in the past few years, there has been no increase in their staff size or technology budgets in twenty years. Everyone, from Capitol Hill to advocacy groups to grassroots advocacy software vendors, is scrambling to solve this problem. Our speaker this month, Daniel Bennett, may just be the knight in shining armor riding to our rescue. Daniel has the great advantage of having helped to develop the email capability for the congressional correspondence systems and, with that perspective, has developed an elegant solution to the problem - XML Topic Tags.  Watch our discussion about this innovative solution, as well as an exploration of the history of how Congress handles email. Daniel also bust several myths about how the Congressional email system works.

Party On...line with the RNC and DNC
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Republican and Democratic parties both are out in full-force online, spreading their messages, organizing voters, and building up party infrastructure. This month, the Internet Advocacy Roundtable is excited to provide you with a glimpse into the e-strategic minds of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee. Our panelists have been working at the very heart of internet strategy for their respective parties and their insights should provide for a very thought-provoking discussion about how the Internet is serving their needs. Speakers: Mindy Finn, former Director of eStrategy, Mitt Romney; former Deputy eCampaign Director, Republican National Committee and Tracy Russo, former Chief Blogger and Deputy Online Communications Director, John Edwards; Former member of the Democratic National Committee Internet team.

Outvideoed - Web Video and Advocacy
Thursday, March 20, 2008, 1:00pm-3:00pm
With the spread of broadband access to the web, digital video has become a powerful tool for persuading citizens and policymakers to participate in advocacy campaigns, donate money, and pass laws and policies. Among those doing online video, our March speaker is one of the most famous and successful. Robert Greenwald shook the media world with his expose Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism and has since ventured into the world on online video with his Brave New Films project.  Since its launch, BraveNewFilms.org has had more than 14 million views.

Online Advertising Strategy for Advocacy Campaigns
February 21, 2008
Americans spend more than a third of their media consumption time online, yet advocacy campaigns rarely spend more than one or two percent of their advertising budgets online.  Even accounting for the lower costs of online advertising, this just doesn't make sense. Online advertising is not just good for mobilizing activists and raising money, it is good for persuasion and setting policy agendas.  The private sector gets this, but the policy and political sectors lag behind.

Through the Looking Glass: Government Transparency Resources for Advocacy
Thursday, January 17, 2008, 3:00pm-5:00pm
Without really knowing what our government is doing behind the scenes it is difficult to effectively advocate for policy changes.  Thankfully, several websites have emerged in recent years to shine a bright light on these inner workings.  Check out our video from this in-depth discussion of how these resources can help your organization be more effective advocating for your causes.

Winning with Widgets
Thursday, December 20, 2007, 3:00pm-5:00pm
In a world where it is getting harder and harder to bring people to your website, we can now use widgets to bring our websites to them.  Widgets are miniature webpages that can be grabbed and posted by anyone to their own website, blog, or social network profile.  Widgets can be used to widely distribute your action alerts, RSS feeds, subscription forms, or any type of content/function you can put on your website... just smaller.  And because widgets are posted on someone else's website, all of those people who trust that website's owner will be encouraged by them to connect with you through it.

Turning Online Activists into Donors
November 15, 2007
Need to walk your activists up the ladder of engagement?  Activists are so important to campaigns for shaping public policy, true, but many would love to help in other ways.  As all of us in the non-profit world know, fundraising is an ongoing effort.  While many of your activists are happy just taking action on campaigns, many others would love to help build your advocacy community with financial support.  The trick is finding the best way to ask them.  The November Internet Advocacy Roundtable featured a discussion with Rick Christ, an expert at turning your online activists into donors.

FREE: The Latest & Greatest Free Tech Tools for Non-Profits
October 29, 2007
A vast array of free tools is available to help non-profits leverage the internet to achieve their goals. From social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, to social media sites like YouTube, Digg, and Flickr, to blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress, the opportunity to deliver information, mobilize action, and build strategic communities has never been more affordable. Following the panel was a reception and tech fair featuring demos from Google, Yahoo, Care2, Joomla, and Pledgebank, courtesy of Google, Inc.

  • We have set up a Google Docs resource page with links and materials from this event here.
  • View the video of this event (right click to download, left-click to watch if you have Quicktime - 175MB .MP4 file)

Meet Ups and House Parties: Then and Now
October 18, 2007
This month, Internet Advocacy Roundtable features a panel discussion on how to use online tools to create offline gatherings. From the "early" days of 2004, when MeetUp changed the political landscape,to today, when Party2Win and Eventful join MeetUp to offer more powerful tools for organizing people online and offline, it is not only true that all politics is local, but now all virtual politics is virtually local.

Congressional Constituent Relations Management (CCRM)
September 20, 2007
New technologies are creating new opportunities for Congressional offices to improve communications with constituents. From email tracking, to constituent profiles, to wikis, to blogs, the ability of Congress to deepen their relationships with constituents has never been greater. At the same time, constituent communications has exploded over the past five years, making innovation in how offices communicate a necessity, not a luxury.

Previous Online Progressive Advocacy Network (OPAN) Events

Leveraging Social Networks for Progressive Organizing
March 8, 2007
Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr have grown exponentially over the past two years with combined memberships exceeding 100 million. Similarly, social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon have transformed the way readers discover new content online.

To date, only a handful of advocacy groups have successfully used these platforms to connect and organize progressive activists. NOI and the CAPAF hosted a panel discussion with a few of these pioneers and the technologists who are shaping the tools they use.

Online Strategies in the 2006 Election
December 1, 2006
With each election cycle, the internet plays a larger role in political campaigns. Most candidates now depend on the effective use of online tools for fundraising, communications, and organizing volunteers. Each election also provides an opportunity to test new online technologies and experiment with innovative techniques and strategies.  The New Organizing Institute and the Center for American Progress Action Fund hosted a discussion of Online Strategies in the 2006 Election. The panel explored what worked, what didn't, what to look for in the future, and how lessons from political campaigns can be applied to issue advocacy and non-profit communications.

Previous Pre-Center for American Progress Action Fund Internet Advocacy Roundtables

 

Contact

Alan Rosenblatt at arosenblatt@americanprogressaction.org for more information about Center for American Progress Action Fund's Internet Advocacy Roundtable.