BarkingDogs.net

Email As a Tool For Change

Email is an essential organizational tool for the savvy anti-noise activist. By using the list serve feature from your email application, you can send a single email that will go out simultaneously to everyone in a given group of people. Then, when anyone in the group replies, their message will also go out to all of the affiliated members, which is the system we use with the Barking Dogs Yahoo group.

Also, you can set-up your email program in a way that will let you write a single email and, then, send it out to all of your local officials at once, with the greatest of ease. So obviously, email can also be an excellent means of communicating with a government official who is interested in reading what you have to say.

However, as a tool of attrition, email has its limits, since it may take you a long time to compose your message, yet it can be deleted in an instant. Worse yet, once the recipient decides that he is no longer interested in receiving input from you, he can just set his email program so that it will block all messages coming in from your email address, which means that, while it may take you a long time to compose your email, the targeted public official may not ever even know that the message was sent.

Consequently, email tends to be an inefficient way to force the powers-that-be to take heed.

If you do decide to send prodding email to your local public officials, please feel free to borrow liberally from the material on this website when composing your message.

This page is part of the Strategies and Interventions
component of the Activist section of barkingdogs.net