The Internet has become a new kind of meeting place where activists find like-minded people to promote their causes. Environmentalists have been particularly effective in using cyberspace to protect the earth.

As thousands of protestors besieged the city of Seattle, Washington, in December 1999 to decry the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a Washington Post editorial stated: "Last time trade liberalizing talks were launched in Uruguay in 1986, 12 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) registered to observe the process. But the reach and clout of NGOs have since expanded marvelously, courtesy of the Internet."

Commenting on the same week-long series of events, columnist Sebastian Mallaby also argued in the Washington Post, "The Internet has handed these groups too much power to make their complete exclusion practical."

When did the Internet gain such clout? How can a technology only widely available within the last five years be proclaimed the cornerstone of one of the most dramatic displays of grassroots mobilization in the United States in recent years?

Just as the Internet is transforming many aspects of society, it is changing how NGOs organize and advocate. While the basic strategy for advocacy has not changed with the Internet, tactics have. Advocacy groups still attempt to influence policy by making persuasive arguments to decision makers, demonstrate broad support by mobilizing the public, and build coalitions with like-minded groups. But the Internet has introduced a variety of new techniques to influence and mobilize, and in doing so, it may be changing the nature of NGOs themselves.

The Internet's impact arises from its unique technological features. Unlike television or radio, the Internet allows "many-to-many," synchronous interactivity in a distributed and decentralized network. There are no geographical barriers and no intermediaries. The marginal cost of sending a message is essentially zero. Messages can be broadcast widely or, using the Internet's capacity for personalization, "narrowcast" to a targeted audience. All of these features mean that the Internet has unprecedented ability to connect, with great speed, communities of interest around the globe.

Environmental NGOs have been quick to use the Internet's networking capacity to create such communities and spur them to collective action. The art of advocacy rests on four strategic elements -- communication, effective argument, public mobilization, and coalition building. The Internet brings new techniques to each of those endeavors.

New tools for communicating with policy-makers are perhaps the most obvious impact of the Internet revolution, but in some ways the least interesting. Petitions, letters, faxes, telephone calls, and office visits are the tried and true techniques of reaching legislators, executives, and other decision makers. The e-mail message is another of those tools. Simply as a means of conveying a message, however, e-mails are little different from letters or faxes. In fact, the Internet's lack of geographic identifiers may actually weaken the impact of e-mails because legislators may be unable to determine whether an e-mail comes from a voter in their district or not.

The Internet's impact on the content of communication is more significant. The explosion of information available on the Internet, as well as increased access to analytical tools, gives NGOs the power that arises from strong, informed argument. The Internet gives the public unprecedented access to localized, specialized, and instantaneous data on environmental problems. Increasingly the public also has sophisticated tools for interpreting and analyzing data. Networks of users build their strength by using these powerful tools, then sharing their information and experience with allies to give their arguments greater potency and wider circulation.

Regardless of the strength of a group's message, ultimate influence depends on the ability to mobilize the public to act on that message. The Internet offers innovative new tactics using the same consumer targeting techniques as e-commerce Web sites. Online advocacy campaigns target issue alerts to citizens most likely to be sympathetic to the cause. The aim is not just to mobilize the public, but to build membership and develop a network of activists ready to act on short notice.

The American Heritage Forests campaign, for example, seeking to restrict road building in national forests, recently pushed White House servers to the limit with 170,000 e-mails generated by a campaign targeted at people with an affinity for outdoor activities. The campaign utilized the services of Juno, an online service provider that collects personal profile information about its 13 million subscribers in exchange for free e-mail, and then uses the data to target advertisements and issue campaigns.

Online targeting appears to allow environmental groups to reach entirely new audiences. In the American Heritage Forests case, for example, most people who took action were not already affiliated with an environmental group. Each participant was added to the campaign's advocacy network database for quick action on future issues. Similar tactics of identifying affinity groups can also be used for fundraising, an activity made easier by the advent of secure connections for transmitting financial information.

In addition to mobilizing the public, the Internet is a powerful tool for creating strategic coalitions. The WTO protests in Seattle, for example, involved the unlikely coalition of the United Methodist Church, the NGO environmental group Friends of the Earth, the Teamsters labor union, and the Steelworkers Union. Many of the groups involved in the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 used similar online organizing tactics to thwart negotiations by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1998. Opposition to the MAI involved 600 groups in 70 countries. One person involved in the opposition related the power of the Internet in coordinating around the globe: "If a negotiator says something to someone over a glass of wine, we'll have it on the Internet within an hour, all over the world .... If we know something that is sensitive to one government, we get it to our ally in that country instantly. I don't think governments will ever be able to do these kind of secret trade negotiations again."

As the Internet introduces new tactics for advocacy groups to communicate, argue, mobilize, and coordinate, it may also be changing the nature of NGOs themselves. As more activities go online, the need for staff and membership offline diminishes. With an effective online advocacy campaign, even small public interest groups can have a big impact. Indeed, the Internet has created the possibility that advocacy groups can exist almost entirely in cyberspace. While in the past groups had to sign up members, and then mobilize them, Internet campaigns make recruitment and mobilization more seamless. The ability to run advocacy campaigns on a minimal budget has already threatened some national environmental NGOs, as regional and local chapters need to rely less and less on headquarters for membership and resources.

Just as some NGOs may be virtual organizations, their constituencies may be virtual as well. Analysts have coined the term "astroturf" to distinguish one-time, online activism from solid grassroots membership and support. While advocacy groups have found people quite willing to engage in a one-time action, they have encountered a greater challenge in sustaining long-term interest and activity. Indeed, the perception that most online activism is actually astroturf has led to some creative strategies to mask the online origins of communications. Rather than sending e-mails, the click of an icon on some advocacy Web sites generates personalized letters or faxes, or even initiates a phone call between the computer user and a Congressional office.

Proclamations about the capability of the Internet to bolster the power of NGOs could be interpreted in different ways. The Internet may be helping to usher in a new era of direct democracy and robust civic engagement in which the unique technology of the Internet overcomes long-acknowledged barriers to identifying, organizing, and expressing legitimate public interest. In a pessimistic scenario, however, the move online may be putting extremely powerful tools in the hands of groups who are not representative of -- or accountable to -- any real grassroots membership, and whose campaigns respond to fleeting and ephemeral public whims. It is too early to tell which scenario will dominate the future of online activism. All we do know is that the Internet will continue to change the rules of the game for environmental advocates and decision makers for some time to come.

Beierle is engaged in ongoing research on the role of public involvement in environmental decision-making at Resources for the Future (www.rff.org),
a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, conducting research on environmental
and natural resource issues.