It started when Robert Meeropol posted a blog about how the Espionage Act of 1917 links his parents to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (see Executive Director's report here for related article). Progressive list-serve Portside (www.portside.org) then republished the article where many of its subscribers read it. Subsequently, AlterNet (www.alternet.org), one of the leading progressive news and opinion websites, republished it as well, and things snowballed in dramatic fashion from there.
Within hours over 75,000 readers viewed the article on AlterNet’s site — a figure many times larger than the total number of RFC supporters! Hundreds of people shared it on Facebook and Tweeted about it. And the reception in the blogosphere was electric; the article was highly rated on Stumbleupon, Reddit and other social news and bookmarking sites, and referenced on dozens of individual blogs.
The end result was that in just a few days, over 15,000 new visitors came to the RFC’s website — a remarkable explosion given that the total number of unique visitors to our site in the previous 51 weeks of the year was around 24,000. Many of these new people joined the RFC mailing list, made donations, and shared info about the RFC with their friends.
In short, this one little blog created extremely positive exposure for the RFC among tens of thousands of people across the country and around the world who had never heard of us before. We can’t emphasize enough how valuable this attention was. It also was instructive to us to see how much of it was gen-erated spontaneously by readers passing the material on to their own networks via social media and blogs.
The RFC puts a lot of thought into how we communicate not only with our current supporters, but also with the broader progressive community of people who are not familiar with our organization, but likely would be interested if they did learn of us. We know we need to make it easy to share our information via all of the different channels people are using, from email, to Facebook and Twitter, to personal blogs. And we need to be creative about how we catch the attention of and mobilize the vast untapped audience out there on the web, the millions of people who could be a virtual information-sharing army for us.
We pledge not to abandon traditional print and surface mail communication, but we are expanding the avenues we use for reaching out via cyberspace. We hope that if you’re online, you’ll join in that effort. Here are some ways to do so:
- Provide us with your email address here
- Subscribe to our blog (here)
- Link to our content on your own blog
- Like our Facebook Page (here)
- Tag us on Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg, etc.
- Follow us on Twitter @wwwrfcorg
And perhaps most importantly of all, let us know what we could do to make it easier or more appealing for you to help the RFC by spreading the word in cyberspace about our project. Send your suggestions by email to amber@rfc.org or message us via our Facebook Page at www.facebook.com/rosenbergfundforchildren.