CitizenSpeak, a new, free email advocacy service for grassroots causes, is using online outreach tools that have the potential to be a major factor in unearthing issues in the 2006 political races.

Other organizations should take note of the simplicity and straightforwardness of the site. Jo Lee started the site to allow anyone, from an active community member to a large organization, to use the CitizenSpeak site to launch an email campaign to spread their message. The new site just launched a few weeks ago. It was built on Drupal by George Hotelling. We did the design :)

Monitoring what people are using on the site and for what issues is like watching a social thermometer.

Here are some campaign highlights that were posted in the last couple weeks that show the scope of the site:

· A screen actors’ guild (SAG) member launched a campaign aimed at the SAG board to protest a SAG staff firing.

· The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles is using the site to stand against new immigration enforcement.

· A number of environmental and green-space protection campaigns, including a campaign protesting the building of a motor raceway that Paul Newman is behind, have signed up.

· There are also a number of health-related campaigns, such as a smoke free campaign in Howard County, MD, and one protesting a governor’s veto of a health care initiative, that have put the site to use.

Imagine community organizations, environmental groups, universities, and pro-democracy organizations breaking out and building decentralized tools like this for their members to let them work for what their communities most need, decided on by the people who live there. It is almost like Blogspot for an activist campaign. It also kind of reminds me of Meetup, just without any of the meeting up.

Of course, this is not how organizations work, and for the good reason of ‘staying on message’ and keeping a focus.

But what if organizations were able to have their members use these tools to help build better on-the-ground open grass roots movements without having to be tied to the projects (notable the ones that are a little crazy… like a Democracy In Action staffer using it to launch a campaign to “Save the Chocolate Chips!” )?

Does it benefit an organization to truly encourage and trust their members to invest in a third party service like CitizenSpeak to act as a separate grassroots base (and at times muck room of things that could make an organization look bad?).

The concept of CitizenSpeak is very close to providing tools for other organizations to cost-effectively run small outreach campaigns that would never have the prominence to make it on their main site.

A couple bucks of investment could turn this foundation into an activist powerhouse (Jo, I know you want to keep it simple but it is just too tempting)…

- Tagging campaigns would make the site more scalable and navigable.
- Integrating a ‘tell a friend’ feature where people can directly spread the word about a campaign they just took part in.
- Auto aliasing for more intuitive URLs
- Ajax integration into campaign pages so that in addition to seeing a message preview that you are sending to someone, for example a political representative, you could read about the history of the campaign and other ways that to get involved.
- Mapping integration by giving each campaign a geo tag and overlay it on Google maps.

Any takers?