Chapter Sections
1. Introduction
2. Campaigning
3. Civil Disobedience
4. Direct Action
5. Action Planning
6. Lobbying
7. Picketing
8. Starting a Group
9. Publicity
10. Leafleting
11. News Media
12. Internet
How to Do Animal Rights - and Win the War on Animals
The Internet is a communication tool to exchange ideas, inspiration, information, statistics, pictures and drawings, and to find people and organisations. Using the internet is quick, convenient and relatively cheap. Use it to communicate with your existing and potential supporters to let them know about you, your group and the issues you raise. The Internet has a number of parts and two of the most important are the Web and email.
The Web
The Web is short for World Wide Web (the 'www' that precedes web page addresses), a network of computers around the globe to which anyone can access by connecting to it with a computer. People began using the Web as a popular medium for communication in the mid-1990's. Basically the Web consists of millions of web sites, each consisting of one or more pages where text, graphics and pictures are set out for people to view.
Acquiring your own web site may be free, cheap or expensive depending on what you want and how you go about obtaining it. Creating and managing your own web site is not difficult but takes a little time to learn how to handle it. Benefits of your own web site are:
- You can tell your web site viewers what you do.
- You can tell your web site viewers what you think they should do.
- You can send people electronic newsletters in addition to or instead of paper ones sent via the post.
- It is easy to add or delete your web pages and to update, add and delete information to existing pages.
- It will give your group a sense of professionalism and enhance its reputation, especially if it is informative and good looking.
Email, short for electronic mail, was invented some years before the Web. You can use email to exchange messages, graphics and pictures within seconds or minutes to any internet user with an email account anywhere in the world. Email is so smart that you will not want to send letters through the post any more and use it preferentially instead of the phone.
When you get a web site you usually also buy an email facility to go with it and your email address should appear on your web site so that people can contact you. However, you do not need a web site to have an email address; web sites and email are separate components of the Internet. To access email you only need get online using a computer and sign up with a company that provides email, which can be free. You can then access and send email from anywhere on a computer that links you to the Internet.
Create Your Own Web Site
You will need a computer to access the Internet, a computer that you own or can use for a time from a friend, a library, your work place, internet café or some other place. Best to have your own computer as you will be in command of when and how long you stay online. Then you will need two things, first a company that will connect your computer to the Internet, and second a company that will store your web site and send pages to the computers of people who what to look at it. Either company might also provide you with email facilities. Both kinds of company can be found online by searching the Web under 'Internet service provider' and 'web site hosting'.
Designing Your Web Site
Pay someone to design a web site for you or do it yourself. Do-it-yourself will be cheaper and you will have more and quicker control over it. You do not necessarily need expensive software or any software to set out web pages. Instead you can learn to write HTML (short for hyper text mark-up language), the instructions that professionals type into a computer to lay out pages. If you are not inclined to do this then you may be able to find a volunteer to build your web site for you. If you do it yourself, however, here are some tips:
- There is no need to do anything complicated. Keep everything simple and you will make progress quickly and your work can look pleasing and professional.
- Look around for intelligible, easy to read books on laying out basic HTML. Big expensive books are not necessary. You can even find most if not all of what you need free online.
- Read a book about good, simple web page design, or look online for the information, eg how to break up text, which font to use and the application of colour.
- Examine examples online of simple, well designed web sites - and the many web sites with distressingly artless or no design - for inspiration and ideas about what to include and avoid on your web site.
- Once you have typed in your HTML code and completed your page you may want to 'validate' it, ie check that the coding is correct. Go online to TwoCows.com and download the free version of CSE HTML Validator. Follow the instructions for checking your pages.
Once you have your completed web site you will need to upload it to a 'host', a company that keeps it online 24h a day to show it to people who want to see it. When you have found a host you can upload your web pages to them from your computer using an FTP program (FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol). You can get a free FTP program from CoffeeCup.com; go to their web site. Alternatively, your host may supply their own FTP program for the free use of their clients.
Capturing Viewers
Whether you design your own web site or have someone do it for you, the first step to have viewers find your web site is to get it listed on the Yahoo and Google search engines. Listing is free for non-commercial web sites, such as yours. Go to the Yahoo and Google web sites and find the link (on or close to their home page - it changes all the time) to tell them of your new web site; it takes just a few minutes. Even if you do not do this, they will automatically find your site in due course and record it. You do not have to inform any other web search engine as these two are by far the biggest and the other ones should eventually find and record your site anyway.
The other method of acquiring viewers is to find relevant web sites (eg connected with animals or nature) and exchange reciprocal links. Depending on the content of your web site this could be the single most important route for attracting viewers. Email a relevant web site; basically all you have to say is, "Can we exchange reciprocal web links, please? The name and address of my site is *****, www.***** and is about animal rights." It might spur them on if you jump the gun and put a web link to them on your site before emailing them. Let them know the page it is on.
How many viewers see your web site and which pages get most viewers? Register with a company offering web counters, software that that compute viewer usage of web sites. An example is StatCounter.com, which is free and excellent. You will be doing well if you get a hundred viewers a day. A thousand plus would be exceptional. If you get only half a dozen a day you will need to work on getting more visitors to your site. And do not be misled by statistics: about 75 percent of viewers to ordinary web sites (not popular national ones) click off in the first five seconds, having found the site is not what they were looking for.
Discussion Boards
With your own web site you could offer viewers a discussion board (which are also called discussion groups, message boards, internet forums and newsgroups). There are said to be over 100,000 discussion boards online.
A discussion board is a facility for people online to hold discussions by typing in (or 'posting') and reading messages about topics of interest to them. You can raise questions and answer them with your group members and with anyone viewing your discussion board pages. Contributors can be anonymous if they like and can email each other individually for more confidential discussion.
Discussions are displayed for ease of following in chronological order or are 'threaded', that is questions and answers are displayed in a hierarchical structure along a theme or series of related messages. Discussions are also displayed permanently or archived so that viewers can return to them.
Setting up your discussion group can be free and takes just a few minutes to register online. Chose a title and description of what your group discusses. Decide whether the discussion group is open only to your group members or to anyone (you will be able to reach more people if it is open to anyone), and whether you want to 'moderate' it (censor messages before you delete or display them online). For example of discussion boards see Yahoo Groups, Mailbase or GreenNet.
| How to Do Animal Rights - and Win the War on Animals. © Roger (Ben) Panaman, April 2008. All rights reserved. |