A Petition Fish! Oceana's Seafood Campaign thought outside the petition box, and let supporters get creative in their protest for mercury warnings at Giant. Find out tons more about this campaign to "hold the mercury". Is your supermarket on the green or red list?

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My fondness for liberals, smart people, and Wisconsin politicians (not to mention good food) aided in my decision to read the Environmental Working Group's recent email on their Organics Petition. Even though Development Associate David (no, I didn't realize that was his title until I searched their site) once spent a good amount of a phone call laughing at my Wisconsin accent when I was trying to explain tags, I enjoy working with the EWG. But even more notably, I enjoy well-crafted campaigns. This action nicely displays a few ways to make them suck less (albeit in the service of an uphill struggle):

Step 1: Pictures are worth a thousand words.

This video was short, energizing, and provided a terrific visual of the support already behind the bill. It's one thing to be told about an issue, but to see an example of what an organization is already doing is quite motivational.

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A great example of using Salsa's flexibility to customize a campaign headquarters' look and feel comes courtesy of Evolve Strategies. The setup in this case is by a consulting shop giving its client a one-screen overview of how its action is proceeding. You'll have to click the screenshot below to get the full effect: How'd they build it?

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Below are some handy suggestions I pulled from the presentation Age of YouTube: Using Video Online to Reach the Masses which was presented at NTEN’s Technology 2007 Conference. The Serial Approach - Consider offering a series of short videos (2-3 minutes) that explain your issue, instead of making an expensive project video (or in addition to). See how I Love Mountains features short videos about the destructive practice of mountaintop removal on their homepage.

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Congratulations to one of the earlier DIA users, Free Schuylkill River Park for doing just what their name avowed.

Every action by the group was meticulously explained on its site (www.freetheriverpark.org), and "action alerts" were sent to its growing list of subscribers any time the group needed lobbying of City Council, CSX or the company's own customers to get behind pro-access initiatives. The response was so instant, the rebuttals so relentless, CSX just couldn't stay nimble.

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The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is debuting InnocentAndExecuted.org, the online extension of a recent report documenting likely instances when innocent prisoners have been executed. This is a nice basic microsite deployment (redirecting to a content page created in DIA) complete with a toolkit of various resources for organizers, an online action and a project-specific donation page.

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Earth Day Network, one of our newer users, is hailing the approach of their signature holiday with multiple online actions. The action here is pretty straightforward as pertains the technics -- there's also a pledge to use energy-efficient bulbs, which is a basic signup page -- but it's drawing traffic from several enormous mailing lists looking for topical links and turning its supporter signup chart vertical.

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Very nice piece in the New York Times today on Step It Up 2007's National Day of Climate Action Apr. 14 and the general attempt to get lawmakers to take climate change seriously. Step It Up is currently the gargantuan Distributed Event in the DIA universe, closing in on 1,000 separate local actions a month out from the action. (There's a short description of what the Meetup-like tool does on this page.) And the seamless blending of online components with in-the-flesh activities testifies to the capacity for creative activism to inspire passion and get big in a hurry:

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On the DIA Support listserv, a question about integrating YouTube with DemocracyInAction pages yielded this nifty Oceana action page with a YouTube embed. Nice pairing. Cameron explains the trick to making sure YouTube plays nicely with DIA:

When embedding YouTube in DIA, the thing to look out for is the WYSIWYG ["What You See Is What You Get" -- the word processor-like HTML editor used in e-mail blasts and on some user-facing pages. -ed.] editor. It has a tendency to mangle code, so I would suggest disabling it when adding the HTML provided by YouTube.

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With the young emperor set to cart more bodies to the Sumerian charnel house, we would be remiss to make no comment on the issue of the day, to which so many of our users are lending their energy. We've been spotlighting on the home page the outstanding house party event that True Majority is running through our Distributed Event tool. (And note their comprehensive Event Kit -- putting organizing material like that in the hands of would-be local activists in conjunction with the signup pages is what really makes a house parties action rock.)* More importantly, it's a response to the mad and unpopular "strategy" of more, deeper, and alongside tomorrow's Day of Action to Shut Down Guantanamo (scads of DIA types among the sponsors) represents a critical test for that netroots we keep hearing about.

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