Recruiting: Internet and Web Resources

The Internet is probably the most valuable vehicle for gaining new members. There are a thousand techniques for using it effectively and beneficially. This guide will give you some ideas about where to find the necessary resources for effective recruiting on the web. But we will mostly focus on the techniques specific to lay advocacy groups reaching out to members via the web.

Your presence on the net may have much more far reaching ability than you realize. It is sometimes said that groups should not rely too heavily on the web because access to the web is limited, but this has changed dramatically in just the last few years. Web and email access are now readily available to much of the world. The majority of affected individuals who live in remote regions of the world connect with lay advocacy organizations through the web. In many cases they report finding disease-specific organizations via Internet access at a local Internet cafe, library, or friend's house in a big city.

Your website can do several things to inform different audiences and connect your members:

• Post news about research, treatment, or group initiatives.
• Contain current and back issues of your newsletters - print and email.
• Host a bulletin board or discussion forum where users can interact.
• Host a list of "vetted" web sources for information about your condition.
• Alert members to a special need - a letter-writing campaign, donations to support a particular goal, or chairs for your office!

Your website must do several things to inform and connect effectively:

• Explain your mission clearly and prominently.
• Offer at least basic information about the condition, as well as the group's functions, acting as an all-hours press kit.
• Prominently display your contact information - and make it easy for visitors to give you their contact information.
• Make it obvious and easy for people to donate time, effort, services, or money.

Your website must do this in a format that is easy to read, easy to navigate, and viewable on many different (and older) browsers. Above all make it easy for people, with a click of a button, to contact you, ideally with a fill-in form that submits information directly from the website to your organization. And don't forget to ask people to donate to your foundation, preferably online.

There are dozens of books and websites that discuss the best way to design a site for specific purposes, and some of the most important guidelines are these:

• Use images carefully, and pay attention to their size, they should load easily even using dial up connections.
• By all means use color as a design element, but for sections of the page where there are chunks of text, the most legible combination is black text on a white background.
• Consider accessibility issues - can a user with low vision using a voice browser understand the way information is presented on the page? How about a color-blind user?
• Avoid animations and movies. Animations distract users. Flash is a popular software for creating animated websites or serving miniature movies, but it has virtually no accessibility features for sensory-impaired individuals. Using these techniques on your organization's site, will limit your audience and may detract from your website's purpose: to share information and link members.
• Keep it simple. The simpler your site is, the easier it is for your users - and for the people who update it.

BOBBYs is a free, web-based service that checks sites for accessibility . It evaluates your site and lists recommendations to improve accessibility. You can ask it to use the World Wide Web Consortium Guidelines (available at W3.org) or Section 508 Guidelines.

W3 and Section 508 rules are for format. Consider guidelines for content, as well. We recommend HON - Health on the Net Foundation - Code of Conduct. This code has guidelines for authority, accountability, and attribution that form a solid basis not only for designing your site's approach to information but for evaluating other sites as well.

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