From the category archives:

Political action

Public Google Alerts account for political action: Sierra Club

by Adam Green on May 20, 2009

in AlertRank, Google Alerts, Political action, Public accounts

Political activists need to collect news items for use in fundraising. They need to find academics who can act as advocates, especially if they are involved in a field where scientific evidence can be persuasive. They also need to know where public events are being held, so they can direct their supporters to attend. This public Google Alerts account gives you an idea of how this can be done for the Sierra Club. This account is not meant to be exhaustive, but it does demonstrate the type of alerts you should be creating if you manage the communications activities of a political advocacy group. If you aren’t familiar with the search syntax used in these alerts, you can review our Google Alerts Tutorial.

Group’s name
“sierra club”

Group’s website
site:sierraclub.org
Find out when Google has indexed a new page on the site.

link:sierraclub.org -site:sierraclub.org
View all inbound links

Areas of interest
“clean energy” OR “beyond coal” OR “curbing carbon” OR “green transpotation” OR “resilient habitats” OR “safeguarding communities”
“global warming” OR “climate change”
allinurl:”global warming” OR allinurl:”climate change”

Public events
(”global warming” OR “climate change”) (conference OR event OR meeting OR convention OR expo)

Government action
(”global warming” OR “climate change”) site:gov
(”global warming” OR “climate change”) site:house.gov
(”global warming” OR “climate change”) site:senate.gov

Citations by educational institutions
(”global warming” OR “climate change”) site:edu

Local news alerts for fundraising activities
(”global warming” OR “climate change”) location:california
(”global warming” OR “climate change”) location:massachusetts
(”global warming” OR “climate change”) location:new_york

National news alerts
(”global warming” OR “climate change”) source:nytimes

Twitter users for grassroots support
(intext:”bio * global warming” OR intext:”bio * climate change”) site:twitter.com

Here is the account now in AlertRank.

demo_political-action

You can see that this can be expanded to hundreds of different searches, but Google lets you create 1,000 search terms in a single account, and AlertRank makes it easy to manage them.

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Google News Alerts are the Paul Revere of the 21st Century

by Adam Green on April 25, 2009

in Google News Alerts, Political action

I live in Lexington, Massachusetts, so the idea of rallying the citizens to a grave danger is never far from my doorstep. In fact, “Paul Revere” rode by my house on Monday. Just as in 1775, political action is triggered as a reaction to news events. Only now you don’t have to ride into the night to spread the word. Google Alerts can keep you aware of news events related to your issues anywhere in the world, and give you the ammunition you need to get people fired up to act. Here is a simple procedure for political organizing through Google News Alerts:

1. Create a Google News Alert for your cause. If it is best described in multiple words, such as climate change, put them in quotes to make sure Google finds that exact phrase.

paulrevere

2. Improve the alert to notify you of events that can be affected by political action. You can add words like protest, demonstration, congress, senate, bill, legistation, law, etc. You add words to an alert with an OR in upper case, and put all these words in parentheses. if you haven’t built a Google search like this, get the details from my tutorial. This is an example:
“climate change” (demonstration OR protest OR congress OR senate OR bill OR legislation OR regulation OR law)

3. All politics is local, so you should add a location to the alert to deliver news with more impact for local citizens. You can add the location: operator with the name of a city, state, or country to your alert for more focused news:
“climate change” (demonstration OR protest OR congress OR senate OR bill OR legislation OR regulation OR law) location:india

4. Now you can spread the word. Imagine what Paul Revere could have done with Twitter. You can blog the news, tweet it, post it on Delicious, email it to a list, create a daily report of news stories as a PDF and distibrute it as a printable flyer. Come to think of it, Thomas Paine would have had a lot of fun with Twitter too. I don’t even want to think about the mischief Sam Adams would have caused.

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