Washington Post: Listserv use soars

Here are two scenarios that aren’t so hard to imagine:

• A committed environmentalist chastises her neighbors on the community listserv for excessive pesticide and fertilizer use.
• A local environmental group announces that a group of residents have agreed to install rain barrels on their gutters, not by sending a press release to the local paper, but by cross posting it to several neighborhood listservs.

If you haven’t gotten around to trying something like this yourself, then read the story that appeared in this morning’s Washington Post has about the growing use of email lists. The story, “Offering Both the Nice and the Nasty, E-Mail Lists Surge in Usage,” profiles how residents of various neighborhoods use listservs to discuss neighborhood business, ranging from the mundane to the grand.

There are three points in the story that are worth noting for nature protection and pollution control experts who have community relations responsibilities.

Point #1: Use of these lists is growing. More than half of Internet users subscribed to listservs in 2006, up from about a third in 2001.

Point #2: Listservs are replacing more traditional neighborhood communications like the association newsletter and the bulletin board at the community center.

Point #3: Smart politicians are trolling neighborhood listservs to keep their finger on the pulse of the communities they represent.

So is it time for your nonprofit organization to set up a free Yahoo! Group and stop paying to print and mail that newsletter? Yes to the former, maybe to latter. It’s also time for nature protection and pollution control groups to seek out and sign up for email lists where people in your community congregate and participate in that discussion in a constructive manner (using words that work so the other subscribers understand what you’re talking about, of course).

The Post article is consistent with the broad conclusions I reached in my report “Network of Networks: Email Lists, Nature Protection, and Pollution Control.” In that document, I explored how nature protection and pollution control experts use listservs to communicate among themselves, and predict that we will increasingly rely on these lists and related online communities to reach out to the community in the future.

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