Earth Day Action Center Ready for Gulf Disaster

On April 22, 2010, the oil drilling rig "Deepwater Horizon" exploded in the Gulf of Mexico causing what may be one of the greatest ecological disasters in American history. Paradoxically, on that same day, millions celebrated the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. Few understood the magnitude of the damage to come.

In the weeks that followed, as the environmental impact became clear, the Earth Day Network (EDN) rallied its members to take action and grew a massive movement for environmental defense. This didn't happen by accident and was the result of careful weeks of planning.

In launching Earthday.org prior to the spill, EDN was in a good position to harness people's enthusiasm and build up a network of nearly one million people. Since then, EDN had also launched a campaign to stop offshore drilling and led an impromptu march on the White House. While the Obama administration halted new deep-water exploration, EDN continued to push for a complete cessation of all offshore oil exploration inclusive of shallow drilling.

Forum One is proud to have played a major role in bringing Earthday.org to life. In conceiving the site with EDN, the main goal was to capture the momentum of Earth Day by gathering a a large group of advocates and then engage them in an ongoing set of actions. EDN could then leverage the community to take new actions after the Earth Day events and extend the impact of this signature day.

The process of bringing Earthday.org to life had its challenges. Given the strong branding, getting users registered on EarthDay.org was less difficult than other organically-grown communities. Instead, the challenge was getting users to take action and establish their own campaigns. To serve this objective, we designed the site with a simple user interface to reduce barriers for participating. To set up a campaign or participate in the community, users need only to register for an account. After registration, users are led to the action center where they may immediately create campaigns, modify their profile, and engage with other members. With a faceted browsing tool anyone may easily locate people, organizations and campaigns by their interests and locality. This makes it much easier for users to connect with others as well as capture a massive number of acts of environmental service and advocacy.

Data submitted to the site also needed to be managed in a separate Salsa CRM database. Forum One developed a Salsa Rules Drupal module to bring its constituent list into Democracy in Action's platform. This allowed EDN to better contact members via email campaigns and forecast logistical information such as event capacity.

Hosting was another challenge. The site was the primary presence of a major international event and was linked from a number of major sponsors. Working with our hosting partner Rackspace, we put in place an impressive hosting infrastructure of 20 cloud servers to handle the load. In collaboration with Trellon, another EDN partner, we made application-level changes to tune the site for high traffic. 

We are pleased that EDN has made the most of its network and pleased to see the community thriving Earth Day. With the help of their growing community, perhaps we may soon see the changes to energy policy necessary to preserve the environment for future generations.