Guidelines for local MoveOn groups

People who have met through MoveOn activities sometimes wonder if they can take on local initiatives as part of their work with MoveOn, or involve other MoveOn members in local efforts. The following guidelines should help you resolve these kinds of questions while keeping both you and us from running into legal trouble.

Our overriding goal is to empower our members to make their voices heard on critical issues. For this reason, we've pushed our lawyers to create guidelines that give you, as a member, as many avenues for action as possible, while still preventing situations that could threaten our very existence—and thus, our ability to continue serving you and making a difference in national politics.

Initiative is good. We believe strongly in the ingenuity, creativity, resourcefulness and leadership of our members. We are thrilled when involvement with MoveOn activities helps citizens develop skills or relationships that they can use to improve their communities in ways that go beyond MoveOn's national program. We see this as one of MoveOn's important contributions to our nation's civic life.

However, for legal reasons, it is essential that activities other than those coordinated nationally by MoveOn not be officially associated with MoveOn.

The Basic Rule: If you want to organize or participate in an activity other than those coordinated by MoveOn, please don't represent it as a MoveOn activity, or call yourselves MoveOn members or MoveOn volunteers in the context of that activity. Doing so could endanger our whole network.

What does this mean in practice? We are making a commitment to provide & support multiple options for MoveOn members who want to take local action on our national campaigns. We may invite people to hold houseparties one month as part of our campaign to protect social security, but also provide tools to run a petition drive, hold a fundraiser, or gather letters to the editor. These are all, officially, MoveOn activities. We will also solicit your ideas for new activities that we could do together as a network, and use these ideas as a basis for our planning.

You may want to go beyond these options—to organize your own local event about an issue we're working on nationally (like a local forum on Social Security), or to work on a different local issue (to gather signatures on your own petitions against state budget cuts, for example). That's great! But for legal reasons, you can't in any way imply that it's connected to MoveOn. You shouldn’t call yourselves "MoveOn volunteers" in that context, or wear MoveOn gear while you do it. If you have a spokesperson, it shouldn't be someone who also speaks to the media at MoveOn events.

Instead, you should come up with a local name for yourselves, or partner with an existing local group. And you should make it clear that the two efforts are distinct. Our lawyers have made it plain that this kind of separation is the only way to protect the resources on which all of us depend: MoveOn's reputation, our trademark, our financial assets, and our ability to work effectively on pressing issues of national concern.

Why do we need to be so careful? We operate in an extraordinarily complex legal environment, under constant scrutiny from our opponents. We are subject to arcane limitations and rules having to do with our tax status as well as campaign finance laws. These govern what we can say, who we can work with, and how we can operate—in non-obvious and non-intuitive ways. Running afoul of these laws could endanger MoveOn's existence.

To make matters even trickier, right-wing groups scrutinize everything we do, looking for ways to misrepresent us in order to smear our reputation or put our whole network in legal jeopardy. And in the past, they have used alleged actions of alleged MoveOn volunteers as one point of attack.

So we need to be extraordinarily careful. That's why, when we organize a set of houseparties or vigils, or circulate a petition, all significant materials, guidelines, and instructions have been carefully vetted by our team of lawyers. We could not possibly provide that level of review and scrutiny for thousands of events and projects organized locally by enterprising MoveOn members.

Finally, the way trademark law works is that if we allow groups over which we don't exercise oversight to use the name MoveOn, by law we lose our ability to protect the name itself—so we would be powerless if, say, a skinhead group decided to create their own MoveOn website.

Here are the answers to some more specific questions:

Can I get MoveOn to endorse or work on an important local campaign? No. Local issues or electoral campaigns are vital, but we normally don't work on them for three basic reasons:

• One of MoveOn's key advantages is the responsiveness and efficiency we gain from our very small staff. We make this possible by choosing campaigns and strategies that people can replicate across the country, and using technology to make this process as easy as possible. Working on local campaigns negates these advantages and makes our small staff a liability instead of an asset.

• We believe that, strategically speaking, there's an urgent need for national coordinated action of the kind we organize, in order to win a voice for ordinary Americans in Washington D.C. This is our niche. Fortunately, many of our allies are better set up to work on local issues and campaigns.

• We simply can't examine and approve tactics, messages, and materials on dozens, let alone thousands, of state and local efforts.

Can we create a listserv for local MoveOn members? In some places, people who've met through MoveOn activities have created discussion groups through free services like YahooGroups in order to stay in touch. Building community is one of MoveOn's goals—and it goes without saying that you're free to communicate with whomever you want. But if you use "MoveOn" in the name of your listserv, or connect it with MoveOn, then you should only use it to coordinate your participation in official MoveOn activities—otherwise it may appear that MoveOn is officially involved in other local activities. For this reason, you will have more freedom and flexibility if you give your listserv a name that doesn't imply a connection to MoveOn.

Can a group of us call ourselves MoveOn[Area]? No. For the reasons outlined above, you can't call yourselves MoveOn in conjunction with projects or activities that aren't coordinated nationally by MoveOn. And because you can't speak for all MoveOn members in your area, you shouldn't use a name like MoveOn[area] in a public context—with the media, or in printed materials for public distribution.

Can I get a list of MoveOn members in our area so we can recruit them or communicate with them? Members sometimes ask us if there is a way to communicate with other local members about a fundraiser they have organized, or an event they think others would be interested in. At the same time, many of our members have expressed a clear preference not to receive too much email or email that's not from MoveOn staff. For this reason, we can't ever make our membership list available to MoveOn members or forward emails from our membership, even though many of these events are worthy of support and relate to our work. There is simply too much good stuff to pass on.

But we are mindful that many of our members DO want to communicate and network with each other, and our new Operation Democracy team structure should make this kind of member-to-member communication easier.

Can we have a local website called www.moveonAREA.org or the like? No. For legal reasons, we would need to carefully examine and sign off on any content posted on websites affiliated with MoveOn or the MoveOn brand. This is not a responsibility we can undertake for dozens or hundreds of local sites. Having a local web space to coordinate activism is great—it just can't be connected with MoveOn. You can, of course, let other MoveOn members know about it as you meet them individually in the course of your activities.

Some MoveOn members have told us that one primary motivator for creating local websites is to have a portal so that new people can hook up with existing groups of MoveOn members in their area. In response to this request, we've now made it possible for people to go to www.moveonpac.org/team/ and connect with teams of MoveOn members in their area, as part of our new Operation Democracy campaign.

OK, I get that there's a lot of stuff we can't do in MoveOn's name. In what ways can MoveOn help members work together locally?

We came up with the structure for Operation Democracy our big plan for stopping the Bush agenda and electing progressives, in response to the many members who told us they wanted to link up and work together on an ongoing basis, and to have more horizontal communication locally. As we get it off the ground, Operation Democracy should provide many of the opportunities members have asked for:

• We'll provide a way for you to join in our efforts, as one large team or several smaller teams, so you can participate in our national campaigns and make a difference in your community. We'll provide messages, materials, and how-to's so that we can all work together towards common goals.

• We'll make it possible for interested people in your area to find your team via our web site and link up with you.

• We'll offer training on various campaign skills, from coordinating volunteers to working with the media, to MoveOn members who want to get more involved or take on more responsibility with the campaign.

• Every month we'll offer support not just for the main efforts but for an additional kind of campaign activity. For individuals or groups who are ready to go the extra mile, we'll always have something you can do, on the same or a different campaign, to keep up a high level of energy and activity near you.

• We know people want to be able to communicate with other MoveOn members nearby. For privacy reasons and to keep the MoveOn email message stream manageable, we can't just give out email addresses of other members or invite people to join lots of local email lists. But we will create a way for you to communicate with other members on your team, as well as for local team leaders to communicate with each other, either electronically or in-person.

• We will have our hands full supporting all the MoveOn members who are participating in this enormous new network, so we can't help people also design local campaigns to conduct on their own on other issues. But we will find ways to offer some advice on who to talk to, or point you towards other resources that may help in your local efforts.

• Not all of this will happen immediately—there are so many steps in building this new Operation Democracy network that some of these plans will take a few months to implement—but we pledge to you that we'll work to build these systems and find other ways to support MoveOn members' being active in their communities.

Do we have a say in what MoveOn does? Yes. At the very core of MoveOn's organizing model is the principle that we work on issues that our members care about a lot, and we choose actions that you'll be excited to do. We also believe in "the wisdom of crowds" and frequently look to our membership for direction or ideas. For these reasons we constantly solicit our members for feedback. We rely on these surveys, our action forum, our analyses of participation patterns, and anecdotal reports to guide nearly everything we do.

For example, Operation Democracy, our new project to organize neighborhood teams to stop Bush and win back Congress, was a product of our "Future of MoveOn houseparties" as well as two other surveys of almost 400,000 members, and dozens of conversations with MoveOn leaders around the country. But we want even more interaction with you and other volunteers. So as we get this network off the ground, we will be introducing a series of new mechanisms for giving feedback and input and helping you get your questions answered.

A Final Word. Turning our country around will require more of us, doing more things, in more places—and to the maximum degree possible, doing them together. These guidelines are intended to help all of us take as much initiative as possible without endangering the network that we've built together. Thank you for being careful—and, more importantly, thank you for all that you do to make our world a better place.

Thank you very much,

—The MoveOn.org Political Action team

Revision March 10, 2005