Voice Your Views offers easy e-campaigns

Advocacy Online has launched a website that makes it easier to set up an online campaign. 

Voice Your Views allows small campaigning organisations or individuals to set up online actions targeting MPs, councillors, NHS Primary Care Trusts, world leaders and companies.

Online campaigns, and e-petitions in particular, have proved highly popular, changing the way people communicate with politicians and business figures.

More than 1.7 million people signed up to a recent e-petition on the Prime Minister's website objecting to a road tax.

Figures on the Prime Minister's site show that this form of lobbying is rapidly gaining favour; more than 3,381 active petitions notched up over 2.5 million signatures.

Voice Your Views allows campaigners to create and manage their own campaign as if they were a large organisation or charity. The site lets the user customise every aspect of a campaign through to branding, layout and copy.

Campaign organisers can also track the progress of each action, analyse the data collected and build their own e-campaigning community.

"There is an appetite for e-campaigning in this country and organisers want to do more than run e-petitions," said Graham Covington, director of Advocacy Online.

"Voice Your Views gives organisers the ability to run targeted e-campaigns like the larger charities for free."

The site already boasts several successful beta users, including Transport 2000, Church Action on Poverty, the Citizens Organising Foundation and the Environmental Justice Foundation. 

Transport 2000 launched a campaign on Voice Your Views to highlight passenger overcrowding on trains.

"We created a character called Sardine Man who joined people on their daily commute and handed out business cards urging people to log on to Voice Your Views and sign up to our campaign," said Jess Fitch, Transport 2000 communications officer.

"The response has been terrific. Voice Your Views is a free resource which makes it ideal to launch a campaign with limited resources. The step-by-step instructions mean the whole process of creating an action can be done in no time."