The Advocacy Email Index will improve environmental advocacy groups effectiveness by giving them the knowledge they need to communicate with their fellow advocates and collaborate with like-minded organizations. It will do this by drastically increasing access to information by indexing the millions of emails sent out by environmentalist groups every year and making the messages digestible. The tool will provide a birds eye view of what's being said in environmental advocacy emails and let people drill down to see what's being talked about on a particular issue, a specific date, and by certain organizations. This access to information will let environmental groups hone in on the most important issues and communicate effectively so they get results.

There are thousands of emails sent each month by environmental advocacy groups to supporters, activists, donors, reporters and voters. These emails are one of the primary means by which these organizations do their work and together, could provide invaluable insight into the workings of the movement. Yet they have never been aggregated into a cohesive network traffic story that would allow advocacy groups to track how their allies and enemies are engaging with the public. They have never been aggregated because storage was expensive, indexing and analysis was expensive, and the technology was complicated. Today the low cost of storage and the advances in automated content analysis and indexing have created an opportunity to develop a new service that provides value by making sense of the movement's email.

The site will:

• Improve the way environmental groups who take advantage of the service think about email campaigns by giving them access to network data that to date, has been invisible.
• Offer a network traffic map that will help users “see” email campaigns in place with other emails sent in the same time frame to the public.
• Provide the great content of the emails additional “life” and exposure for the campaigns to new audiences.
• Aid in academic and professional research (to support consulting and network learning about email campaigns).
• Create an effective hub for the discussion of the campaigns that are promoted via email.