David Abel: Hello and welcome to “PoliticsOnline” internet radio. I’m David Abel and our guest for today is Bill Greene of RightMarch.com. According to it’s website, RightMarch.com is an umbrella organization for many conservative groups and they’re leading the virtual march from the right against the on going liberal onslaught. Bill, thank you for being on the show today and if you could, please tell us how RightMarch.com got started. Bill Greene: Well, we actually began close to two years ago now. Back when, if you remember, before the liberation of Iraq begin there was a number of far left groups like Moveon.org and International Answer and others who were coming together with what they called their virtual march on Washington. David Abel: Right. Bill Greene: So what we did was, we got together with a number of other conservative organizations to respond to what these guys were doing because we know that we could get a lot of conservative activists nationwide activated through the use of the internet to be Abel to be a counterweight to the shrill voices of the left that were coming from these types of organizations so that people in Washington, D.C. and other places could know that those aren’t the only voices out there. That you have the voices of gratuitous Americans that are willing to stand up and be counted on the other side here. So countering their virtual march on Washington we’ve established what we’ve called “the virtual march from the right.” And thus RightMarch.com was born. David Abel: Interesting. And how many on-line supporters are there for RightMarch.com? Bill Greene: Well, when we send out an email know we go to close to two million folks nationwide. David Abel: Wow. I had no idea. I thought you were in the hundreds of thousands. That’s very impressive. I imagine that with the ease of the internet it makes things go a little bit more smoothly but how many people do you have running that operation and who are the type of people that are behind the scenes there? Bill Greene: Well, I think we’re probably a lot like other organizations like move on in terms of the numbers that are actually, I guess, at the ‘top.’ Because we are such a grass roots oriented organization the bulk of the activity that goes on is going on from our members so you’ve got myself, and I’m in Atlanta and I have one person working for me here. You’ve got Phil Sheldon, who’s are vice-president who is up in Pennsylvania and he has someone working for him there. We’ve got someone who helps us that lives in Texas. We’ve got someone at a new office that works part-time for us in D.C. And that’s about it. Everything that goes on from that point is just on internet base and is just people responding to when we send things out there. We’re just letting people know, look, “Here’s something that’s going. Here’s an issue that’s of importance to just grassroots patriotic Americans nationwide and here’s an action that you can take.” We’ll set it up on our website where people can contact their congressman, their senators, their president – maybe if it’s businesses or advertisers or whatever the issue or action happens to be, we’ll drive them through to our website and say, “Here’s where you can take action.” And then they do. We’ve averaging – last year I think we had between two and three million messages sent through our website alone. Emails, faxes, hand delivered Western Union mailgrams, all sorts of things. David Abel: Well, let’s talk about those e-mail blasts you wend out to people. You say you have about two million people on your list, what’s an average response rate for you guys. Let’s say you send out an e-mail saying, “We’re trying to raise money for a newspaper ad we’re going to run in USA Today.” Bill Greene: We’ll get a response rate – what’ll happen usually is we’ll send out the e-mail and we’ll say, “Here’s a particular issue.” And usually it’s an issue that either we’ve caught very early that needs to be responded to quickly or else we’ve gotten a lot of e-mails and messages sent to us from our membership about a particular thing that is going on. If it is something that warrants something like a nationwide newspaper ad, which we’ve done a number of, full page USA today ads and so forth, then we’ll set that up so we can let people know, “Here’s an ad that we want to take out and we’ll take it out if we get the donations to come in.” Usually it’s within three to four days that we’ll raise the full amount of money we need from the membership to take that ad out. David Abel: OK. Yeah, I noticed on PoliticsOnline our response rate’s about within 48 hours if it doesn’t get in or happen, then it’s probably not going to happen. Bill Greene: Yeah, that’s – we see, we see sort of a bell curve of response rates – where we’ll send an e-mail out and within 48 hours almost every single thing has happened already. Now what we’ll do sometimes is we’ll send out a second email 48 hours later on a particular issue or action item or whatever it is we’re taking and that way if either people miss it the first time or they didn’t take action right away but wanted to – that sort of thing. Because a lot of people – people get lots and lots of emails in their email boxes and so even though they’re specifically signing up and opting in to our e-mail list, they are also, even though they want to get our emails they get so many others that a lot of times they don’t get to it right away and so we’ll send up a follow-up email. If it’s a really hot action item and especially if it’s something that we’re working with a number of conservative organizations on over a longer period of time and doing a lot of different actions, then, of course, we’ll send out a number of different emails. For example: apparently we’re working hard on opposing the law of the sea treaty that is in the senate and we’re working with a number of conservative organizations opposing that particular treaty that’s trying to be pushed through the senate and so we’ve done, we’ve started out by having folks contact their congressman or contact their senators and voice their opposition. Then we set it up so people could send faxes to the senate and we’ve now had over 60,000 faxes go through just to republican senators. We just opened it up to where people can send faxes to democrat senators, as well. And that one is starting to take off now, too. And we send out alerts to raise money to take out nationwide newspaper ads against the treaty as well. We’ve already raised the money for that. We’ll do it. A lot of times we’ll hit it from a lot of different angles on a particular issue. Especially if it’s one that we know is not just a flash in the pan but something we need to be hitting repeatedly until it finally gets through. David Abel: Right. I’ve seen that RightMarch.com has advertised in other like mono websites or newsletters such as “News Max” and I’m not really sure how affiliated you are with conservative alerts either but how is that – its that an effective means for your to advertise in other like minded news letters and websites or is it as effective as sending out messages to your own core group? Bill Greene: It’s very effective and depending on – I mean we’re very email focused here. We’ve played a little bit with blogs and I think we’re about to dive a little more into blogs because we’ve got someone who is a blogger who wants to work very closely with us and we’ll see what happens with that, but our biggest focus hasn’t been focused on the websites or anything like that, it’s been email focused. Maybe driving to websites that are set up for that purpose. That’s where we’re – where we’ve seen that the greatest response happens because people are saying, “Yes we want to get this kind of information” so when we send on the emails they’ve already asked to receive it. If we go to other websites like newsmax.com or worldnext.daily if we go through large conservative position in any of these different areas then that’s where we’ll get the greatest response because, again, it’s people that are going to be, on the whole, like minded. They’re going to be conservative. They’re going to be more activist oriented and so when they receive these emails that are coming from Right March then they tend to respond in good numbers. David Abel: You mentioned blogs just a minute ago and you said it is something that you are looking forward to getting involved in – why hasn’t Right March blogged – it appears you guys do not have a blog on your website and why is that something that you thinking about getting to now? Bill Greene: It’s not – we actually, it’s funny because here you and I are talking – we actually played for awhile for doing an internet audio blog where we would take ten minutes each day and go over the hottest issues that we were going over right then – some of the emails we’d been getting in and so forth – and the response just wasn’t very high. Maybe it’s just not right time for audio blogs yet. We have, we’ve worked with some friends of ours over at redstate.org, at their blog site we set up a Right March blog there to test it out but one of the problems has been that we’re so frickin’ busy over here- David Abel: (Laughs) I understand. Bill Greene: - that, you know, bloggers, God bless them, they seem to have a lot of time on their hands. (Laughter) Bill Greene: We just don’t have the same amount of time. I mean if you go to our site and you see the [tape cuts out] action alerts that are on the site, it goes very much, you know, “Here’s the issue. Here’s the action you can take.” It’s almost in a blog format except that there’s not a response mechanism that most blogs have in terms of a response on the web page itself. Obviously anybody can use our contacts to contact us. David Abel: Right. Bill Greene: So, we haven’t, we just, even though we’ve tried it out and so forth, it hasn’t taken off for us because we just haven’t had the time to put into it. But we’ve got someone who has worked with us on a number of things in the past that we’re talking to right now – nothing is set in stone – but we’re looking at setting up our own blog. That way what we can do is have is, you know, have our action items that have the basic information there but then once off of those to say, “Here’s even more information about that. Here’s what other people are saying about that.” And then people start discussing that particular action on the particular issue that we’re talking about and we think that will contribute to the cause. David Abel: Well, I agree and I’m sure your supporters are probably anxious for some blogs on the website are ones they can comment on, I know – Bill Greene: You know, I’m not real sure. I mean we’re going to test it out. I’m not real sure that our particular members are as involved in wanting to do something like participate in blogs. My gut feeling is, just from what we’ve done so far, is that our folks are much more interested in receiving emails and clicking to take action. We get some responses back and we get a lot of emails that come in and so forth because of those emails where people are commenting on things or asking questions or wanting to discuss stuff that’s what gave us the idea, “Well, maybe, maybe we should go ahead and test out a blog and see if this are the kind of people that are willing to, you know, sustain a blog.” The little bit of testing that we did with our friends at Red State – there just wasn’t a lot of activity going on with a blog. But then again we weren’t particularly driving people to that blog using email and maybe that’s going to be a key factor for us since we’re so email centric here then maybe driving to the blog itself using those emails – that might actually increase the activity. David Abel: Well, I think that you’re right on with that. We’ve experimented with blogs here and I think ______at least talking about it as much as you can has definitely driven our traffic a lot more than just expecting people to just find it on our website. Bill Greene: Right. David Abel: But let me just ask you one more question and if you could just tell us what the most successful on-line initiative or maybe the most interesting initiative that Right March has done thus far and what kind of success did you have with that? Bill Greene: Boy, the most successful one. Because we’ve had so many good ones. This latest ones concerning the United Nations law of the sea treaty is of course upper most in my mind right now. I mean we’ve had, again, over 60,000 faxes going through the senate. But we also, I mean we’ll do some things, sometimes, where there’s a conservative student that’s being harassed by liberal faculty and administration – maybe in a high school because they’re starting a conservative club. We did that just recently with a particular student and sent out an action alert giving contact information for the principal and the superintendent. When you have people nationwide that suddenly focus their attention in on, you know, one little high school in one little school district and our contacting them saying, “Look, we know what you’re doing. The eyes of the world are upon you and what you’re doing is wrong.” Then we see real quick turn around. First we’ll see denial. Then we’ll see trying to explain things. Then we’ll see people getting angry and us and at people that are contact them. But then we’ll see things start to change – see things start to happen. So we don’t just focus just on the national/federal level. In the same way – we’re working now with – we’re just beginning to work with the Schendler family down in Florida on the Terry Schendler/Shivo case where they’re trying to disconnect her feeding tube and starve her to death just because she’s disabled and already we’re seeing donations pour in by the tens of thousands to this family’s foundation so they can fight in court to save their daughter. We’re setting up our site, as we speak, for people to be Abel to contact all the Florida legislators and the governor of Florida to once again get them in action so they can save this girl’s life. Those are the kinds of things where we like to – we really like to see that we’re making a difference David Abel: Right. Well, Bill, this has been great and that’s all the time we have for today and we want to thank you again and for our listeners out there, if you want to learn more about RightMarch.com it doesn’t really get any easier. All you’ve got to do is type in RightMarch.com into your web browser and you’ll be taken to the home page. That’s it for us today. Thank you and goodbye. Bill Greene: Thanks for having me on. David Abel: Nice to have you Bill. [End of Audio] PoliticsOnline RightMarch.com Interview Page 1 of 6 David Abel, Bill Green www.escriptionist.com Page 1 of 6