November 10th Return to Offender Campaign - Veronica Chimes In & Charlie Responds

Hi Charlie!

HA! I love your campaign. I've been mailing back junk mail in their return envelopes for years. While I salute you on your efforts, I don't think putting "Return to Offender" on the outside of the envelope is a good idea. It makes the companies' job a lot easier once they realize once going on. They will just throw away the envelopes. Instead, I suggest putting nothing on it, making this process a whole lot more painful. They'll have to sort it and process it, and open it, thinking there might be a filled out application inside. Maybe we should put the notice on the inside, writing "Return to Offender" on the last page inside the envelope, facing out.


Thanks for doing this and I will save my junk mail for November 10th.  This is gonna be fun!

-Veronica Armstrong
Austin, Texas


Veronica,


Thanks for following up and for your suggestions. Its really good to see folks getting excited about this campaign. I like the idea of having the message on the inside. I also hear (and like) the idea of it being more painful for the companies to sort everything out first.


That said, having it on the outside does make for better "action pictures" for volunteers to send back to us and these 3 companies all already know they are being targeted for the Nov. 10th day of action.


To give you some insight into the inner workings of the DoNotMail campaign (and FE corporate campaigns in general) i wanted to take a minute to explain how we engage with the companies we're targeting.


Our approach to environmental change begins on the ground where we have staff members who live in the places we are fighting to protect and work with scientists to define critical regions. Once these regions have been mapped out, we determine which corporations are purchasing the products that cause those areas to be destroyed - i.e., the paper being produced to make Junk Mail.


When Then approach these companies, typically with an informational letter about the issue and request a meeting with them to discus things further. If a corporation refuses to change its practices, we hold that company publicly accountable--with protests, websites, email campaigns, national advertisements, and more. And when corporations are ready to protect forests and wild places, we help them implement sound policies through our Market Solutions.


Our Market Solutions department (formerly Corporate Action Program) helps companies distinguish themselves as environmental innovators and forest protectors. Tapping into both in-house expertise and an extensive external network, we provide information, guidance and recognition through a variety of mechanisms. These include direct consultation, business roundtables, sector scorecards and other published materials. We are also active in developing leading market standards and metrics.


In the case of the Return to Offender day of action each of the 3 companies we're asking volunteers to send junk mail back to have been contacted and have refused to discuss this issue with us. The companies have been informed that they are the targets of this upcoming day of action so (A) they are already awaiting people's letters and (B) they will know exactly why they're getting them.


ForestEthics will follow up with each of the 3 companies again a few weeks after the day of action and re-ask for a meeting to discuss our concerns. It's typically at this point where we can start to determine which companies are going to work with us without needing further pressure and which companies we may need to consider running longer campaigns against.


This is more or less how ALL our campaigns are run. For some examples of our past success stories please visit: http://forestethics.org/industry-success-stories


Hopefully this info was useful for you. I'd love to hear any further feedback.


charlie
Paper Campaigner - ForestEthics

Hope you are saving your junk mail more successfully than I am!  Can you believe I haven't received a single mailing from one of these companies?!  My junk mail has been solely comprised of x-mas catalogs.  Too bad THEY don't come with a SASE...  jen.