Speed Matters

background and goals

CWA is one of America’s largest unions, representing  700,000 workers in communications and information technology, media and cable, public service, health care and higher education, airlines and manufacturing.

CWA believes that the corporate consolidation among Internet access providers poses economic and social risks for America.  In the face of increasing corporatization in the broadband industry, the United States has already slipped to the rank of 16th in the world in access to high-speed Internet, making equal access an issue of international competitiveness.  And in a world in which an increasing share of high-value economic activity is dependent on the Internet, CWA believes equal access is also a matter of economic equity and fundamental fairness.

In 2006, when CWA set out to develop a public advocacy campaign called “Speed Matters” around communications equity, their goals were three:

• To develop a popular constituency in support of the union’s legislative advocacy goals, including equal access to broadband and other advanced telecommunications services
• To stake out political ownership of the equal-access issue among opinion leaders and the press
• To propel Congress and the state legislatures to take access on a set of specific legislative goals relating to equal access

the bsd “speed matters” program

CWA retained BSD to develop and manage the “Speed Matters” advocacy program, the related advertising and promotional campaign, and the Speed Matters Web site at http://speedmatters.org, which launched in the fall of 2006.

BSD designed its Speed Matters Web site with multiple frictionless opportunities for site visitors to engage personally with the content and to volunteer their email addresses and other personal information to CWA.  It has therefore been very successful in recruiting a constituency for CWA that supports communications equity and the union’s other advocacy goals, resulting in a constituency of over 60,000 that is still growing.  Additionally:

• Through the real-time Internet speed test functionality that BSD built into the site, it aggregates geographically targeted data about the distribution of high-speed Internet across America, for use by CWA in informing its policy prescriptions and advocating for change.
• Advocacy campaigns mounted through the Speed Matters Web site mobilize supporters of communications equity to contact Congress, state legislators, and opinion leaders to press for legislative action. 
• And the site serves as a platform for disseminating CWA’s action plan and thought leadership on the issue of communications equity to opinion leaders, the press, and the public.

The centerpiece of the Speed Matters campaign and the Web site is an Internet speed test, developed by BSD in coordination with Ookla Net Metrics, whereby a site visitor can test the speed of his or her Internet connection, receiving results in real time and anonymously contributing the results to a geographically indexed database of national results to support CWA’s state-by-state analysis of communications equity.

The constituency-building and advocacy components of the Speed Matters Web site are built on the framework of BSD’s online communications, constituency-building and advocacy toolset.  BSD has supplemented those components with aggressive outreach to drive traffic to the site and its Internet speed test, including search engine optimization, coregistration, and a cost-effective Google AdWords campaign.

results

Over the course of about a year, BSD’s Speed Matters program has built a constituency of almost 100,000 members of the public concerned about communications equity, who have been mobilized through a series of action alerts (using the BSD online advocacy tools) to contact legislators and opinion leaders and advocate in favor of the CWA’s legislative goals.  The overwhelming majority of the email addresses were acquired via the Internet speed test, but the emails have been proven via subsequent advocacy programs to be of high quality.

Additionally, almost 200,000 geographically indexed Internet speed test records have been collected to date, making the CWA’s Internet speed database one of the most comprehensive bodies of Internet speed data available.  Analysis of the data by CWA has provided further support for its legislative goals, as the patterns evident in the data are themselves useful in advocating for communications equity.

On the strength of the Speed Matters campaign, the CWA has consolidated and enhanced its credibility on the equity issue; its spokespersons are routinely consulted for their opinions on the subject, its platform is publicized, and it is generally seen as a leader in the movement for Internet access reform.  At this writing, the campaign is continuing, along with CWA’s leadership on the issue.