Sharing Information on Secular Action Alerts

You may have noticed the "Take Action" section I added to the top of the right sidebar here at Atheist Revolution. I do this periodically in an effort to call readers' attention to some things they can do to help. It tends to be intermittent in the sense that I'll often have it up for a couple weeks, take it down for a bit, and put it back up when new opportunities arise. I used to make an effort to keep it limited to traditional church-state issues, but I figured there was little need to do that. After all, my readers are intelligent people who are perfectly capable of picking the issues they find worth supporting and ignoring the rest.

I continue to be frustrated with how some of the national secular organizations handle action alerts, but I'm not sure what I can do besides continue to complain and suggest alternative approaches to distribution. I suppose I could write more posts containing the few action alerts I manage to see before it is too late. The challenge is that many of them are distributed so late that the post I'd write would be obsolete before I had the opportunity to write it. I'm not sure that accomplishes much. These late alerts are a problem since few of us are in a position to drop whatever we're doing and immediately respond if we manage to see them at all. If we are expected to take action by contacting our elected officials, we really need at least a few days to do so.

I have a folder set up in my RSS reader called "Secular Activism" and while most of the content is not action alerts (because most of the secular organizations still haven't figured out how to distribute these effectively), it is better than nothing. If you'd like to set up something similar, here are the feeds I'm currently using:

• American Atheists https://www.atheists.org/feed/
• American Humanist Association https://americanhumanist.org/category/news/feed/
• Freedom From Religion Foundation https://ffrf.org/news/news-releases?format=feed
• National Secular Society (UK) https://www.secularism.org.uk/feeds/rss/news
• Secular Coalition for America https://secular.org/grassroots/action-center/

I hope to add more as I find them, but finding worthwhile ones to add has not been easy.

As for whether I'll keep the "Take Action" section around, it is hard to say. I want to do my part to help spread the word on things we can do. I'm just not sure about the most effective ways to do so.