Perhaps the best model for a structured campaign is Jim Warren's successful campaign to get California legislative information made publicly available on the Internet. Rather than send his messages out to discussion groups, Jim created his own mailing list devoted solely to this campaign. Both types of action alerts are obviously modeled on things that have been happening on paper, and lately via fax machines, for a long time. What computer networks do is make them a lot cheaper. In particular, a networked alert can travel extremely far from its origin by being forwarded from friend to friend and list to list, without any additional cost being imposed on the original sender.
Action alerts can travel through the net forever.
They may, for example, sleep in someone's mailbox for weeks, months, or years and then suddenly get a new life as the mailbox's owner forwards it to a new set of lists. You can't prevent people from modifying your alert as they pass it along. Fortunately, at least in my experience, this only happens accidentally, as extra commentary accumulates at the top and bottom of the message as it gets forwarded. So put a bold row of dashes or something like that at the top and bottom so extra stuff will look extra. The Amnesty alert network actively discouraged this kind of forwarding.