After the Washington State Team returned from the 2002 States Institute, we realized that our first task would be building grassroots awareness and support for International Education in Washington state. We knew there were many pockets of success around the state, but people were not networking across the state or across organizations (e.g., schools to non-profits, parents to business, colleges to preschools, etc.). That's why we decided to start by building a website to help us get the message out.

The primary purposes of the original site were reflected in the main site navigation:

About the Coalition - learn about the Washington State Coalition for International Education and its involvement with the National Coalition for International Education Calendar - track dates of upcoming events across the state that support international education News Room - find out what's happening in the news and access Media Press Kits about international education Summit - find out about the P-20 International Education Summit "Teaching and Learning in a Global Community" Get Involved - join our efforts to promote international education in Washington State Contacts - find out how to contact the Washington State Coalition for International Education

We wanted to let people know that:

The website was originally launched on a free community-based server: http://www.scn.org/internationaledwa/, but we soon decided to move it to a reasonably priced professional web presence provider to ensure 24/7 availability. We chose the "silver" ($19.95/month) plan at http://fullservicehosting.com/ based on features and testimonials and the fact that they were a local, Seattle-based company. Actually launching the website was quite easy once it was designed and built. The "publish" feature of Microsoft Frontpage, for example, will automatically move all of the updated pages to the server. You can literally edit and publish the site several times in just a few minutes.

Once the website was launched, we used it as the central point for storing and sharing meeting summaries, announcements, and links to organizations that wanted to be part of the Coalition. That made it very easy to let anyone know by email (at no cost) the current "state" of our Coalition.

We built our initial email list by holding a focus group of about 30 people involved with International Education in schools, colleges and universities, and non-profit organizations. These organizations all agreed to be part of the Washington State Coalition for International Education, so we listed links to their organizations on the Contacts page of the web site. The Coalition quickly grew because people would forward our email messages to their colleagues, who, in turn, asked to be part of the Coalition. In addition, we would follow up on candidate leads by sending an email with links to our website and an invitation to join the Coalition (see Sample Email).

Sample Email I'm a Fulbright alum and member of the Fulbright Association, Puget Sound Chapter. I just received this notice in the ASCD bulletin: Interested in INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION? The Fulbright Teacher and Administrator Exchange arranges direct classroom exchanges for teachers of all levels. We also offer six-week observation exchanges for administrators in more than a dozen countries and eight-week classical seminars in Italy and Greece. The annual application deadline is October 15 for the following year's program. For more information, please visit www.fulbrightexchanges.org. I would like permission to add a link to your site from the International Education Washington site that we have created in support of our state's involvement in the National Coalition for International Education in the Schools http://internationaled.org. I would add the link to our Resources page: http://internationaledwa.org/resources.htm. or, if you would like to be listed as part of our Coalition, I would add a link to our Contacts page: http://internationaledwa.org/contacts.htm  www.fulbrightexchanges.org The Fulbright Teacher and Administrator Exchange arranges direct classroom exchanges for teachers of all levels. We also offer six-week observation exchanges for administrators in more than a dozen countries and eight-week classical seminars in Italy and Greece. The annual application deadline is October 15 for the following year's program.

Our next big thrust in growth was due to publicizing the P-20 International Education Summit, which was funded primarily by a State Innovations grant from the Asia Society. Being very cost-conscious, we relied more on electronic communications and networking than on paper mailings. We asked everyone in the Coalition to send out information about the Summit and to include it in their organization's calendar. Some of the organizations that publicized the Summit for us included:

• East Asia Resource Center of the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies
• Ethnic Heritage Council
• New Horizons for Learning
• Washington State Association for Multicultural Education WSAME
• World Affairs Council

We created an online Registration Form for the Summit, which allowed us to collect contact information from participants and find out how they heard about the Summit. The vast majority of them did hear about it via email or the web. To engage Coalition members in planning the Summit, we stored relevant Summit documents on a Summit Planning page.

During the Summit, we asked people to complete a Summit Contact Form (pdf file, opens in a new window) where they could choose to sign up for one or more of three listservs that we created following the Summit. From these forms we got about 200 people to sign up for the News listserv (to receive a bi-monthly E-Newsletter), about 50 to sign up for the Advocacy listserv (to become more involved in policy-level action), and several dozen additions to the Coalition listserv (for leaders in International Education).

Setting up the listservs themselves was quite easy, given the tools available from the web presence provider (i.e. the host of our website). Our web plan includes unlimited email accounts (i.e. with our web address somename@internationaledwa.org). These can be individual mail boxes (e.g., michele@internationaledwa.org) or lists (e.g., steeringcommittee@internationaledwa.org). The lists allow you to store multiple email addresses in them and specify parameters for the listserv (for example, is the list moderated or can anyone on the list post messages to it?). Once I had the list of emails from Summit participants who wanted to be on the news listserv, it was literally a matter of copying the list and pasting it into the listserv field for batch subscriber creation. It took about 1 minute.

Since the Summit, we have been using the E-Newsletter as a way to further build the Coalition and our subscriptions to the news listserv. We encourage recipients to forward the E-Newsletter to colleagues and invite them to sign up on the Get Involved Form on our site. (We could allow people to sign up directly to the listservs, but we are still interested in getting more detailed contact information, such as organization and title, and, for teachers, what subjects or grade levels they teach. This makes the process a little more manual for the webmaster, but it's still quite easy to manage.) We now have over 170 individual members of the Coalition, 250 subscribers to the News, and 56 subscribers to the Advocacy listservs. Of course, these individuals now connect with dozens of organizations and hundreds of other individuals across the state.

What's Next?

The beauty of working with the web is that it is always evolving. For example, since advocacy was identified as a priority area for the Coalition at the Summit, we have added an Advocacy page to the website. We've also added links to all of the E-Newsletters on the News & Events page so that people can peruse past newsletters and quickly get up to speed on "what's happening" in International Education in Washington state. We'll undoubtedly be adding new email listservs too, as the need arises. That's quite a bang for the buck at $19.95/month!

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