Cover Sheet
I am creating a wiki that contains as its front page an essay to convince Oregonians who may support physician assisted suicide that the Death With Dignity Act lacks safeguards for vulnerable people, and to persuade them to write to their representatives, urging the amendment of the act. User-editable parts of the wiki would have contributed resources—perhaps sample letters, personal experiences, or links to websites with supplemental information.
Ideally, this would be on its own domain (maybe something like amenddeathwithdignity.org), but I didn't have time to set this up.
Audience
My audience, as I mentioned above, is Oregonians who support the right-to-die movement, but may not be aware of the pitfalls in the Death With Dignity Act. They haven't necessarily read my convincing argument, so this essay aims to convince as well as persuade. This audience is appropriate because the Death With Dignity Act originally passed with 51% of the vote (and later, when a motion was on the ballot to repeal the Act, 60% of the voters voted not to repeal it). I assume most people who support the Act do so under the assumption that it has reasonable protections in place, and I aim to convince them otherwise, and to compel them to spread the word and write to their representatives about changing the law.
Reaching the Audience
While getting to the top of a Google search would be difficult without many people linking to the site, I could use Google's AdWords service to buy placement beside the search results. Basically, I would choose keywords for which the ad would show, for example "death with dignity" or "right-to-die" and "oregon", in order to show the ads for relevant searches.
But really, search engine placement depends on people already looking for these results. To get to people who aren't already interested in this, I would need to post flyers or get ads in some Oregon newspapers, simply pointing people to a site about facts on the Death With Dignity Act.
Dive in!
I haven't written much of the "resources" content (the user-contributable stuff) yet. But here's the main page.