Case Study: Sierra Club scales grassroots member engagement and automates hundreds of discussion lists with L-Soft LISTSERV

Sierra Club - Customer Case Study

The Sierra Club, a 600,000‑member grassroots environmental organization with 65 chapters and 400 local groups, needed to replace a proprietary, manually maintained email‑list system that limited participation to licensed leaders and excluded tens of thousands of members. In winter 1996 the Club chose L-Soft’s LISTSERV to create a scalable, volunteer‑managed discussion network that would allow broad member participation and decentralized list ownership.

L-Soft implemented LISTSERV along with training, help documentation, a lightweight server setup and governance tools (mission statements, a list‑naming hierarchy, and a supervising committee), plus a public NEW‑SC‑LISTS announcement list and a GETable list index. The result was rapid growth and self‑service subscription: by July 1999 Sierra Club had established over 370 lists with 22,300 subscribers, dramatically reducing manual maintenance and enabling far wider member engagement.

Sierra Club