Page 184 - The Resilient Organization

Postcard No. 2 from Hanover, New Hampshire 171

nevertheless had interesting ideas and a record in the area of health-care
reform. Nevertheless, as the year 2003 progressed, Dean was to raise more
money than any other presidential candidate in his party. After lagging in
fund-raising in early 2003, compared to the candidates who were widely
perceived as major candidates, Dean’s campaign raised the most money of
any Democratic candidate during the second quarter. By the end of the third
quarter, Dean for America’s cumulative fund-raising for the year had
surpassed the other campaigns, and it had broken his party’s fund-raising
record for a single quarter by a presidential candidate, which was
previously set by Bill Clinton as an incumbent president during his 1996
reelection campaign. Howard Dean completed the calendar year with $50
million in total fund-raising, a level far enough above the other candidates
to help grant a perception that he would be his party’s eventual candidate
for president.

Small Donations via the Internet

“Small donations” soon became a focus of the Dean campaign. To qualify
as the first Democratic candidate for federal matching funds for the 2004
presidential elections would mean raising a minimum of $5,000 in multiple
states. Although other political campaign organizations have used the
Internet for fund-raising (for example, presidential candidate John McCain
did so in the 2000 primaries), it was in March 2003 that the Dean cam-
paign began to rely on and solicit small donations via the Internet as a
public operational strategy. In an inaugural post on the campaign’s Call to
Action Blog on March 15, DFA campaign manager Joe Trippi invited
supporters to contribute whatever they could in advance of March 30, the
important deadline to report fund-raising for the first quarter of 2003 to the
Federal Elections Commission.
Dean’s campaign departed from this reporting practice by making its
fund-raising status public during the final days of the second quarter in
2003. The campaign used a fund-raising “thermometer” concept, one pop-
ularized by the United Way in which the fund-raising organization has a
graphical representation of its goal and indicates with a rising red marker
the cumulative progress toward that goal. The Dean campaign’s staff
members adapted this concept by posting online a graphic of a baseball bat