Page 185 - The Resilient Organization

172 Part Four: Step 3. Rehearsing a Culture of Resilience

and player, where the bat served as the marker that indicated fund-raising
progress. The campaign raised $3 million in the last nine days of June, well
over a half-million dollars on the last day of the quarter. Its receipts for the
quarter totaled over $7.5 million, surpassing an initial public goal of
approximately $6 million, and the campaign raised more money for the
quarter than any of the other competing campaigns.
Internet-enabled tactics such as the fund-raising bat and associated per-
sonal bat pages available to supporters helped Dean’s campaign set new
fund-raising records for a Democratic presidential candidate, both for a
single quarter and for the entire year before the presidential primaries.
These tactics entailed using digital media applications to report fund-raising
progress both regularly and publicly, to make the donation process convenient
and interactive, and to help supporters solicit their personal networks for
additional contributions.

The Evolution of Voter Contact Activities

Howard Dean’s list of supporters at the start of 2003 was hundreds of
people, a list too small to build a national campaign organization (Trippi,
2004), but it was to expand significantly by the end of 2003, enough to
include numerous unofficial groups located in many different places. Dean’s
campaign organization performed a number of activities to facilitate
contact with its potential supporters and voters: developing a business rela-
tionship with the Internet start-up Meetup.com, a service that used online
tools to help people with common interests find each other offline in their
local communities; developing its official Web site Blog for America as a
virtual campaign headquarters; and developing online software to facilitate
individuals’ finding local campaign events.
Dean for America also facilitated contact among campaign participants
through its GetLocal tools, which its software programmers developed and
made available for the campaign Web site’s visitors to post, locate, and sign
up for DFA events. A recurring theme in DFA’s use of online tools for mak-
ing contact with potential voters was translating online behavior into
offline action. Meetup.com and GetLocal tools were online services that
facilitated in-person contact. The campaign’s blog served as an online
channel to making calls to action. Some actions could be performed