Page 190 - The Resilient Organization

Postcard No. 2 from Hanover, New Hampshire 177

would be reasonably sustainable. The campaign organization quickly
adopted a different set of digital media tools from Meetup.com to establish
a physical presence in many local communities. It then adapted an existing
concept (the fund-raising thermometer) to a digital media form, using it to
collect the financial resources needed to remain competitive and then domi-
nate the fund-raising of competitors. The campaign organization’s use of
these digital tools became a natural aspect of its fund-raising and voter con-
tact activities, which may have encouraged the growing community of
Dean’s supporters to seek adoption and use of similar tools, in order to
create and sustain their unofficial DFA groups.
When the campaign organization was suspended, due to its failure to
win primaries and depletion of money, its groups and communities of sup-
porters remained, having been created and (in part) sustained through their
use of digital media technologies. The resilience of these communities pro-
vided the resources for Howard Dean to retire his campaign debts, as well
as to create and sustain a new organization Democracy for America, which
coexisted with a number of prior unofficial groups from Dean’s campaign
that have since become legal organizations.
The third, and increasingly commonplace, observation is that digital
media tools help make special-purpose organizations and communities
most visible to those who want to find them. Many digital applications
were developed by the campaign; yet without the availability of Yahoo!
groups, Meetup.com, and blogging capabilities, in particular, the DFA
would have been severely handicapped in its capacity to reach a wide com-
munity of supporters. These tools added a veneer of publicity to discourses
and events that until then might have been only locally known and
observed. Thus, with the use of digital media tools and infrastructure (for
example, online search engines), people are increasingly in the position to
attract and search for others who share their interests but who are beyond
the boundaries of what is geographically or socially approachable (Cattani,
Pennings, & Wezel, 2003).
Once these special-purpose organizations and communities are discov-
ered online, further communication and actions can subsequently occur in
other venues (for example, via in-person meetings and telephone) in a mix
of virtual and physical, online and offline activities. After discovery, these
organizations or communities might employ strategies that bind transient