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http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64340,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2
It's the stuff of political legend. In 1998, appalled by Congress' drawn-out, taxpayer-funded preoccupation with protein stains on a Gap dress, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd wanted to send a message to Congress to censure the president already and move on.
They sensed that other people might feel the same way, so they built a website and sent e-mail to about 100 friends asking them to sign an online petition to send to Congress. Within a week 100,000 people responded. Eventually, the number grew to half a million.
Thus a national movement was born.
"That was the key moment for them," said Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for one-time presidential candidate Howard Dean, whose online campaign techniques were inspired by MoveOn's success. "But they've had many moments since."
From that petition six years ago, MoveOn.org has become a powerhouse, grass-roots organization that has helped re-energize politics in the United States and force Washington lawmakers to pay attention to voices outside the capital beltway.
Today, with no office and no formal organization other than a website and a handful of staff members spread around the country, MoveOn has amassed more than 2 million members and raised millions of dollars for candidates.
In addition to igniting the populist-fueled Dean campaign, MoveOn has helped elect congressional representatives who are in alignment with members' values and who pass legislation on Capitol Hill. They've committed to raising $50 million this season to support more candidates. And that's just the beginning.
Last week, the organization filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission accusing Fox News of false advertising under its "fair and balanced" slogan. They've sponsored a TV ad to get Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired. And now they're addressing electronic voting machines, asking the government to require a voter-verified paper trail for digital voting machines.
But MoveOn founders Blades and Boyd never intended to get involved in politics or take on Bill O'Reilly and George Bush.
Blades, an attorney mediator, and Boyd, a computer programmer, met more than 20 years ago while playing soccer. The husband-and-wife team became known for flying toasters when, as founders of Berkeley Systems, they helped develop the After Dark screensavers, which included the Magritte-esque winged toasters that flew across thousands of computer screens in the early '90s.
In 1997 they sold the company for $13.8 million and spent a year designing educational software and working on art projects until Congress became mired in the sordid affair between a president and his intern. That's when the second act of their life began.
"We had no intention or expectation for it to become big at all," Blades said of that first petition drive. "We were thunderstruck when 100,000 people signed it in a week. The penetration of the Internet was not nearly so deep (then) as it is today."
Blades said it helped that the desire to move Congress forward had wide consensus.
"We had Republicans, Democrats, Green Party and Libertarians that recognized that there were pressing national issues that were being neglected because we were focused on a scandal for six months," Blades said.
The petition was supposed to be a one-time thing. But after Congress voted to impeach Clinton, Blades and Boyd launched their "We Will Remember" campaign to help raise money for candidates running against lawmakers who voted to impeach. A day later they had pledges for more than $5 million.
That ability to raise bundles of cash in a matter of days has been a hallmark of their organization.
During that first effort, the money didn't go to MoveOn directly; members pledged to donate to their campaign of choice. But by 1999, the organization formed a political action committee, or PAC, to collect political contributions.
They raised about $2.4 million online in 2000, which they contributed to the campaigns of 30 House and Senate candidates. The average contribution from MoveOn members was just $35.
"This was the first indication to us that you really could raise significant money online in small amounts, with average citizens making a real difference," Blades told the audience at an American Civil Liberties Union conference last month.
From then on, whenever the organization asked for money from members, it rolled in.
In 2003 they needed $35,000 to publish an anti-war ad in The New York Times and received $400,000. They raised half a million dollars for Oxfam America's relief efforts in Iraq.
And since October, members have contributed $10 million in small donations to MoveOn's Voter Fund to create and air anti-Bush ads in battleground states like Ohio and Florida. Billionaire financier George Soros and philanthropist Peter Lewis offered matching funds up to $5 million, and director Errol Morris (Fog of War) has signed on to direct some of the ads, which will feature real Americans speaking, unscripted, about issues important to them.
"There is such power in people coming together," Blades said.
But money isn't all that members give. They helped register more than a million voters in concert with other organizations, met with federal lawmakers in their home districts, and hosted Bake Back the White House bake sales that raised $750,000. MoveOn and other organizations also launched a "virtual march" against the war, flooding the Senate and White House switchboards with more than a million phone calls, faxes and e-mails.
Last year, MoveOn sponsored a "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest, asking members to create their own campaign ads, and received 1,500 creative entries. Members picked 26 finalists, from which celebrity judges like Moby, Jack Black and Janeane Garafolo chose the winner.
Members were also ready to pay $1.6 million to air "Child's Pay," the winning ad, during this year's Super Bowl. But CBS turned them down on political grounds. Instead, the ad, which depicted children working in service and manufacturing jobs and asked the question "Guess who's going to pay off George Bush's $1 trillion deficit?" ran for five days around the president's state-of-the-union address. The ad's creator, an ad executive from Colorado, was a registered Republican until 1992.
In June 2003, fed up with how big-money insiders pick presidential nominees, MoveOn held an online primary to let members choose a nominee from among the nine candidates. MoveOn promised to endorse whichever candidate received more than 50 percent of the votes. About 300,000 people cast ballots, but no candidate passed the halfway mark. Dean came close with 44 percent; John Kerry received only 15 percent.
MoveOn then offered to advise the nine candidates about growing their campaigns online. But only Dean's campaign accepted the offer.
"Everybody else thought the Net was a joke," the campaign's Trippi said. "The joke from the Kerry campaign was that our (Dean campaign) meet-ups were like bar scenes out of Star Wars. I'm not sure they understood the power of MoveOn. (Our campaign) had to take off before other campaigns realized that MoveOn was something they should pay attention to."
Trippi had always been interested in MoveOn, but says he really took note when it helped organize a global candlelight vigil for peace in March 2003, in which more than 6,000 vigils lit up night skies around the world.
"One of the biggest questions at the time was: Could you use the Internet to connect people offline?" Trippi said. "We knew that people would obviously sit in front of their computers and send messages and grow an organization. But could you use people to do something offline in the community? Well, they did it."
Blades says the organization's success has come from really listening to what members want. MoveOn's staff of about a dozen people work out of homes in Berkeley, Maine and Japan, among other places, coordinating activities through instant messaging and weekly phone calls.
They conduct member surveys and read postings at the site's action forums to determine what members care about, and they let members vote on actions the organization will take. They work hard to make participation simple and easy. Each e-mail to members discusses only one issue and offers a direct, quick action for members to take.
"I think they are very quick to respond to what's going on, and they've got a good feeling for their members' interests," said Rich Garella, creator of one of the "Bush in 30 Seconds" ads and now a consultant to MoveOn for e-voting issues. "They tend to work on things where there is a good chance of success and where they can deliver results and make people feel that what they did actually made a difference."
MoveOn Executive Director Peter Schurman agrees that MoveOn has struck a chord with members but says it's not the only progressive organization seeing a surge in grass-roots participation.
"Whenever you have such a huge disconnect between where Washington is heading and where people want to go, you have an opportunity for huge participation in grass-roots movements," he said. "The Internet has helped enable that. We're fortunate to be part of it, but we don't take credit for it."
Blades says many progressive lawmakers are happy to have MoveOn members pressure them because it helps them justify doing what they already want to do.
"There are a lot of fine politicians that would love to do good work, but don't have the political capital necessary to get things done. The folks in D.C. desperately need us to make them do it," she said.
Blades says that however important this year is, she can't wait until Nov. 3. "Because that's when we can start working on the long-term issues and creating support for those politicians who want to do good work."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64340,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2
It's the stuff of political legend. In 1998, appalled by Congress' drawn-out, taxpayer-funded preoccupation with protein stains on a Gap dress, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd wanted to send a message to Congress to censure the president already and move on.
They sensed that other people might feel the same way, so they built a website and sent e-mail to about 100 friends asking them to sign an online petition to send to Congress. Within a week 100,000 people responded. Eventually, the number grew to half a million.
Thus a national movement was born.
"That was the key moment for them," said Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for one-time presidential candidate Howard Dean, whose online campaign techniques were inspired by MoveOn's success. "But they've had many moments since."
From that petition six years ago, MoveOn.org has become a powerhouse, grass-roots organization that has helped re-energize politics in the United States and force Washington lawmakers to pay attention to voices outside the capital beltway.
Today, with no office and no formal organization other than a website and a handful of staff members spread around the country, MoveOn has amassed more than 2 million members and raised millions of dollars for candidates.
In addition to igniting the populist-fueled Dean campaign, MoveOn has helped elect congressional representatives who are in alignment with members' values and who pass legislation on Capitol Hill. They've committed to raising $50 million this season to support more candidates. And that's just the beginning.
Last week, the organization filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission accusing Fox News of false advertising under its "fair and balanced" slogan. They've sponsored a TV ad to get Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired. And now they're addressing electronic voting machines, asking the government to require a voter-verified paper trail for digital voting machines.
But MoveOn founders Blades and Boyd never intended to get involved in politics or take on Bill O'Reilly and George Bush.
Blades, an attorney mediator, and Boyd, a computer programmer, met more than 20 years ago while playing soccer. The husband-and-wife team became known for flying toasters when, as founders of Berkeley Systems, they helped develop the After Dark screensavers, which included the Magritte-esque winged toasters that flew across thousands of computer screens in the early '90s.
In 1997 they sold the company for $13.8 million and spent a year designing educational software and working on art projects until Congress became mired in the sordid affair between a president and his intern. That's when the second act of their life began.
"We had no intention or expectation for it to become big at all," Blades said of that first petition drive. "We were thunderstruck when 100,000 people signed it in a week. The penetration of the Internet was not nearly so deep (then) as it is today."
Blades said it helped that the desire to move Congress forward had wide consensus.
"We had Republicans, Democrats, Green Party and Libertarians that recognized that there were pressing national issues that were being neglected because we were focused on a scandal for six months," Blades said.
The petition was supposed to be a one-time thing. But after Congress voted to impeach Clinton, Blades and Boyd launched their "We Will Remember" campaign to help raise money for candidates running against lawmakers who voted to impeach. A day later they had pledges for more than $5 million.
That ability to raise bundles of cash in a matter of days has been a hallmark of their organization.
During that first effort, the money didn't go to MoveOn directly; members pledged to donate to their campaign of choice. But by 1999, the organization formed a political action committee, or PAC, to collect political contributions.
They raised about $2.4 million online in 2000, which they contributed to the campaigns of 30 House and Senate candidates. The average contribution from MoveOn members was just $35.
"This was the first indication to us that you really could raise significant money online in small amounts, with average citizens making a real difference," Blades told the audience at an American Civil Liberties Union conference last month.
From then on, whenever the organization asked for money from members, it rolled in.
In 2003 they needed $35,000 to publish an anti-war ad in The New York Times and received $400,000. They raised half a million dollars for Oxfam America's relief efforts in Iraq.
And since October, members have contributed $10 million in small donations to MoveOn's Voter Fund to create and air anti-Bush ads in battleground states like Ohio and Florida. Billionaire financier George Soros and philanthropist Peter Lewis offered matching funds up to $5 million, and director Errol Morris (Fog of War) has signed on to direct some of the ads, which will feature real Americans speaking, unscripted, about issues important to them.
"There is such power in people coming together," Blades said.
But money isn't all that members give. They helped register more than a million voters in concert with other organizations, met with federal lawmakers in their home districts, and hosted Bake Back the White House bake sales that raised $750,000. MoveOn and other organizations also launched a "virtual march" against the war, flooding the Senate and White House switchboards with more than a million phone calls, faxes and e-mails.
Last year, MoveOn sponsored a "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest, asking members to create their own campaign ads, and received 1,500 creative entries. Members picked 26 finalists, from which celebrity judges like Moby, Jack Black and Janeane Garafolo chose the winner.
Members were also ready to pay $1.6 million to air "Child's Pay," the winning ad, during this year's Super Bowl. But CBS turned them down on political grounds. Instead, the ad, which depicted children working in service and manufacturing jobs and asked the question "Guess who's going to pay off George Bush's $1 trillion deficit?" ran for five days around the president's state-of-the-union address. The ad's creator, an ad executive from Colorado, was a registered Republican until 1992.
In June 2003, fed up with how big-money insiders pick presidential nominees, MoveOn held an online primary to let members choose a nominee from among the nine candidates. MoveOn promised to endorse whichever candidate received more than 50 percent of the votes. About 300,000 people cast ballots, but no candidate passed the halfway mark. Dean came close with 44 percent; John Kerry received only 15 percent.
MoveOn then offered to advise the nine candidates about growing their campaigns online. But only Dean's campaign accepted the offer.
"Everybody else thought the Net was a joke," the campaign's Trippi said. "The joke from the Kerry campaign was that our (Dean campaign) meet-ups were like bar scenes out of Star Wars. I'm not sure they understood the power of MoveOn. (Our campaign) had to take off before other campaigns realized that MoveOn was something they should pay attention to."
Trippi had always been interested in MoveOn, but says he really took note when it helped organize a global candlelight vigil for peace in March 2003, in which more than 6,000 vigils lit up night skies around the world.
"One of the biggest questions at the time was: Could you use the Internet to connect people offline?" Trippi said. "We knew that people would obviously sit in front of their computers and send messages and grow an organization. But could you use people to do something offline in the community? Well, they did it."
Blades says the organization's success has come from really listening to what members want. MoveOn's staff of about a dozen people work out of homes in Berkeley, Maine and Japan, among other places, coordinating activities through instant messaging and weekly phone calls.
They conduct member surveys and read postings at the site's action forums to determine what members care about, and they let members vote on actions the organization will take. They work hard to make participation simple and easy. Each e-mail to members discusses only one issue and offers a direct, quick action for members to take.
"I think they are very quick to respond to what's going on, and they've got a good feeling for their members' interests," said Rich Garella, creator of one of the "Bush in 30 Seconds" ads and now a consultant to MoveOn for e-voting issues. "They tend to work on things where there is a good chance of success and where they can deliver results and make people feel that what they did actually made a difference."
MoveOn Executive Director Peter Schurman agrees that MoveOn has struck a chord with members but says it's not the only progressive organization seeing a surge in grass-roots participation.
"Whenever you have such a huge disconnect between where Washington is heading and where people want to go, you have an opportunity for huge participation in grass-roots movements," he said. "The Internet has helped enable that. We're fortunate to be part of it, but we don't take credit for it."
Blades says many progressive lawmakers are happy to have MoveOn members pressure them because it helps them justify doing what they already want to do.
"There are a lot of fine politicians that would love to do good work, but don't have the political capital necessary to get things done. The folks in D.C. desperately need us to make them do it," she said.
Blades says that however important this year is, she can't wait until Nov. 3. "Because that's when we can start working on the long-term issues and creating support for those politicians who want to do good work."
