The Mice That Roared

What charities can learn from political campaigns about raising funds and rallying supporters online

Each month, 5,000 to 10,000 people who regularly read the Heritage Foundation’s news and opinion Web site

meet in person in 150 cities to discuss current events with fellow conservatives and get to know each other.

While very few of the people who join those gatherings have much in common with Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, they can thank his presidential campaign for bringing them together.

More than six months after Mr. Dean’s campaign fizzled, his approach to soliciting donors and organizing volunteers online continues to have an effect not just on the presidential campaign, but on charities and advocacy groups that are borrowing some of the campaign’s ideas.

Jonathan Garthwaite, director of Townhall.com, the site operated by Heritage, says that after watching the Dean campaign, he realized he wanted to find a way to reach out to the site’s readers and get them to organize local, in-person gatherings, in the hopes of building a grass-roots network of conservatives.

The most important thing he has taken away from this election cycle is a lesson that the Dean campaign drove home, says Mr. Garthwaite: “If you give your supporters a sense of ownership and the ability to give feedback, they will be your best salesmen.”

In addition to using the medium to rally the troops, the 2004 presidential campaign has also demonstrated that the Internet can be a potent tool for fund raising. Of the more than $213-million President Bush’s campaign had raised through May 31, $7.6-million came in online. For Senator Kerry, the results have been even more significant. Online contributions accounted for $56-million of the more than $182-million his campaign had raised through June 30.

‘Get Their Hearts and Minds’

Observers in the nonprofit and political worlds say that, if nonprofit organizations are realistic in their expectations, they can learn a lot from the way candidates have used the Internet to attract supporters, build relationships, and raise money. The experts caution, however, that the short, definite time frame of political campaigns and the intense news-media coverage that accompanies them are important factors driving the presidential candidates’ big online fund-raising numbers — factors that charities don’t often encounter.

So rather than focusing on the amount candidates are raising online, charities should look at how the candidates are raising those dollars.

This year’s presidential race — Dean’s campaign, in particular — has shown that online fund raising works when supporters feel they are an important part of the overall effort, says Phil Noble, founder of PoliticsOnline, an Internet publication. “It’s the old, ‘Get their hearts and minds, and their dollars will follow.’”

The Dean campaign didn’t just ask for money online, it also solicited advice. In fact, Howard Dean decided to forgo federal financing of his campaign, and the spending limits that come with it, after putting the question to his e-mail list of more than 600,000 supporters.

Pointing to that decision as an example, Mike McCurry, a former press secretary to President Clinton who is now a communications consultant in Washington, argues that charitable groups can also use the interactivity of online communications to give supporters a role in making decisions at an organization.

“You can begin to have a two-way dialogue with people,” says Mr. McCurry. “It’s a call and response. I give you some critical piece of information about an issue that’s important, and I ask you for your opinion back.”

Getting the Word Out

Campaigns are also recognizing that technology has made it easy for people at the grass-roots level to quickly get messages out to family members, friends, and colleagues, says John Hlinko, co-founder of DraftWesleyClark.com and later director of Internet strategy for the Clark for President campaign.

“I don’t know exactly how many people heard Paul Revere shout, ‘The Redcoats are coming,’” says Mr. Hlinko. “But I’d be willing to bet the average e-mail user has more people in their address book than heard Paul Revere that entire night — and that launched a revolution.”

To tap into those networks, charities should craft e-mails that are conversational and tell a story, recommends Mr. Hlinko. He learned at the Clark campaign that supporters were far less likely to forward an e-mail message that says “We’re really going to need you to make phone calls on Tuesday” than one that said, “Hey, we’re going to have the biggest phonathon ever, and you’re going to be part of it.”

But, says Mr. Hlinko, while e-mail can be a powerful tool to attract supporters to a cause or campaign, face-to-face interaction is what will seal their loyalty. So, like the Dean campaign and the Heritage Foundation, the Clark campaign turned to Meetup.com, a software company that provides online tools to help people who share a common interest use the Internet to get together in person.

Veterans always say that soldiers go into battle for their fellow troops, not for their commanders, says Mr. Hlinko. “Why shouldn’t the same be true for activism?” he asks. “Sure, there’s a larger cause, there’s a candidate, and you want to fight for him, but you’re so much more likely to keep on fighting if you form close bonds with the people who are in that battle with you.”

Campaign Gifts

New research suggests that the Meetup-organized gatherings might also lead to bigger campaign contributions.

A study of 820 people who attended such events for Democratic presidential candidates from January to March found that political contributions and volunteering was highest among those who had attended multiple gatherings.

People who had just attended their first event before taking the survey had on average given a total of $154. That figure rose to $216 for participants who had attended two previous gatherings, and $510 for respondents who had attended more than three previous Meetups.

Christine B. Williams, a professor of government at Bentley College, in Waltham, Mass., who oversaw the research, cautions against drawing too much of a cause-and-effect relationship from the findings. “It may be that political activists go to Meetups, as opposed to Meetups creating political activists,” she says.

But Ms. Williams and her research partner, Bruce Weinberg, associate professor of marketing at Bentley, also found that respondents who attended gatherings for candidates for whom such meetings were an integral part of their campaign strategy — Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, and Dennis Kucinich — were twice as likely to have attended a Meetup first and then gotten involved in the campaigns as respondents who attended such events for John Kerry and John Edwards.

“What it suggests is that Meetups can add value to political organizing if it is integrated with the campaign strategy and it’s done early on,” says Ms. Williams. “If you’re already established and you adopt it later as an extra little thing, it doesn’t seem to be adding value in the same way.”

Keeping Control

Organizing on their own using tools like Meetup gives supporters a greater sense of investment in the work that they’re doing. But the flip side of self-organizing is that a campaign or cause benefiting from the meetings loses some control over what is being done in its behalf.

Michael Cornfield, associate research professor at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, in Washington, recommends that nonprofit organizations put “feedback loops” in place before giving supporters self-organizing tools.

In the case of volunteer-organized gatherings, he says, a charity might create an online form that asks meeting coordinators questions such as how many people attended and what was discussed. After the designated meeting time, an organization could send the coordinators an e-mail reminder to complete the form — and follow up with coordinators who don’t comply.

Without such communication tools in place, “you open yourself up to unpleasant surprises if somebody does something in your name or fails to do something in your name that you expected,” he says.

‘Playing Catch-Up’

Some of the lessons that political campaigns have learned about the Internet have a familiar ring to people who work with charities and advocacy groups to run walkathons, organize lobbying drives, and pursue other charitable activities.

“The political campaigns are playing catch-up in 2004,” says Rob Stuart, senior vice president of strategic relations at Advocacy Inc., a company in Washington that provides Internet consulting to both political campaigns and nonprofit groups. He says a lot of the approaches that are considered innovative this election cycle, and that political campaigns have expanded and improved upon, originated with nonprofit advocacy groups, particularly MoveOn.org.

What has struck Mr. Stuart, however, is how much faster the rate of adoption has been in the political world. Using the Internet for organizing and fund raising is fast becoming the norm in state and even local races, while many charities are still sitting on the sidelines.

“Campaigns are all on the bandwagon,” says Mr. Stuart, “whereas I don’t see as much urgency — there’s interest, but there isn’t as much urgency — on the nonprofit side.”

But even if the tactics the campaigns employ aren’t new, fund-raising experts say there is much that organizations can learn from the way campaigns have put them into practice.

“The act of giving to a political campaign is often more of an impulse buy, in that you’re inspired by something you see or you’re infuriated by something you see,” says Greg Nelson, who works with both political and nonprofit clients as managing partner at the Carol/Trevelyan Strategy Group, a fund-raising and advocacy consulting company. “The act of giving to a nonprofit is generally more well thought out,” he says.

Nevertheless, nonprofit organizations should be ready to take advantage of moments when current events and news coverage put a spotlight on their causes, and give them the opportunity to be an “impulse buy” as well, he says.

While charities should make sure the technology is in place to accept a sudden influx of online donations, it is just as important to have a plan for how it will respond to a blitz of attention from the news media, says Toby A. Smith, Web strategist for CARE USA, an international-development organization in Atlanta.

“You have to have thought out the tricky questions,” says Mr. Smith. For CARE, that meant wrestling with the question of what to do if journalists start covering an emergency, such as an outbreak of violence, but the charity’s employees who are working where the unrest erupted argue that for security reasons the organization shouldn’t talk about it. Says Mr. Smith, “You have to have all that worked out, or else you are not going to be effective.”

Nonprofit organizations would also do well to examine the way that political campaigns break up the their overarching goals into a series of smaller objectives, says Rick Christ, senior consultant at NPAdvisors, a company in Warrenton, Va., that provides online fund-raising advice to charities.

Political campaigns, he says, create “big days” regularly — whether it be an important endorsement, a stumble by the opposition, or a fund-raising reporting deadline — which then give the campaign opportunities to talk to their supporters. Nonprofit organizations can do the same thing, says Mr. Christ. Among his suggestions: A zoo could announce the birth of a new animal or a charity could remind donors of a matching-grant deadline.

“Instead of World War II, it’s that next island in the South Pacific,” says Mr. Christ. “You want to focus on this one island with overwhelming force, claim victory, and move on.”

Timing Matters

While the success of candidates’ use of the Internet has many nonprofit organizations plotting how to translate the campaigns’ techniques for their own work, observers point to some sharp differences between the nonprofit and political worlds that they say should temper charities’ expectations.

Gregg Small, executive director of the Washington Toxics Coalition, in Seattle, notes that the lifespan and outlook of a political campaign is very different than that of the average nonprofit organization.

“Electoral campaigns are on this very short, urgent timeline,” says Mr. Small. “Every day is life or death at some level in electoral campaigns, and they are guided by a very finite deadline.” Nonprofit groups, on the other hand, have to look beyond the immediate challenges they face and think in terms of years, rather than weeks or months, he says. “We are working to build long-term relationships and know that if we win on one particular issue, it’s not going to solve the long-term problems that we are working on.”

A practical way that the difference in timelines plays out, says Mr. Small, is in how often the coalition contacts its members. He says that sending out e-mail as often as the campaigns have — in some cases, almost daily — would jeopardize the relationships his group has worked so hard to build. “We would be losing members by the boatloads,” says Mr. Small. “It would be a disaster.”