curious, a quick scan of the Georgia SOS finds connections with Herman Cain and Bob Barr... Not sure what that means.

Egad! I talked briefly to their VP of Product Development at SoCon last weekend, but I had no idea he was on the dark side! (Facebook stalk.)

That's okay, we have our own tools, right? RIGHT?

Well, the site's nice-looking, but janky on Safari. And the marketing feels a bit dishonest -- they only have one product, which they pitch as separate products (w/ the same name!) depending on what kind of organization you work with. But I'm still interested in knowing more about 'em -- it'd be great to see, say, a screenshot.

The Perdue campaign was hardly the only Southern Republican governor campaign to win handily in November, Sanford got 55% and Riley got 58%. Extend that to just Governor's running for re-election and you can throw in a blowout win in Tennessee, even though he is a Democrat. These guys will have to prove that their program somehow made the difference, or just seek out clients that have a lot of money to burn and are looking to burn it on the next cool thing.

It's interesting to me that they don't seem to put Republican ID on their website. In the political business, you generally have to pick a side and work for it -- if they don't do that they might have a hard time getting clients because of perceived trust issues.

Check out this chart on their site:

http://www.wethecitizens.com/next_step.html

And how much of a product is it, really? I have a sneaking suspicion that a big part of their strength is that they're young, they can program, and they speak the lingo of that scary-scary web 2.0 -- and if you have that, you can get older and/or less geeky/hip people to pay good money for not-so-much (a suspicion about many such deployments that was not at all dispelled by SoCon07).

Here's the achilles' heel of it: "Consider this... Your Revolution2 network starts with 6700 supporters. Each supporter then recruits one person a month who volunteers 20 minutes a month and commits to a single, 5-hour day in the final month of the election." Yeah, or, they DON'T. Once again, you can lead e-horses to water, but you can't make them get off the couch. Or something.

Well, not exactly. They've closed the "volunteer loop" by offering feedback, points, prizes, etc. for the most active volunteers. It may seem like nothing, but it's something. It could be the difference between a bunch of list lurkers and actual working volunteers.

Yeah -- I like the part about the feedback score. In other respects, though, this reminds me of capabalities in the toolsets of Blue State Digital and Democracy in Action, among others. Really curious to see whether this has a spin that vaults it above the competition.

1.2 billion yard signs?

(Pssst- let's not tell them that yard signs don't work. Hee hee.)

Re: the math in that chart: clearly they had a formula they used. Still, the result was so absurd -- eleventy _billion_ volunteerz!!! -- that I wanted to cue the music from that scene in _Austin Powers_ where Dr. Evil threatens the Security Council. I'm just sayin'. :)

Shelby: I'm the VP of Product Development you met at SoCon07, and I wouldn't say I'm on the "dark side" - not everything's about choosing sides.

Truly, while you can't force every volunteer to invite even one of their other friends, others will invite [literally] hundreds. The main point there is that campaigns find tons of volunteers they didn't know they had, it averages out to exponential volunteer growth, and those volunteers tell you the ways they're most interested in helping.

As MelGX points out, closing the volunteer loop, points and prizes, etc. are some of the special sauce in our products.

Greg: The products are similar in name and features, but these different types of organizations have different needs, different tasks they need expedited, different leadership structures, and vastly larger or smaller volunteer bases. There are some partial screenshots sprinkled across the site - other than that, we're only currently showing the software in live demos and with our clients.

Damn! Now they know that yard signs don't work.

I guess we'll have to start making those 1.4 billion phone calls instead. Narrowly targeted, of course.

So Rob, if I fill out the little online form for a presentation, will you book it?

Mel: That form will feed you to our sales team - not sure what they'll do with you, but feel free to submit. I'm tossing around the idea of us giving a presentation for bloggers in the area, and we'll be in touch if we put such an event together.

As a staffer at Democracy for America while we developed and built up DFA-Link (now at 40K registered users), I'm excited to see that a company is really focusing on this "social mobilization" aspect of technology. Seeing that they have fellow Tech grads on staff I wish them well, even if they are for the "other side".

However, I do agree that there is seems to be too much hype in the marketing language, and not just the 1.4 billion number. In the Atlanta Business article from December, it was mentioned how 26,000 invites were sent for the Perdue campaign. This honestly is not very many. DFA-Link users sent several times that amount in the same election cycle, and we weren't an active campaign but rather an organization. I would guess that Obama's site has generated just as many invites so far for Georgians.

Secondly, there already do exist tools that track online activity, and there have always been prizes and promotions awarded to the best recruiters and online activists. Those tactics have existed since the Dean for America days. As the Cobb County DFA group knows (and I was pulling for them at the time), DFA awarded a free training academy weekend last March to the group who could recruit the most members in an NCAA Tourney-like competition (the prize ultimately went to NJ for Democracy).

Rob, don't "toss it around", just make it happen.

I invite you bring your laptop to my studio in Midtown on Wednesday, February 28th at 7:00pm. We've got everything you need, web access, a large screen projector and tasty refreshments.

We'll invite about 50 friends from local Democratic groups, parties, campaigns and blogs and you can give us your best pitch. Email me at mel@georgiafordemocracy.org to confirm or choose another date/time/location.

Luigi, even though the tools have existed in some form or another, they haven't really been put into practice. For example, one of the Gubernatorial campaigns here supposedly purchased a "volunteer module" for their site (from an aforementioned firm), but never once used it. Either they didn't understand it, were not properly trained, or it didn't work.

Instead, they continued to send out text emails to (what seemed like), a random selection of people. Sometimes I got them, sometimes not. It was totally low tech and a complete mess.

Taylor had the same problem recruiting volunteers. So excuse me if I think 26,000 invites sounds huge. This is probably more people than are in the entire DPG database.

I suggest that you warn anyone who might attend such an event of the possible pitfalls of sharing names, data, etc with a clearly right-leaning organization. I don't think all these tools they "claim" to offer are worth giving getting pimped over.

I think you guys are missing the point. An IT vendor is not (or should not be), in the political consulting business. In fact, most of the best IT firms are not "color coded". For example, PlusThree (the vendor for John Edwards), has no partisan info on the site:

http://plusthree.com/

Are they a "blue company"? I think so, but I'm not sure. Besides, how many "red sites" are set up using blogger, MT, scoop, whatever? There are even a few Republicans using CampaignWindow.

Tools are tools. The day any IT vendor breaks confidence and gives away data, lists, whatever to a competing client, is the day they are out of business. The first questions might be: Does the software reside on client's server or is it proprietary? Are there confidentiality agreements in place? Is this a software package, or part of a larger consulting agreement?

That doesn't mean I don't have reservations. You'll notice from the initial post that I wondered whether or not they would be a partisan firm. If in fact they've got something special here, and are willing to vend to Democrats, then it's worth checking out.

Just FYI: Rob writes that end of Feb. is a little ambitious and they will try to schedule something for us in March or April.

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