The Dean campaign revolutionized politics by raising more than $25 million on the Internet, primarily from donations of under $100, while building an email list of more than 640,000 Americans. Dean supporters had used online software tools to organize more than 10,000 face-to-face events in communities all around the country.

Even America's young people, increasingly alienated from politics, were galvanized by the Dean campaign's deployment of Internet technology that was integral to their lifestyle. "One quarter of all our people who gave us money were under 30 years old," Dean, the former governor of Vermont, noted during his withdrawal speech before a small crowd of staff, supporters and volunteers in Burlington, Vermont. "This has been a campaign that has been extraordinarily different. The new approach [is]: planting seeds on the Internet, strengthening

John Pettitt /   DeanForAmerica.com   Howard Dean

[the] grassroots face to face, [and] obtaining support from hundreds of thousands of small donors . . . "

Dean began campaigning for the presidency on January 31, 2003, with just seven staff members, $157,000 in the bank, and 432 known supporters nationwide—"not even an asterisk in most of the polls," said former campaign manager Joe Trippi. Webmaster Mele had been working for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative in New York City before he joined the Dean campaign in May 2003 to be its only full-time Web worker. He built a Web team of young people, most of whom joined the campaign during the summer of 2003 when Dean was surging from last place to the front of a pack of nine Democrat presidential hopefuls.

By year's end, largely thanks to online support from more than 600,000 Americans, Dean had raised more money than any presidential candidate in U.S. history and had built an unprecedented organization of supporters—with one of the youngest and most inexperienced staffs ever assembled for a presidential campaign. The December issue of Esquire magazine profiled Mele as one of its "best and brightest."

Photo John Pettitt / DeanForAmerica.com

Two-thirds of the Dean campaign's 12,000-page, six-foot-tall Federal Election Commission report for the third quarter of 2003—the largest ever by a Democratic presidential campaign. It showed $7.4 million in contributions from 84,713 online donors, with an average contribution of $61.14. Note the bat on the right.

The Dean campaign raised a total of $2.6 million during the first three months of 2003. Another $7.6 million came rolling in during the second quarter of the year. This is when Mele invented the now legendary "bat"—an animated baseball player and bat that appeared on Dean's Web site each time the campaign launched a fundraising challenge. It attracted a game-show-like following because it encouraged Web site visitors to contribute money instantly through their credit cards. They could watch the bat fill up like a thermometer with the red color tracking the funds total.

Mele worked around the clock to keep the bat updated, often sleeping at his desk. In June the entire staff watched in awe as more than $700,000 flowed in on the final day of the quarter. "People saw that bat; they watched it fill; and they realized that there was a new way to practice politics," Mele said. "They saw that their small individual actions, taken as a collective whole, could revolutionize the process and provide a counter to big donors and corporations. Individual action mattered."

The bat is an example of how a simple Web tool helps Internet users connect with a social cause, motivating them to give money and participate. In August Dean was enroute to a major rally in midtown Manhattan's Bryant Park when Trippi received a phone call from Mele. He reported that the latest campaign challenge had raised $948,000 from more than 17,000 individual contributions averaging $58 apiece.

Photo by Garret Graff

Dean Campaign Manager Joe Trippi watches Nicco Mele at work at a campaign rally in Manhattan's Bryant Park as contributions mount on the Dean Web site

Mele noted that Dean supporters were posting messages on Dean's Internet blog saying they wanted to push the total to $1 million in the next 40 minutes. And he added, "If we make a million dollars, they want the governor to walk on stage in 40 minutes with a red bat and hold it up and say, 'You did it'."

"I thought it was a really cool idea," Trippi recalls. "And the blog was going—talking a lot about it, and they're all saying, 'Yeah, that's a cool idea. Let's do it.' . . . At this stage there are thousands and thousands of people reading this blog. We're praying that it doesn't crash. Everybody's reading these comments about this idea. So I turned to a poor, hapless staffer standing next to me and said 'Go get a red bat!'

"We get to Bryant Park and the governor [Dean] is standing behind the stage. We're waiting and we're looking at the clock, and we don't see the red bat, and we don't see the staffer. We're hitting a million dollars on the bat. It's up there on the big screen. We hit a million dollars. And I hear the announcer say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States, Howard Dean.'

Photo John Pettitt / DeanForAmerica.com

Hitting a million dollars on the bat on the big screen in Bryant Park

"The governor starts walking to get on stage and just as he does, I'm looking down the sidewalk and here's the kid, red bat in hand—running like crazy. As the governor hits the top of the stage, he tosses the bat up to the governor, and Howard Dean walks up on that stage and says, 'You did it!'

Photo by Garrett Graff

Nicco Mele (left) and Dean blogmaster Matt Gross in Bryant Park with the red bat

"That may sound unimportant, but that was the kind of empowerment that was going on in the Dean campaign. Those people out there knew that they had made that suggestion just 30 or 40 minutes ago.

"I think the suggestion came from somebody in Tucson, Arizona. And 30 minutes later somehow we get the governor himself walking up there and saying, 'You did this!' There was an ownership of the campaign, on small things like that. The campaign belonged to the people."

Web Tools Trigger Face-to-Face Activities

Much of the Dean campaign's early success can be attributed to its adoption and aggressive use of the Internet Web site Meetup.com, which at its peak allowed 189,000 Dean supporters to "meet up" in more than 1,100 locations around the country. They received guidance from the Dean campaign's Meetup director, a 23-year-old, recent Middlebury College graduate named Michael Silberman.

CBS/Eric Salzman

Michael Silberman

Like Mele and the rest of the Dean headquarters staff, Silberman worked 16-hour days as the number of Meetup participants snowballed from 423 people in January to more 189,000 in a little more than a year. "The Meetups became the key way for new supporters to learn more about Dean and our campaign," Silberman said. "We could never respond to the thousands of emails and hundreds of phone calls every day, but people knew that there was a local group of supporters they could visit to learn more—they just had to go online and punch in their zip code."

©Ryan Witt/ Deanforamerica

Dean makes a suprise visit to a meetup in Burlington, Vermont, in October 2003

Silberman and Mele say one of the greatest lessons they learned from the campaign is that when the Internet allows average citizens to participate in a campaign at unprecedented levels, these citizens learn to approach the experience like any other consumer transaction—they are looking for the same things whether they are ordering a book from Amazon.com or ordering dinner at the Olive Garden restaurant: they want good customer service and a return on their investment.

Converting Donors to Investors

Traditionally, the people who donate money to campaigns are not the same people who get involved in grassroots field organizing. With rare exceptions, the money donors will not be the people who go campaigning door to door in Iowa and New Hampshire in the dead of winter.

But the small-dollar online fundraising that has fundamentally transformed so many Democratic campaigns during the past year has also reshaped the relationship between donors and a campaign. Many of the Dean campaign's door knockers and volunteers had donated the cost of eating dinner out or buying a new pair of jeans to help their candidate. By giving small donations—the average Dean contribution was about $100—supporters came to think of themselves as customers or even shareholders in "their" campaign. They had, after all, paid for the campaign and they expected a return on their purchase/investment.

Now customers are doing the same thing online—not just in politics but in citizen sector organizations and other advocacy groups: They want to feel comfortable and they want to be in control of the interaction. "The supporters dealt with us like they did with Maytag," Silberman observes. "After all, as a campaign or advocacy group, you're competing for their attention like any other retailer—not just in the political realm, but also against everything else going on in people's everyday lives. Why should they spend time emailing friends about your campaign/cause/petition/action when their daughter has a soccer game and the Amazing Race 5 is on? You need to give them a reason to care."

Finding and Amplifying an Authentic Voice

While hanging out with other members of the Dean Web team in a coffee shop in Burlington, Mele proposed they form a new kind of political consulting firm that would take the lessons they had learned about online organizing and small-dollar fundraising and apply them to social causes throughout the country and the world. "We had seen the incredible power that grew out of Dean's grassroots supporters, and we didn't want to see that power—harnessed online for the first time—lost just because our candidate lost," Mele said.

In April, Mele, age 27, founded a firm that includes veterans of the Dean Web team and dubbed it EchoDitto Inc. It's a young team—the average age in the company is in the late 20s—and it lives and breathes technology and online communities. The official company blogs run the gamut from poetry to politics to wikis (collections of interlinked Web pages that can be posted and edited by anyone). Almost all of the team members maintain personal blogs with names like Movering, Toneland, and the News & TeleGraff. Mele gives out business cards that contain no information beyond his email address: nicco@nicco.org.

The name EchoDitto is based loosely on the nymph Echo in Greek mythology who was doomed to repeat others' words, causing them to truly hear them for the first time. "Our work helps people find their 'echo'—their authentic voice—and then amplify it to a broader audience," Mele said. "Echo and then ditto. A fresh voice, louder."

The name also reflects frustrations over the manufactured dialogue of television and focus-grouped politicians who "together conspired to drain real language and real meaning from our political process," Silberman said. "When we began to think about our company's mission and our guiding principles, we realized that what we were trying to do was return an authenticity of voice and language to democratic politics," Mele added.

"The lesson we took from the Dean campaign was that television's images don't have to rule. The rise of the Internet allows a different model. The Internet is a medium based on rawness and authenticity, and it also allows simple words and simple discussions to be amplified

Sona Virdi   Nicco Mele (left) and Garrett Graff, EchoDitto's vice president of online communications, watch election returns on Nov. 2

and expanded at rates never before possible. It empowers. It engages. It creates community. It creates two-way streets and avenues of communication where none had existed. It is democratic in the truest sense of the word."

EchoDitto seeks to develop the Internet as such a two-way communication tool. The Internet is a medium with many levels, Mele said. Online communities must be dynamic, informative, and welcoming, and thus multiple levels of engagement for visitors and information consumers are required to successfully harness the Internet's potential.

Bringing the Benefits to the Citizen Sector

EchoDitto seeks to apply lessons learned from the Dean campaign to other sectors including citizen sector organizations. For example, Silberman, EchoDitto's vice president of online organizing, led a team that organized 16 activities in June for an event called "Bridging the Gap for Health Care—National Day of Action" cosponsored by three partner groups: the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Rock the Vote, and Jobs with Justice. EchoDitto helped design custom self-organizing tools for the project, conducted an aggressive outreach program to allies and related interest groups, and worked with grassroots coordinators and organizers, building a truly national day of action with more than 165 events in all 50 states.

"We firmly believe that, harnessed correctly, the Internet can enliven debate and inspire ordinary Americans to reengage in their communities and the political process," Silberman said. "The future lies in mass two-way, peer-to-peer communications and small dollar fundraising.

"All sorts of new initiatives succeed when large numbers of people are empowered to take even small actions. This forms the foundation of a thriving online community. Making an extra effort upfront to invite supporters to take an active role in your organization's work can yield great benefits down the road."

• Take It with You: A Primer for Online Fundraising, Tips and Best Practices

EchoDitto
PO Box 50002
Arlington, VA 22205
Tel: 202-449-5644
Fax: 202-478-0169
Email: info@echoditto.com
Web site: www.echoditto.com

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