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If you feel like the Internet could help you organize your cause online but don't really know how to navigate through all the options available, the CauseBuilder blog is there to help you.

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Monitoring Support
Nicolas Colin Nov08

 

$150 million are gone with the wind! Despite the fact that Meg Whitman spent that much of her own fortune, the former eBay CEO and Republican candidate for governor of California lost her bid against Democratic veteran Jerry Brown.

There couldn’t have been more contrasts between their two campaigns. One was cold, professional, massive, and run like a big corporation. The other was more of a crafting work, low-profile and aimed at connecting with voters who, for the most part, had already forgotten who Jerry Brown was and that he had already been their governor 30 years earlier.

There’s a harsh debate in the U.S. over money in politics. Democrats fear that a decision rendered last year by the Supreme Court could pave the way for many special interests, including from abroad, to influence election outcomes. But does money matter so much? Doesn’t Meg Whitman’s campaign prove that money is not synonymous with success in politics? The key may be that raising money is not so much a means to finance a campaign as a pretext to fire up popular support.

First, asking for money is a very good reason to reach out to voters. It forces the candidate and their team to know their constituents, to try to connect with them, and to engage a conversation. Money may be the goal, but building relationships is a collateral effect of far greater importance. A successful fundraising effort means that a leader somehow managed to connect with the people.

Second, lots of money from outside is a sign that a campaign is becoming a movement, that voters care about the campaign and even think of it as their own. When they reach this point, big or small donors tend to come to the rescue. Whether rich or poor, people like to be on the winning side. So there’s no better way to raise money than to create a movement, which is the very recipe for success. When there’s a movement, money happens to flow in, but only to reinforce the pre-existing momentum.

Deciding to spend her own money was a trap for Meg Whitman. It exonerated her from any critical effort to reach out to her constituents. It deprived her of the most relevant indicator of success in creating a movement. If raising money was not the point, she couldn’t monitor the amount to confirm that popular support was there. Nancy Pelosi was recently quoted as saying ‘‘I’m one of the most effective fundraisers that the Congress has had... because I believe in something’’. When Meg Whitman chose to spend her own money, did she mean that she couldn’t raise it on the market because she didn’t believe in anything?

True, many candidates won elections in the past thanks to their own money, and many will in the future. Former Goldman Sachs executive Jon Corzine winning a Senate seat in New Jersey in 2000 is a famous example. Yet many failed, including the same Corzine when he lost his reelection bid for governor last year and more famously Steve Forbes, several times a presidential candidate in the Republican primary, and now Meg Whitman (and Carly Fiorina).

Those failed because it has somehow become useless to overwhelm the airwaves and to spread your message from the top down, which is precisely what you use big money for. This is not what a campaign is about. The idea is not to knock off the voters with your own money. It is to create relationships, to drum up mobilization, to tell great stories, and to build a movement. Cash inflows are the right indicator to know whether or not you managed to do just that. When Meg Whitman kind of shut down this indicator, she became incapable of monitoring the support she had to gain in order to win the election.

Strengthening ties
Nicolas Colin Oct08

Malcolm Gladwell just wrote an article in the New Yorker criticizing the idea that Facebook and Twitter are the new tools to make the revolution. It has already triggered controversy (see here and here). I would like to make a modest contribution and discuss some of Gladwell’s arguments. 

The first argument is that to make the revolution, you need a strong organization led by a strong hierarchy, which the historic civil-rights movement had, and which you can’t build with Facebook or Twitter. “The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization,” Gladwell writes, “run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had... a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups.”

Sure, but having a hierarchy doesn’t solve all the problems. When people work under a hierarchy, they often feel ignored, neglected, patronized, or simply not listened to. On the contrary, empowering your base, far from weakening your hierarchical authority, actually reinforces your bonds with the troops and therefore strengthens your power. It doesn’t mean you must suppress any hierarchy. But those who know how to rely on a network without a hierarchy probably have the most effective power, compared to others who merely exert formal authority – just compare Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin to, say, Michael Steele or even Mitch McConnell. To whom do we owe the outcome of the Republican senatorial primary in Delaware?

Gladwell’s second argument is that to make a revolution, you need people with strong ties with the organization, ie many friends in it. The idea is that if you want to quit, the strong ties will retain you both because you’re accountable to your friends and because they’re here to support you in times of hardship.

What makes people capable of [high-risk activism]? “[In the civil-rights movement,] all of the applicants – participants and withdrawals alike – emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the... program,” concluded [Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam]. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the movement... participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. “High-risk activism”, McAdam concluded, “is a ‘strong-ties’ phemonemon.”

The civil-rights movement was both noble and effective, yet when it became hard, those without strong ties to the movement dropped out. Sometimes it can even be hard AND ineffective AND not-so-noble after all. In those cases, if you stay, it’s clearly because of strong ties – loyalty to your friends, not to the organization. When even those ties weaken, that is when all hell breaks loose. Think of the Bush administration after the defection of Scott McClellan and the departure of Karl Rove.

But must these strong ties exist before the movement itself? After all, why not make activism an opportunity to build strong ties that didn’t exist before? In that case, a network can help, at least as opposed to a rigid hierarchy. In a hierarchy, everyone looks up to the chief, not really sidewards. There is neither time nor interest to get acquainted with fellow foot soldiers. In a network, on the contrary, people share the same values and rally around the same stories, thus initiating the conversations that lead to stronger ties.

Facebook and Twitter have many flaws indeed. They allow to build on preexisting ties and sometimes temporarily gather around a cause, but don’t provide many opportunities to make new friends. Jumo (coming soon) seems to be willing to fill that gap. And CauseBuilder is precisely about building the strong ties that Facebook and Twitter fail to create. So stay tuned!

Sharing Stories
Nicolas Colin Sep17

What a political earthquake! Two days ago, Christine O'Donnell unexpectedly won the Republican senatorial primary in Delaware. If she were elected, she would fill Vice-President Joe Biden's old Senate seat. But whereas her rival in the primary, Mike Castle, would have been sure to win the general election, O'Donnell is so unelectable that the relatively unknown Democratic candidate, Chris Coons, just became the frontrunner overnight.

Why is Christine O'Donnell unelectable? It's complicated. She settled in Delaware only a few years ago. She cheated on her tax returns. She falsified her resumé. She endorsed extreme positions on the issues of teaching creationism (she supports it) or masturbation (she rejects it). And she already lost statewide twice (once against the unbeatable Joe Biden in 2008). In short, she is too conservative a nut case to become the junior Senator from Delaware.

But then how has Christine O'Donnell beaten Mike Castle? You know why: she was backed and actively supported by Sarah Palin and by members of the tea-party movement. Which made me wonder about that movement. Who leads the tea-party movement? Who speaks for it? Where are its headquarters located? What are the movement's stands on the issues? Even a logo is nowhere to be found!

In fact, the tea partiers recognize no chairperson or general manager. A lot of well-known public figures speak loud on their behalf, but none of them fills an official position. There are no headquarters, no Web site, no logo, no official Facebook page, no "Who we are" or "Where we stand". Just satellites, FreedomWorks here, Tea Party Express there, and most of all the sincere and passionate commitment of many, many people. According to surveys, more than 25% of the American population claim they identify with the goals of the movement!

I think tea partiers set an example of what's at the core of a movement. These people connect with one another and share stories that motivate them to commit. The movement is so large and diffuse that it's very hard to confront it. Since it has no head, it can't be beheaded. And since it's not definitely clear where it stands or what its identity is, it can constantly reinvent itself in the heat of the moment: one day, the issue is state interventionism; the other, it is God. What's persistent and what fuels the movement is the connexion between people and the stories and the values they share.

Politicians and commercial brands who reach that level of commitment are very rare. We tech addicts tend to think of Apple. Yet Apple has a guru, Steve Jobs, without whom there would be no such passion. On the other hand, it's unclear whether the tea-party movement has a guru at all. Glenn Beck? Sarah Palin? Dick Armey? The fact that there are many would-be gurus actually proves that only the people matter, that the tea-party movement is no center and all periphery, no leadership and all crowd. In 2008, there was Obama as a leader and this overwhelming movement that aspired for change. With the tea-party movement, there is no leader, it's a stand alone movement built completely from the bottom-up.

Born out of opposition to health care reform in 2009, the movement aggregates different preexisting clusters like birthers, libertarians and people who believe in all sorts of conspiracy theories. The only thing they have in common is they oppose the Federal Government, as the American settlers once opposed the British crown. The President of the United States as your enemy and the founding myth of the Nation as your mantra, now here are powerful stories to share!

For Republicans, there are pros and cons to having such a movement around. They can use it to serve their interests and fire up their base. Or, precisely as the tea partiers refuse to be used, the movement can overreach and ignore all tactical and even strategic reasoning, in that case probably missing the target to oust the Democratic majority from both chambers of Congress.

But is that even the target? Isn't the tea-party movement all about people longing for stories about their country and about themselves? The Becks and the Palins provided the service of helping build the movement, and their personal brand improved because of that. But likely Republican victories, as in Florida or Kentucky, and losses, like those of Mike Castle's and probably Christine O'Donnell's, may only be collateral.

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