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The 2002 Wellstone for Senate organization was remarkable, even before its tragic conclusion. Before the horrific crash that claimed the lives of 6 of our friends and co-workers, as well as 2 pilots, the Wellstone campaign was making great strides in melding 21st Century technology with Paul Wellstone's legendary talent for grassroots organizing.  We integrated high-touch with high-tech, combining frequent and direct communication efforts with new and innovative approaches to reaching out to voters.

Online organizing and new technology were viewed by those on the campaign as essential and integral parts of the overall strategy.  Those charged with developing the online and technology strategies benefited greatly from campaign leadership that understood the intrinsic value of communicating over a wide spectrum of media and the tremendous potential held by new technology to cheaply and effectively bring Paul's message to the voters.

As is true for many campaigns, the keystone of our online organizing efforts was our web site.  The site presented nearly all of our campaign materials and information: contact information, biography, press headshot, and accomplishments, as well as more novel features like TV ads, the campaign song, position papers and a daily updated front-page news story.   We thought of the front-page as "CNN for the Wellstone campaign."  The more often we had updated content, the more likely people were to return to the site and to refer others to it.
 

As with all campaign communication, the web site was heavily influenced by the type of candidate and type of effort it served.  Paul reveled in the freewheeling one-on-one conversations of the Minnesota State Fair, eagerly answering any question posed by a constituent, and we wanted to bring that same approach to the "On the Issues" section of the web site. The goal of the web site was to provide as much information as possible within a manageable, intuitive framework allowing users to get as little or as much detail as they needed.  So rather than posting a few vague position papers on a few basic issues, we posted our in-depth positions on more than 20 key issues ranging from Paul's stance on education to his work on behalf of African immigrants.  

Other key features of the Wellstone web site included:

• an extensive multimedia section including lit pieces, video of TV ads, and audio of Sen. Wellstone delivering speeches.  
  
  
• resources for writing letters to the editor, such as email links for each of the papers in the state, and suggestions about how to write a letter to the editor.
  
  
• voter registration forms, information on requesting an absentee ballot and on same day registration, and a link to the Secretary of State's polling place finder.
  
  
• online donation capabilities (see below)
  
  
• online volunteer center (see below)

Our online donation and volunteer sections were innovative in many ways, but what set them apart from many other sites was the seamless integration with our database.  With an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use web form for data entry and queries, our database was accessible to staff and volunteers at our many field offices across the state.  Our secure online donation process automatically added donor information into the database.  This helped with FEC compliance, and with follow-up solicitation.  The volunteer page worked in much the same fashion; when someone signed-up to volunteer, not only was their information automatically added to the database, but they also received an immediate thank-you message and our volunteer coordinator was automatically notified of the new addition.  

Integrating information from the donation and volunteer pages allowed us to make full use of the campaign database.  Our database was able to receive information, but also enabled us to send email from inside its integrated framework.  This allowed us to pull a list, compose and test an email, and broadcast it to tens of thousands of supporters all from the same program.  

The field offices were setting up so many events that by the summer of 2002 we were sending mass emails on a daily basis, so it became critical to avoid overwhelming supporters with a deluge of messages.  We established a unified schedule for email in much the same way as would be done with direct mail.  Creating a standard schedule for our newsletter, the Wellstone Wire, helped this dramatically.  Originally published on a biweekly basis, the newsletter quickly became an anchor for our email strategy.  We planned our other messages around the Wire, leaving it as the only electronic communication that supporters would receive on its day of publication.  The Wire gave supporters a way to keep up with campaign activities and events and get a sense of life at campaign headquarters without including overt fundraising pitches or negative themes. 
 
The success of the newsletter was at times difficult to measure, though we did observe higher turnout at events, increased traffic on the web site to pages specifically referenced in the email, and a near doubling in the number of email addresses added to our database.  When the Wire began, it was first sent to nearly 18,000 individuals.  The last Wellstone Wire was sent to 34,000!  

While a direct measure of the effectiveness of the Wire is a little elusive, the success of our fundraising emails is indisputable.  By any objective measure, the Wellstone for Senate online fundraising effort was a wild success.  Each fundraising pitch saw an immediate and incredible return, all with zero overhead.  Compared to the cost of other traditional fundraising methods that give similar returns, email provides an effective and economical means of raising money from potentially untapped sources.  Consider the cost of a medium-sized house party-the fundraising emails were able to raise that much in a matter of hours, or days, and without a single dollar spent.  

Our campaign raised its money primarily from an enormous number of small donors.  Online fundraising helped to reinforce this principle by making it easier for thousands of people from across the country to support Paul's candidacy.

The success of our fundraising effort allowed us to invest in the infrastructure necessary to support the massive volunteer-driven grassroots organization that always was the hallmark of Paul Wellstone's campaigns.  By using new technology and methods, our volunteer coordinators were able to very quickly get the necessary information from new volunteers and integrate them into the campaign.  Anticipating a deluge of volunteers for GOTV, we invested in a new scheduling infrastructure for our database.  We realized that the only way to handle the incredible number of volunteers on Election Day was to create a database scheduling system.  This system also allowed us to track their assigned task, location, and contact information.  By Election Day, we had scheduled 12,000 volunteer shifts for our Get-Out-The-Vote effort, a number that would have been impossible without this database-driven approach.  
 

Potentially the most innovative use of technology on the Wellstone for Senate campaign was the creation of a multimedia CD-ROM as a grassroots organizing tool and a way to energize supporters.  The CD, Behind the Bus, was created entirely by staff and volunteers to be a true multimedia experience and contained features such as:

• a three-minute video documentary about Paul's iconic Green Bus
  
  
• video of Senator Wellstone's DFL acceptance speech, and his kick-off speech
  
  
• printable copies of all of our literature
  
  
• classic and contemporary TV commercials
  
  
• a welcome message from Senator Wellstone
  
  
• information on volunteering
  
  
• voter registration cards and information
  
  
• resources for writing letters to the editor
  
  
• screensavers
  
  
• wallpaper
  
  
• dorm posters
  
  
• pictures from the '96 and 2002 campaigns

Thus far we have focused on the campaign's use of technology in its external communication efforts.   Technology is useful not only for managing external communications, but also for providing infrastructure for internal operations.  By implementing a daily reporting regiment that centralized information from the field, we adapted military-style reporting systems to promote progressive politics.  Using online forms, we were able to quickly and efficiently get hard numbers and other pertinent information from our field staff that allowed us to form a nuanced view of each congressional district as well as the overall state-wide operation.  Our reporting system produced daily updates on our progress in certain aspects of the campaign, while our internal email communications allowed us to make strategic changes and to pass along that information to all staff both at the headquarters and at field offices across the state. 

On October 25, 2002, everything changed.  A plane crash in northern Minnesota not only robbed us of six of our friends and coworkers, but also threw into question the future of everything that we had built over the past year and a half.  The importance of the Internet as a source for getting fast-breaking news was hammered home on that morning.  Our web site got tens of thousands of hits in the hours following the crash.  The site traffic was so high that we weren't able to access it in order to make it reflect the tragic events.  We did put a simple statement up on the site on the 25th, followed by a more comprehensive memorial site when we returned to work that weekend.

Looking back on the effort, we remain proud of the campaign's many uses of new technology.  As with all campaigns, time and monetary constraints prevented us from implementing several other concepts.  As the McCain 2000 campaign so forcefully demonstrated, online advertising can be very profitable.  We developed and produced several online banner ads, but due to the aforementioned constraints these were never released publicly.  Another feature we had hoped to include on the Wellstone web site was streaming audio and video from the trail.  While we never had the means to implement this on the Wellstone site, following Paul's death we received help from talented volunteers who produced the content in the field and uploaded it to the Mondale for Senate web site.  This strategy worked very well during the abbreviated Mondale campaign, but due to bandwidth costs, it would have proved difficult to sustain it over the course of a typical campaign.  Audio and video from the campaign trail are fairly innovative and effective campaign features, but equipment and bandwidth costs must be weighed carefully before implementation.

Though no one who knew Paul would confuse him with a technophile, it is a testament to Paul's passion for grassroots organizing that his campaign sought to reach out to voters by each and every means available.  We remain immensely proud to have been afforded the opportunity to work for a man who so loved and believed in the inherent value of political action.  In the end, technology served the same role as all elements of the campaign - to facilitate a connection between the candidate and voter.  For Paul, that connection was a chance to remind people that "politics is about the improvement of people's lives."
 

About the Authors:  J.C. Quirin served as the Director of Online Organizing, and chief lover of all things related to the State Fair.  Aaron Leavy worked as the Assistant to the Campaign Manager, when he wasn't working with J.C. on some other project.
 
 

This handout was provided by JC Quirin and distributed at the Net & Elections and Online Advocacy in Minnesota event in February 2003.  It is being access via a server at the Institute for New Media Studies, University of Minnesota.