A Vendor's-Eye View of the Cindy Sheehan Netroots

05:30 PM Aug 19, 2005

Appearances to the contrary, we do a lot more here than streaming Kintera's stock quotes.

DemocracyInAction is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing robust and affordable e-advocacy tools to other nonprofits. That's from the company pamphlet, or would be if we had a company pamphlet. What it means is, it's a hell of a lot of fun to work here.

We have around 200 clients, everything from small local arts organizations to enormous brand-name groups. Among them, they do a humbling array of good deeds, with an astonishing range of strategies.

Both of which bring us to Cindy Sheehan, the accidental spokesperson of America's three-years-overdue disenchantment with the Iraqi blunder.

We're lucky enough to be hosting the donation page for meetwithcindy.org, a site that went live less than two weeks ago and has become one of the web's most heavily trafficked. We're also serving Operation Truth and CodePink, and know a lot of the IT folks who have gotten involved in this amazing netroots phenomenon. It also means we get a view of a lot of the sausage-making.

Last week, David Swanson posted this survey of meetwithcindy.org's preternatural gigantism. Amazingly, at the time this post went up, the site didn't even have a donations page.

In the week since, it's gone still higher, cracking the top 10,000 web sites worldwide and being widely featured in mainstream media. Yet meetwithcindy finally put up its donations page, using DemocracyInAction tools, just this Wednesday. From that time to this, they've collected (and I'm obliged to be at once vague and emphatic) a lot ... even though the page's donate button is decidedly understated. It's a staggering flood -- but only a fraction of the sum left on the table by not having a donate page up a week earlier.

That's more than a quibble, but much less than an indictment. In general, Cindy and her supporters have done an incredible job focusing, then seizing, the spotlight; DIA has processed hundreds of thousands of Cindy-related e-mails and thousands of distinct donations across our system -- all this in August, traditionally the very worst month for grassroots fundraising.

Guess we've got George W. to thank for all that. And he'll be welcomed back from his Crawford retreat by another member of the DIA community, United for Peace and Justice, with a massive anti-war rally on the Mall. Netroots and grassroots ... a fecund biome.

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