The DIA Salsa users at the Center for Constitutional Rights recently gave a great illustration of the power of smart targeting and messaging to balloon an online list ... paired, of course, with one smooth-handling e-advocacy tool. I caught CCR's Owen Henkel on the way out the door to a well-deserved break to find out just how they cooked up the pitch-perfect Send Bush a Copy of the Constitution online action. How did you come up with it? Were you looking specifically for something with virality, or did that follow the brilliance of the idea? we had been using the image of the constitution for a little while (previously a constitution being shredded). People responded positively to this so wanted to continue using the image of the constitution as it was central to the larger campaign.... I thought that people would like the 'naughtiness' of sending something to bush, and the constitution worked perfectly! (the word Constitution is also in our name). I had read some stuff about holiday campaigns and petitions-- it was coming up on Thanksgiving on Black Friday, so I got the idea for the "present" and wrapping paper from that, trying to make it relevant and timely. How are you communicating with people who do take the action -- both immediately and going forward? What are you doing to actually deliver the constitution? A) we are keeping them looped into the progress of the larger campaign and other actions - like the danny glover ad B) but we are not introducing them to other CCR stuff yet, just more friendly ccr stuff... C) we are figuring out to deliver them- we are not going to be as wasteful and foolish simply to mail them individually, and are planning an event/symbolic action to present them in a creative way... Have you run any comparable campaigns that give you an estimate for what sort of arc this one might describe -- how many of those people stay active on your list or convert to donors, things like that? Nope but this is the first big crop we can try to steward. Does this fit into a specific CCR campaign? yes, it's a component of our Beyond Guantanamo: Rescue the Constitution" campaign. Which is centered around our supreme court case that was just heard today. What you spent on creating the campaign and viral marketing, such as blogads I did all the creative myself... I imagine a professional (s) would charge in the 3k range from start to finish -props, photos, design, web implementation, we did pretty modest Blogads advertising maybe but only switched to the constitution thing AFTER it took off. What really helped us was 'sponsoring' an email sent out to Alternet supporters. This cost about 3.5k and increased the number of people who initially received our action from about 40k to 100k. Still even after the blasts only about 3-4k people signed the petition the 2.5 days. It was days 3-7 were we saw the enormous growth witch attests to the fact that a lot of these signatures were pass-alongs, basically I think if you have creative capabilities in house or have a friend who will help out, you could get something like this off the ground for less than 5k Anything I forgot to ask that you want to make sure people know about? 3 things 1) use smaller blogs on blog ads, they perform better and provide you audience research - which is how we picked alternet to reach out to 2) simple provocative images - I think the image of the constitution it the wrapping was pivotal to the campaign, it allowed people to imagine the whole scenario- otherwise it would be too abstract. Try to include images on your action pages, it really helps. 3) close the loop. Solicitation -> action -> tell a friend or donate-> thank you page. We have nearly doubled the size size of our active list in about 3 weeks.