CHAPTER 8
Shift Your Mobilization Efforts and Perform the Right Actions
Shane Johnson © 2011.
There were a lot more of us online.
Principle
Awareness is not enough. Education and engagement will only get you so far. You have to mobilize people to take actions that help to accomplish your goals and fulfill your mission. Anything less is a failure.
Normally, I don’t like case studies (and later in the book I explain why), but here are two important cases we can review off the bat in this chapter on mobilization, and both are published by Blue State Digital, a leading digital strategy and communications firm. The first case is from Blue State Digital’s work on Barack Obama’s Campaign for President1:
The Challenge
In late 2006, as they began prepping for a presidential run, then-Senator Obama and his small team faced seemingly insurmountable hurdles. Unlike most major presidential candidates, the young senator hadn’t spent years assembling a stable of wealthy donors, building an infrastructure of establishment support, or gladhanding influential voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Aware of the pioneering work Blue State Digital had done for other political campaigns—including Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s successful 2006 reelection bid—Obama for America reached out and asked us to take charge of the campaign’s online components. Our ambitious task: Use every tactic in our arsenal—including ...
