by Sheldon Rampton

Since its launch in September 1998, the MoveOn.org Web site has become a fundraising and organizing powerhouse, attracting more than 2 million subscribers and raising tens of millions of dollars for liberal causes and Democratic party candidates. Its success has surprised even its founders, computer entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd.

Before venturing into online politics, Blades and Boyd were the cofounders of Berkeley Systems, an entertainment software company known for the flying toaster screen saver and the online game show "You Don't Know Jack." After selling the company in 1997, they became concerned about the level of "partisan warfare in Washington" following revelations of President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. They launched MoveOn.org initially to oppose the Republican-led effort to impeach Clinton. Initially called "Censure and Move On," the web site invited visitors to add their names to a bipartisan online petition that stated, "Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country."

At the time, it appeared likely that MoveOn's petition would be outmatched by conservatives, who already had several Web sites dedicated to ousting Clinton. A reporter who interviewed Blades on the day after the MoveOn launch wrote, "A quick search on Yahoo turns up no sites for 'censure Clinton' but 20 sites for 'impeach Clinton,'" adding that Scott Lauf's impeachclinton.org Web site had already delivered 60,000 petitions to Congress. Salon.com reported that Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing maven, had collected 13,303 names on a Web site, resignation.com, which called on Clinton to resign.

Within a week, however, support for MoveOn had spread rapidly and exponentially. Blades calls herself an "accidental activist. . . . We put together a one-sentence petition. . . . We sent it to under a hundred of our friends and family, and within a week we had a hundred thousand people sign the petition. At that point, we thought it was going to be a flash campaign, that we would help everyone connect with leadership in all the ways we could figure out, and then get back to our regular lives. A half a million people ultimately signed and we somehow never got back to our regular lives."

From the beginning, MoveOn did more than simply collect names in a database. It also mobilized activists in the real world, recruiting 2,000 volunteers to deliver the petitions in person to members of the House of Representatives in 219 districts across America, and directing 30,000 phone calls to congressional district offices. After Republicans in Congress went ahead and impeached Clinton, MoveOn made its first move into political fundraising, asking its members to sign a pledge that they would give money and volunteer time to defeat politicians who voted for impeachment.

In June 1999, MoveOn established its own political action committee, the MoveOn PAC, with the ability to accept contributions online via credit card. It was not the first organization to fundraise online for political candidates, but its success was unprecedented, raising $250,000 in its first five days of operation and $2 million over the course of the 2000 election to help elect four new Senators and five new House members. "That may not seem like a lot of money to most people, but it was a revolution in fundraising for campaigns from average citizens," Blades recalls.

According to Michael Cornfield, director of the Democracy On Line Project at George Washington University, MoveOn's achievement created "a change in attitude" in the political fundraising community. "It is like a bell has gone off," he said. "The race is on. 'Let's raise money online.'" He compared MoveOn's achievement with the pioneering of direct-mail fundraising in the 1970s by the religious right and conservative fundraisers such as Richard Viguerie.

The most significant innovation was MoveOn's success at raising funds from small donors, with an average contribution size of $35. Direct mail fundraising brings in lots of money, but most of the money raised goes to pay for printing, postage, and processing costs. By comparison, MoveOn's fundraising costs were minimal, with credit card transaction fees taking the biggest bite out of donor contributions.

"If candidates can use the Internet to raise significant funds through small donations and attract and organize volunteers at relatively little cost and labor, it could radically alter the balance of power in politics," observed political reporter Joan Loawy. "Suddenly candidates with fewer resources are more viable and the clout of moneyed special interests is diminished."

Anti-war organizing

With the end of the Clinton era, MoveOn itself moved on, taking up new causes such as a campaign for gun safety laws in the wake of the student shootings at Columbine High School. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, MoveOn launched an online campaign calling for "justice, not escalating violence."

During the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, it circulated an anti-war petition, collecting 220,000 signatures in two months. As with the petition against Clinton's impeachment, MoveOn's petition included an off-line component, organizing volunteers who hand-delivered signatures to senators and representatives. In October 2002, a MoveOn fundraising appeal raised $1 million in two days' time for what it called four "heroes of the anti-war effort" in Congress who opposed the Iraq resolution: Sen. Paul D. Wellstone of Minnesota, Reps. Rick Larsen and Jay Inslee of Washington, and Rep. Rush D. Holt of New Jersey. However, MoveOn also worked to raise money for Democratic candidates who actually supported the Iraq resolution, some of whom were locked in tight races in moderate or conservative states, including Missouri Sen. Jean Carnahan, and Senate candidates Ron Kirk in Texas, Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, Tim Johnson in South Dakota and Mark Pryor in Arkansas. All told, it raised $3.5 million for the 2002 election cycle.

In September 2002, it issued a bulletin by Susan Thompson, "Selling the War on Iraq," offering "lessons in PR from previous wars" and warning that "the costs of regime change" would be "a whopping $200 billion" (which actually has turned out to be a low estimate). MoveOn predicted that "regular people will probably have to foot the bill" while "anyone with ties to the oil companies (Bush and Cheney for example) will probably profit immensely."

MoveOn also joined with 14 other organizations to form the Win Without War coalition, which also included the National Council of Churches, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Organization for Women. Win Without War in turn helped organize Artists United to Win Without War, a group of more than 100 anti-war actors, producers and directors from Hollywood.

In December 2002, MoveOn launched yet another petition, titled "Let the Inspections Work," with the goal of raising $40,000 to pay for a full-page anti-war appeal in the New York Times. Instead, its members sent in nearly $400,000. With the additional funds, it sponsored anti-war radio spots and TV ads in 13 major cities. It also attempted to place anti-war advertisements on the sides of buildings, billboards and buses but was thwarted when Viacom, which owns the largest outdoor-advertising entity in North America, refused to run the ads.

By early 2003, MoveOn boasted more than 750,000 members in the United States and hundreds of thousands more overseas. As war in Iraq neared, its member base grew and the pace of its activities accelerated. Whereas the Nexis/Lexis database recorded 155 news stories that mentioned MoveOn in 2002, in 2003 there were 2,226 mentions. By 2004, it had more than 2 million members.

How MoveOn Moves

MoveOn uses e-mail as its main conduit for communicating with members, sending action alerts at least once a week. According to Joan Neils, a University of Washington graduate who analyzed MoveOn's success, one of the keys to its effectiveness has been its status as a "trusted, credible entity."

It achieves this status through a variety of strategies. "First of all," Neils says, "people who read a MoveOn e-mail or visit the site generally do so after receiving the message or link from someone they trust. . . . This is because almost every e-mail MoveOn sends encourages recipients to forward it on to others who share an interest in the topic. This is how they build their membership and it provides a foundation of trust among the recruited." By allowing recipients to unsubscribe and by ensuring members privacy by not selling or sharing information, the group differentiates itself form commercial emails and spam.

"Most fundamental to credibility is MoveOn's legitimacy through validation," Neils writes. "All of the supporting information MoveOn provides via e-mail and the Web is easily validated. For instance, e-mails always cite sources at the bottom, most often complete with links directly to the source."

MoveOn's Web site features multi-media content on many pages, including videos, audio downloads and images. In addition to communicating via the Internet, MoveOn advertises using traditional print and broadcast media as well as billboards, bus signs and bumper stickers, digital versions of which are downloadable from its Web site. It has also published a book, titled 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find Your Political Voice and Become a Catalyst for Change.

"MoveOn also uses the Web effectively for two-way communications," observes Neils. "One of the most interactive elements of the MoveOn.org site, and one that demonstrates the group's nonhierarchical organization is the Action Forum. The Action Forum is much like a blog, in which members write in issues they think are important and suggest strategies for action. Members then vote on submissions and the highest ranked issues rise to the top, thereby establishing MoveOn's priorities. It's an incredibly fluid, bottom-up approach to decision-making, allowing MoveOn to adapt and change as they go."

"The site is organized in ways traditional political consultants might not stomach," reported CNN in January 2004. "Any member can propose priorities and strategies to which others can respond, and the most-supported ideas rise to the top. That means ceding control over much of the content to motivated online participants, producing interactivity that adds grass-roots credibility."

"We are steeped in feedback," says MoveOn founder Wes Boyd. The group's success, he argues, has stemmed from its ability to listen to supporters and develop campaigns that reflect their interests. "That doesn't mean you can't have a vision. Our model is 'Strong Vision, Big Ears,'" he said at the O'Reilly Network's 2004 Digital Democracy Teach-in. Feedback from members has also moved MoveOn increasingly in the direction of what the Washington Post calls "a vigorously liberal agenda" that goes "beyond simple opposition to the Bush administration."

While MoveOn's allegiance is clearly with the Democratic Party, within the party it is positioned as a counterbalance to the rightward tilt that has dominated Democratic leadership over the last decade. Boyd rejects the advice of "centrists" such as the Democratic Leadership Council, who argue that Democrats need to moderate their positions on war, taxes, universal health care and other key issues. Speaking in June 2003 at a "Take Back America" conference, Boyd said, "The primary way to build trust is to consistently fight for things that people care about." Grassroots America is ready to support a liberal agenda, he said, if only "someone will get out and lead. . . . Every time we did something, every time we showed leadership, our membership went up."