107670787951256110

We got involved in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and that’s where our big growth happened. People were disturbed about the rush to war. When the political establishment is not addressing people’s concerns, that is when the Net can afford a way for those people to come together. A little more than a year ago, we said that we’d done petitions and lobbying congress — should we try advertising? We asked for $35,000 for an ad in the NYT. In 48 hours, $400,000 came in. We ran an ad about ‘let the inspections work.’

Then the war happened. During that period, our list grow to around 1.3 million — it tripled during the run-up to the war. All these people came together originally around an issue. We wanted to know if they were interested about other issues. We asked how people felt about the budget and tax cuts, and we did an ad about a school in Oregon that had a blood drive to raise funds. While leaders in Washington were used to getting a few dozen comments about media consolidation issues. People were passing email petititions aroung the Internet about the proposed FCC rule changes that would allow even greater consolidation of media ownership, so we raised the issue and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in days, so we very actively engaged in issues, helped citizens meet with members of Congress and Senators, who were very surprised at the numbers of citizens who were coming in to talk about FCC rules, which had previously been followed by small numbers of media owners and policy wonks. We ran an ad featuring Rupert Murdoch about media consolidation. We enabled hundreds of thousands of communications to Congress, which responded.