Where's Our Leverge for Gaining Wide Public Attention, And Competing for Contributions?

[Al Cannistraro]

How will CitizenEquality.US get its voice heard among all the clamor for attention by other groups with broadly similar goals and intentions, not to mention the clamor of presidential candidates and their supporters?  Larry's plan was to leverage the power the Democratic debates (and ensuing presumably plentiful and positive media coverage) to transform himself into a viable, out-of-the-box, populist presidential candidate. What's our leverage going to be?

I ask this because I am besieged by e-mails from so many organizations that are attractive to people like myself,  whose members and prospects also would be good fodder for CitizenEquality.US, not to mention pitches from the Hillary and Bernie campaigns, and from their supporters; and I can't yet envision how CitizenEquality.US's pitches would not get lost in the crowd.

I also fear that, with our push for commitments to monthly contributions, we will be seen as fund-raising competitors by otherwise kindred organizations and presidential campaigns.

My points are:  To succeed in becoming a populist, grass-roots movement with 50,000 initial sponsors, we would need to be WIDELY seen as "special" in some obvious and tangible way.  And we also would need NOT to be seen as fund-raising competitors:  Rather, the success of our mission must be seen by competing organizations as a necessary prerequisite to the accomplishment of their own missions.

Or am I missing something obvious, or guilty of faulty logic, or exaggerating the problem?

Al C.

[alisa witt]

I agree completely with Al
I am a state level Organizer for Wolf-PAC and follow and help with Represent.us  And, have been watching here to see if I  can  help  Things get confusing for volunteers. These grassroots groups have simiilar, yet different end goals with different tactics.  Also confusing for local legislators we approach. 

Many may be aware that this Spring, there will be a March on Washington with many organizations already on board with  narrower or  broader goals.

Here is the link for that. At the bottom of the page, you can see the current group's involved

http://www.democracyspring.org/?utm_source=Lessig+Supporters&utm_campaign=ca7cd49003-Team+Announcement+9%2F28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_31d9101d91-ca7cd49003-105223333&mc_cid=ca7cd49003&mc_eid=b592a189e6

The internet is both a blessing and a curse. Wonder if the civil rights movement had this issue??

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[Bruce Skarin]

Thanks Al, I've been making a very concerted effort to engage a long list of groups in this space including represent.us, nhrebellion.org, mayday.us, takeback.org, fairvote.org, and issueone.org

So far, just about all like the idea of a more concerted effort, but there is a politics to fixing politics unfortunately. The campaign finance are leary of election reform and the election reform are leary of campaign finance. I'm hopeful that we can still partner with one or more of these groups, and I'd love to have a public conference for the CEA coincide with the democracy spring. April is when we are planning on starting the whole effort to write the CEA.

I think the CEA offers a unique focal point in the form of a short-term high-reward project. I think if we can demonstrate the viability of this idea, that long list of groups will help us spread the word.

Competing for funds is never fun, but I think we need to show people that this isn't just raising money to run yet another organization. This is a single project, where the majority of the funds will go directly into producing a solution.

I've updated the site to provide more details on the current plan, and I'll be sending a test email to the volunteer list here shortly to get a bit of feedback before sending it out to everyone else.

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