Grassroots Webathon Day 7: Wrap-Up

Greetings, barbarians, and Happy Father's Day!

Today is the final day we'll be tallying numbers on our webathon for the Alaska Fund Trust. We'll do a final count tonight, and the banner at the top of the page will be moved down to the sidebar, as we drop out of "surge" mode and back to normal operations.

Now that we're winding things down, I wanted to share with you guys the history of how we ended up jumping into this campaign. Back in early May, I happened to read this write-up by Erika Bolstad about Congressman Don Young's legal fund. Part of the article stated that Young, even with his connections and the fact that he was taking contributions of up to $5,000 from corporations, was having difficulty in raising funds for legal expenses.

I had written about the fund when it was first created, and noted that there really had been little publicity to encourage people to donate. This caused some concern on my part, and got me thinking more and more that the fund would need publicity to gain traction. I discussed this with RAM, who has a background in fundraising, and she agreed that the low donation limit on the fund ($150) combined with the severe restrictions on who could donate, along with the lack of publicity, was probably limiting the amount of money Governor Palin could bring in. So we at C4P gradually started fleshing out plans for this campaign.

A big debate revolved around the goal we would set for our effort. The bottom line was that this was our very first foray into political grassroots fundraising, and we had absolutely no idea what our capabilities were, or how far we could reach. We're just a bunch of Average Joes and Janes here who met up in the comment sections of political blogs. We didn't know if we were even going to raise $5,000 - this essentially was going to be a trial run of our capability as much as an effort to help the Governor.

Ultimately we decided to set our goal as the amount we knew the Governor needed - $500,000. There was some trepidation about this, because we didn't want to send out some kind of "failure" vibe if we didn't reach that in our first attempt. But ultimately it comes down to the fact that this is the amount of money that needs to be raised. We would do what we could in this first attempt, and take further runs at it if needed. I think I may have used this quote before, but our attitude was that we were going to eat this entire $500k elephant one bite at a time, no matter how long it took.

I want to offer some recognition for a lot of work that took place behind the scenes - the videos that were the centerpiece of this campaign were the work of the brilliant Seth Adam Smith, and RAM did a ton of work on helping to script and storyboard them, in addition to overseeing the overall organization of the effort. Sinistar did a great job setting up the number-crunching side of the operation, as well as handling graphics and contributing a video of his own. And Hal was his usual brilliant self with the tech side of the website. Our webathon website layout was his doing.

I also want to offer my sincere thanks to all of our sister blogs who joined in this effort - it would never have gone as well without you. If I try to name everyone who participated, I'll invariably leave someone out...but you know who you are, and thank you. I do want to give a special shout-out to a couple of the bigger blog fish who gave attention to our campaign, the lovely Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs and Allahpundit and Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

We had originally talked about kicking this off to coincide with the official release of the numbers from the Alaska Fund Trust, but we decided to go ahead and kick things off early due to the wave of publicity from Governor Palin's trip to the Lower 48. And we decided to focus our efforts on a get-out-the-media campaign - the Governor has a big base of support throughout the country, though many of them don't follow day-to-day happenings in Alaska. They don't need to be convinced to help her out financially, but they do need to be informed when she needs a hand.

We had some good breaks and some disappointments...the Associated Press and The Washington Times picked up the news of our fundraising drive early in the week, and we got some good traffic, plenty of media queries, and a donation surge. RAM was tireless in working the talk radio venues we could get access to, including Eddie Burke, John Ziegler, Dan Fagan, Tammy Bruce, and G. Gordon Liddy.

A disappointment was our failure to get Bill O'Reilly to keep his promise about publicizing the fund...we were actually hopeful about this on Tuesday, when O'Reilly's website linked to our post about this from his front page. We'll see what happens with this down the road. It may very well be that he is waiting for a Palin legal story to tie this together, as he tends to be driven by what is happening in the news cycle.

I want you all to reflect on the number in the banner above and feel good about it. There will undoubtedly be trolls coming around who will want to paint our final result as some kind of failure, but don't buy it for a second. We're a young blog, with no real media access or resources beyond you guys - our loyal readership. This is a tremendous accomplishment. I'm so proud of all of you for getting out there and making this thing happen.

Where do we go from here? Well, obviously, our goal remains to retire this debt. We will watch the official amounts released by the fund and adjust our fundraising goals accordingly. We need to continue to spread the word about this fund as opportunities arise. Ironically, it is the frivolous complainers themselves who are our best fundraising tools - whenever they make another bogus complaint, outrage ensues and Governor Palin's support solidifies. We need to make sure those folks are aware of how best they can express that support - by financially contributing to her defense.

And finally, we at C4P will continue to try to expand our reach by providing quality content, and attracting more loyal readers. We've been happy with our progress so far, as we've expanded our readership over tenfold in the last few months. The bigger we get, the more people we can reach, and the more people we can motivate to turn out support for the Governor.

Thanks again to all of you for the incredible support you showed for this effort, and the hard work that you did. I really can't find the words to tell you all how much we appreciate you.

UPDATE by RAM: Just a reminder that Karen Allen is selling t-shirts with the proceeds going to the AFT. Check it out here.