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TECHNOLOGY CREATES SELF STARTERS

Well-funded campaigns enjoy the luxury of paid staff to make calls and knock on doors in hotly contested precincts. Yet even the richest campaigns benefit from having volunteers who are willing those same things for free, just because they think it's important that their candidate win.

But in the 2004 race, I heard from many Kerry-Edwards volunteers who said they had to be very persistent to get the campaign to put them to work. That is, they tried volunteering several different ways—over the campaign Web site, at recruiting events, or with a call to the local Democratic Party office—but it was a long time before anyone got back to them.

So it's significant that Obama's supporters talk about how easy it was for them to get involved. They didn't have to wait for someone from headquarters to return their call—the Web site gave them the tools to be self-starters. Instead of centralized control, the Obama campaign relied on decentralized, grassroots energy. That's really the only way they could have done it, says Josh Uretsky, co-chair of Philadelphia for Obama.

"No campaign has enough infrastructure to manage the number of volunteers Obama's campaign has," Uretsky says. The challenge is to give volunteers the freedom to organize themselves, but with enough direction "that they actually do useful things," he says.

"This allows you to be involved, no matter how relevant or irrelevant your state is in the headlines," says Timothy Foley, who joined the campaign staff as new media director for the primaries in New Hampshire and New York and continues to participate on a volunteer basis. "You could get involved as much or as little as you would like, and you could get organized even if your state was not one of the traditional early states."

Daly says one of her challenges was finding outlets for volunteer energy. "We wound up with people doing things a professional campaign might roll their eyes at, but they were not harmful, and they were keeping people busy," Daly says. For example, a "honk-and-wave" event is a campaign ritual where people stand on a busy street corner waving signs and trying to get drivers to honk if they support your candidate, and her group held several of those when it was just getting organized in 2007. It was a way for people to show their support at an early stage when there was not much else for them to do.

"The campaign has done a good job of allowing people to create their own rules and to be happier." Even from a cynical strategic perspective, that means, she says, is "they've swallowed the bait."

"They're committed, because they're working hard for you, and they start giving money. By using their energy, you've made them a part of the campaign," she says.

Uretsky's Philadelphia grassroots group got started back in August, when most experts were predicting the race would be over by the time of the New Hampshire primary in January. So for months, except for an occasional conference call with campaign headquarters, the group operated autonomously. And even after the official campaign came to town for the Pennsylvania primary in April, the Philadelphia volunteer group retained a measure of independence. "There are some things the campaign is choosing not to do that we think should be done, and so we do it," Uretsky says. For example, in the weeks leading up to the primary the group invested in buying campaign buttons for volunteers who wanted to be able to display a visual token of their support.