Last night I realized that we were 36 hours away from launching our kickstarter campaign for TurboVote and that I didn't have a plan. The plan as far as it existed before 8:30pm Friday night was to send a "Launch Email" to "everyone" and let the awesome prizes and video we created turn us into a celebrated internet viral phenomenon.
I knew enough to understand that this was not a good plan, but I didn't know what a good plan looked like. So I turned to Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" for help. Basically I was like "Help me Obi-wan Clayobi, you're my only hope."
Thus, I began my analysis of Clay's book in terms of whether it could answer three big questions. First, what was TurboVote's launch story? Second, how would I tell our story? Third, how would I get the proverbial "everybody" on board?
In answer to my first question Clay advised that our story had to offer a plausible promise, "to work out a message framed in big enough terms to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence" (16). TurboVote seems like a plausible promise to me, but of course, there is a higher bar for plausibility when you promise to build a better democracy by making voting as easy as Netflix. I'll be paying attention to how people react to our message over the next few weeks to see if our message needs tweaking.
The second question was more about the method of telling our story. I knew we needed a blog to tell our story but was grappling with whether to launch a new TurboVote or Democracy Works blog or to just use the blog on our Kickstarter page. Clay's story about the lost/stolen cell phone partly provided the answer. It gave the impression that most people tune into most blogs temporarily, each blog its own fully encapsulated news story.
But this didn't answer my question. Just because the Kickstarter page offers a temporary blog doesn't keep me from easily setting up a temporary external blog. In fact, Clay's observation that the economic logic of the internet is to publish everything and decide what's worthwhile later would imply that I do both! In fact, the answer to my question was ultimately the simple observation that our fundraising was the story and if I want people to both pledge support and follow our story, then it makes sense to send them just one website. Not only that, but blogging on the kickstarter site makes the site more dynamic and provides reasons to post the site on facebook multiple times.
Third, how could I get everybody involved? Clay provided the authoritative reason why: we need a place for our supporters to connect with each other and not just a place for them to hear from us. The blog accomplishes the latter, but it allows absolutely no opportunity for our supporters to organize themselves. The obvious solution was a facebook page, but what wasn't obvious was how to title it. This is where I could have used more guidance. When someone "likes" a group on facebook it announces it to their whole feed. But these news feeds are now so full of news stories about friends joining different groups that you need an emotionally powerful title in order to stand out.
I'll let you know when I come up with it.
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