The MoveOn Poll Back Story
The MoveOn story seems to have interested quite a few of you. In my quest to try and make this blog interesting I thought I'd pass along the story of that day last June when the poll hit. This is a tale from the campaign trail.
While I am prevented from speaking a lot about specific things from my time as Interim Campaign Coordinator for Chuck Pennacchio last year (confidentiality agreement) I don't think this is a problem. It just shows how crazy working on a campaign can be.
We had our staff meetings every Friday morning. That Friday Chuck and I also had a meeting with our fundraising staff so I was pretty late getting to the campaign office. I unlocked the door, sat at my desk and started checking the emails that constantly rolled in through the website. Ten minutes after I got there the Move On email hit. The phones began ringing off the hook, including my cell, and emails poured in from supporters and volunteers. Thank goodness because if I hadn't been at the office yet the calls to my cell would have been crucial.
The crazy part was I was the only person in the office. Tim Tagaris, our previous Communications Director, had recently taken a great job at GrowOhio and his replacement was working from his home in D.C. Chuck was running some personal errands and since I didn't know how long the day's meetings would run no volunteers were there yet. Have you ever tried answering three phones at once? At the same time Outlook Express kept telling me about incoming emails. At the same time I was trying to write a campaign letter to send to our email list announcing the poll and asking them to get their freinds voting for Chuck.
When Chuck finally got through to me to check in and found out about the poll he rushed to the office to help. Because Tim had always handled the campaign emails to the people in our database I was new to the task. It took me about 45 minutes to get it finished and sent.
We suspected right away that something was "rotten in Denmark" as they used to say. The poll was written in a way that made Bob Casey appear to be the progressive candidate. Things were way too busy at the time though to worry too much about it.
In July I received an email telling me the Casey campaign had hired M&R Strategic Services for their internet outreach. It was rather easy at that point to confirm that and find the relationship between MoveOn and M&R. It took several hours to gather all the information, document it, source the documentation to websites and write the article. I still had the MoveOn emails in my inbox and used them.
Just another crazy day on the campaign trail. Sometimes you go to the office thinking you know what you'll be doing that day. Other days you don't have a clue what might happen. You have to prepared for anything and that's what makes it interesting.
While I am prevented from speaking a lot about specific things from my time as Interim Campaign Coordinator for Chuck Pennacchio last year (confidentiality agreement) I don't think this is a problem. It just shows how crazy working on a campaign can be.
We had our staff meetings every Friday morning. That Friday Chuck and I also had a meeting with our fundraising staff so I was pretty late getting to the campaign office. I unlocked the door, sat at my desk and started checking the emails that constantly rolled in through the website. Ten minutes after I got there the Move On email hit. The phones began ringing off the hook, including my cell, and emails poured in from supporters and volunteers. Thank goodness because if I hadn't been at the office yet the calls to my cell would have been crucial.
The crazy part was I was the only person in the office. Tim Tagaris, our previous Communications Director, had recently taken a great job at GrowOhio and his replacement was working from his home in D.C. Chuck was running some personal errands and since I didn't know how long the day's meetings would run no volunteers were there yet. Have you ever tried answering three phones at once? At the same time Outlook Express kept telling me about incoming emails. At the same time I was trying to write a campaign letter to send to our email list announcing the poll and asking them to get their freinds voting for Chuck.
When Chuck finally got through to me to check in and found out about the poll he rushed to the office to help. Because Tim had always handled the campaign emails to the people in our database I was new to the task. It took me about 45 minutes to get it finished and sent.
We suspected right away that something was "rotten in Denmark" as they used to say. The poll was written in a way that made Bob Casey appear to be the progressive candidate. Things were way too busy at the time though to worry too much about it.
In July I received an email telling me the Casey campaign had hired M&R Strategic Services for their internet outreach. It was rather easy at that point to confirm that and find the relationship between MoveOn and M&R. It took several hours to gather all the information, document it, source the documentation to websites and write the article. I still had the MoveOn emails in my inbox and used them.
Just another crazy day on the campaign trail. Sometimes you go to the office thinking you know what you'll be doing that day. Other days you don't have a clue what might happen. You have to prepared for anything and that's what makes it interesting.
posted by PA progressive @ Saturday, May 13, 2006
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