ACLU
Powerful Outreach to a Diverse Audience
Last minute online "viral" campaign tactics coupled with sophisticated web-based messaging provided by Grassroots Enterprise helped opponents of a racially charged ballot measure claim a historic victory.
After trailing by a wide margin in early polls, a coalition of civil rights groups led by the largest civil liberties organization in the world, hired Grassroots Enterprise during the final weeks of the campaign to help defeat a controversial, and popular, California ballot measure. The measure proposed a ban on race-related data collection by the government.
The result: the ballot initiative was defeated by a nearly 2-to-1 margin on election night.
"We proposed changes to the [campaign] Web site to make it more action-oriented," said David Chiu, Senior Vice President at Grassroots Enterprise.
"To get the right message to the right audience group we created impact-specific issue Flash pieces for African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and mainstream audiences. Each piece included ethnic-specific themes, content, statistics, images and music," said Chiu.
With these Flash pieces, Grassroots Enterprise launched an online "viral" campaign to community activists who were asked to forward e-mails to voters in their address books to boost email outreach in the final days before the vote.
The viral campaign was extremely successful; for example, Latino activists forwarded the email to an average of 60 friends. This campaign was the first known example of the Internet being used successfully to reach diverse ethnic groups with customized messages during a political campaign.
Featured Project
2004
Sierra Club
The Sierra Club turned to Grassroots Enterprise to develop a plan to engage their wide network of volunteers in the Club's targeted voter mobilization and education efforts.
Using our propriety technology, the Sierra Club was not only able to educate this important bloc of voters, but empowered all their volunteers to get involved in key locations by using the Internet and cell phones to eliminate the geographic boundaries that would have prevented such involvement in the past.
