Clients

Environmental Action

When the Public Interest Network decided to reboot Environmental Action, they needed a big overhaul. Born at the first Earth Day in 1970, Environmental Action has been kicking butt for the planet for over 40 years. But it needed a reboot – and a new program that was focused on engaging online action and powerful on-the ground actions.

PowerThru has been helping them all the way – relaunching the website, designing engaging actions, and planning on-the-ground events that match and show real results. We even loaned them a senior partner to act as their executive director and oversee budgets, staffing and operations. In less than a year, we’ve doubled the size of the online list and relaunched a slick, savvy new organization as part of their network.

US Action / TrueMajority.org

USAction is a federation of 23 state affiliates that organize for a more just America. PowerThru runs every aspect of the online program for this national leader on online progressive action. We write over 200 emails, raise over $200,000 for their c3/c4/PAC, keep the list of over half a million people growing and generate over a million actions every year.

If you need an all-in-one solution that lets you look like a pro at online organizing, without lifting a finger, ask us about what we do for TrueMajority/US Action.

Secretary of State Elaine Marshall

Progressive champion Elaine Marshall ran for U.S. Senate in 2010 and is running for re-election as North Carolina Secretary of State in 2012. In both races, she called on a member of our staff to execute her online presence. In 2010,  Mike Nellis lead the team that raised $1.7 million for Elaine’s campaign. Long considered dead in the primary, Mike used effective new media techniques to activate the power of the netroots to invigorate her campaign. Elaine would go on to beat the establishment-backed candidate in a runoff election with over 60% of the vote. In 2012, Elaine is the favorite to secure re-election as a highly popular statewide figure in North Carolina. In just the first few months of the year, we have helped Elaine revive her new media campaign and raise nearly $100,000 online.

Gun Free Kids

Founded in 2007, GunFreeKids.org is an Internet-based 501(c)4 issue advocacy organization, which provides tools for people to take action on pending state and national legislation on sound gun violence prevention policies. In 2011 just weeks before the anniversary of the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, NRA-backed legislators in multiple states introduced legislation to FORCE colleges and universities to allow guns on campus. So the students and staff of Gun Free Kids called PowerThru to help them crank up their online organizing in a few key states, and build a national call-in day on the anniversary to tell Governors and legislatures everywhere to say NO to guns on campus.

Together we built a series of lobby days and call-in days that stopped bills in Texas and Georgia from making it out of committee. And when the Arizona legislature ignored our campaign, and passed a bill forcing colleges to let guns on campus, we focused on the Governor – who vetoed the bill just a few days after our national day of action. Over the few weeks, we doubled the number of active members in Gun Free Kids’ database, expanded their Facebook presence, and built new and lasting partnerships with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and other partners at the state and federal level. Then in 2012 we’ve helped them stop more legislation while beefing up their social media, list building and online fundraising.

AFL-CIO

As the nation’s largest coalition of labor unions, the AFL-CIO draws strength from the hundreds of local chapters and affiliates that form their coalitions. So when the AFL moved all their online data to the Salsa platform with Wired for Change, they also started working with PowerThru. Together, we helped make the chapters tool work as hard for the AFL and their member-organizations as the working families they represent.

We de-bugged the code, trained chapters on the most intricate parts of the syndication system and kept the trains running on time for complex, multi-chapter actions and campaigns. If you’ve got a big organization with several chapters on Salsa – get in touch so we can help optimize your system too.

We Are Wisconsin

When Scott Walker and his radical cronies in the Wisconsin Senate tried to attack collective bargaining rights, they woke up a sleeping giant of protest. Two Senate Republicans were recalled, and Scott Walker is fighting for his political life. At the center of it all is WeAreWisconsin.org – a people-powered coalition PAC and campaign that’s working to make Wisconsin politics work for working people again.

PowerThru helped manage every aspect of this mammoth Independent Expenditure’s online work during the Senate recalls – from coming up with strategies that unite people online and through social media, to building custom tech tools that make volunteer recruitment, online activism and fundraising a snap. We’ve doubled the size of their email list (and then doubled again), helped them raise over $60,000 in online small dollar donations, and assisted them in turning their social media communities into a Wisconsin powerhouse.

National Physicians Alliance

The National Physicians Alliance creates research and education programs that promote active engagement of health care providers with their communities to achieve high quality, affordable health care for all. The NPA offers a professional home to physicians across medical specialties who share a commitment to professional integrity and health justice. They came to PowerThru looking for some simple help sorting out donations in their Salsa installation. But when we started working together on how to not only track, but increase, their donation rates and averages — the NPA got more than they hoped for.

Today, PowerThru helps build them innovative tools and online actions – like their campaign to protect physicians free speech – that have boosted donation rates, added new members and made them a more visible and powerful organization than ever. We’ve helped them grow their presence on social media to spread their message as well.

RootsAction

RootsAction is the cool new kid on the online organizing block. They are a new online initiative dedicated to galvanizing millions of Americans who are committed to economic fairness, equal rights, civil liberties, environmental protection — and defunding endless wars. Started by progressive heros and endorsed by left-wing luminaries like Cornel West, Naomi Klein and Jim Hightower, they wanted to go from a good idea to one of the country’s leading online groups in 12 months.

So they brought in PowerThru to help brainstorm ideas that can electrify members, social media advertising campaigns that recruit followers, and tech solutions and strategies that make it all as simple as a mouse click. And the best part is – it’s already working. Since we started working together their email list has doubled many times over, and they hit their goal of over 100,000 members by the end of 2011. Their Facebook fans went from ~3,000 to over ~10,000 within two weeks last summer, then doubling again the following month to over 20,000 fans.

Progressive Kick

Progressive Kick is a national progressive 527, focused on elections and accountability and targeting the United States Congress and state legislators. We helped them with their most recent project (from updating their website and sending out mass emails, to setting up the ActBlue page and Facebook advertising) — partnering with Working Families Win to raise over $10,000 for the Iowa Senate special election. Progressive Democrat Liz Mathis won her race on November 8th with 56% of the vote, allowing Democrats to retain control of the Iowa Senate and preventing a complete GOP takeover of Iowa government. Our previous project involved teaming up with EMILY’s List last summer on a donation-matching program which raised over $60,000 for the Wisconsin Senate recall candidates. Five of the six Democratic challengers running in the Wisconsin recall elections were progressive women — and two won their elections.

Slow Money Alliance

The Slow Money Alliance is a national network and a family of local networks, organized around new ways of thinking about the relationship between food, money and soil. We helped them develop a complete online strategy for membership recruitment, and executed Salsa and custom platform technology projects.

Partnering with PowerThru in 2010, Slow Money created an online contest linking an interactive voting platform with their Salsa database. Over the four week campaign, thousands of votes were cast for over 500 local businesses and Slow Money doubled the size of their mailing list. We then repeated their project with a new local business contest in the summer of 2011 to add even more active members to their list.

Vote Green Gov / Vermont LCV

From September 1-November 2 2010, PowerThru LLC operated the “Vote Green” project for VtLCV. The project had 3 goals:

1. Raise VtLCV’s profile as an organization that can move and shape electoral victories for pro-environment candidates;
2. Provide meaningful support to a VtLCV endorsed candidates for governor;
3. Provide decisive support to a short list of endorsed State Senate and House candidates, with a focus on the Senate.

Thanks to excellent collaboration, over-the-top success in fundraising and an extraordinary team of staff, volunteers and allies we well exceeded the initial vision for this program.

• 173% Voter contacts/Contact goal;
  • Including a 34% re-contact rate: call-backs to target voters who pledged to vote green in the last 48 hours of the campaign.
• 35% of contacted voters Voters Affirmed support for green candidates (green Voters);
  • 5% Green voters were New Registered voters; 20% of Green voters voted early or by absentee; 100% of Green voter contact info tracked and retained by VtLCV and retuned to national Catalist file of LCV.
• Increased web traffic 500%.

Check out our video for more.

350.org

When 350.org and 1Sky merged, they created one of the world’s most powerful institutions fighting climate change. But they also needed a solution to merge together the two different member databases each organization had used and synchronize them all into a single account on Wired For Change’s Salsa. 

PowerThru helped synchronize, de-duplicate and align all the data – from cleaning up country codes for their international users to synching action history so long-time members didn’t lose access to insider information or special privileges they’d earned over the years.

1Sky

Before they merged with 350.org, 1Sky was one of the biggest environment groups on Salsa. With tens of thousands of members taking action every week on campaigns to protect the planet’s climate, they turned to PowerThru to get cool new Salsa tools like our Goal-o-meter – that could boost action rates and add sizzle to their organizing.

Rainforest Action Network

As one of the country’s leading environmental groups, Rainforest keeps detailed records on every action, donation and click their members take online. But what do you do with all that data and how do you turn the wealth of knowledge about what your members DID into a plan for what they can DO in the future?

PowerThru helped RAN break down and analyze member data. More importantly, we mined members’ past history for key ideas about which campaigns were hot, where more fundraising or list growth was possible, and how to better engage their most ardent followers.

VPIRG

VPIRG is Vermont’s largest environmental and consumer watchdog. We helped move VPIRG onto the Salsa platform in 2007. But there was a hitch: VPIRG runs a massize canvass operation every summer that quintuples their staff and brings in a third of the annual operating budget. They needed to allow canvassers to sit down at the end of a day and enter data into Salsa about members who were contacted. But Salsa doesn’t do that, right?

It does now.

We built a custom interface that pulls together all the parts of the Salsa system the canvassers need into a single screen, and hides the extraneous parts that would only distract from the job.

With everything in one place, Salsa collects donation or political information and maps it to existing member/donor info in Salsa. For accuracy, all donation records are permanently associated with the canvasser and his/her supervisor.

The best part is that all contributions, political action and updates are processed in real time – instead of waiting days to weeks for the data to be entered offsite and returned.

HeadCount

A leader in boosting civic engagement through cultural events and concerts, HeadCount was already rocking the world of voter registration. But their old email templates were a little too boring – You can’t have a template that looks like Muzak when you’re trying to Rock and Roll. You also can’t pay staff people to spend hours meticulously crafting the HTML and CSS of every email you send.

So Headcount brought in PowerThru to overhaul the look and function of their email templates. With our master producers behind the keyboard, we boosted the cool factor, linked in social media and donation tools and made several variations so picking a changing a headline or image size is as simple as point and click for the staff. Rock on.

VoteVets

As the largest progressive organization of veterans in America, VoteVets.org fights every day to ensure that troops abroad have what they need to complete their missions, and receive the care they deserve when they get home.

But when they got stuck with an impossible mission – migrating thier entire supporter database, including aciton history, donations and more, to a new CRM in 72 hours, they new to call in the air support. From the minute we finished our briefing, PowerThru swung into action, working all night for 72 hours straigh to move every piece of user data to a new home, and making sure nobody was left behind. Mission accomplished, sir.