I spent ten years working at a nonprofit organization wishing I had the kinds of resources that large corporations can put toward their marketing efforts. A nonprofit the organization’s web site and related marketing are usually seen as overhead, and overhead is bad, therefore budgets limited. Nonprofit budgets are tight in general which doesn’t leave a lot of extra room for fancy services, tools, and consultants. Then I started to work with large corporations. Turns out, all that money doesn’t necessarily bring you people who know how to spend it well. Yes the margins are bigger, and there is less complaining about the basic costs of doing business, but when it comes right down to it they aren’t any more strategic than a small scrappy team of people in the communications department of any organization large enough to have a communications team. ...

The first major online application I wrote was a petition for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in an attempt to build support against the war in Iraq. The Iraq Peace Pledge succeeded in that it gave people a place to voice their frustration and helped encourage the anti-war movement. It failed in the sense that the guy writing the software (me) had no idea what he was doing, MoveOn completely stole our thunder (gathering 100 times more names than we did), and it didn’t exactly prevent the war in Iraq. ...