I don't know what the answer is.
But I think Kos' diary presents a good opportunity to tell you what I did with the $4,000 I raised for my George Allen project. At the end of the diary, you'll see why I don't know what the answer to Kos' question is.
Actually, this diary is going to be pretty short.
Many of you know that I planned to make radio ads when I asked y'all for money. If I had stuck to that plan, I might've been more successful in my ad strategy.
At the time, nobody had gone public to accuse Allen of using the n-word. This was after macaca, and after I asked him about his use of the n-word, but before Larry Shelton came forward.
So I had a pretty damned good script. I just wanted to get young people to be my voices and then I was gonna use the $4,000 to buy a seed campign on radio stations across Northern Virginia. The media wasn't talking about Allen posing in pics w/white supremacists, his noose and confederate flag or any of the rest of his questionable race record. I was gonna get it on the air, and hopefully, into the news. I had dreams of "Swift-boating," only democratic style - using the truth. The news cycle would grab a bit more publicity, damage Allen, and hopefully raise enough money for me to expand the market I ran the ads in.
It really was a good plan.
Too good.
My script got around, here and there. Before I knew it, I was talking with one of the netroots leaders. We decided to go for broke and produce an ad for TV. This person was making the rounds talking with a lot of potential funders. The script was shared with them and generated a lot of interest, but the interest was in donating to purchase air time, not in production.
So I signed up a progressive video team - people that do this stuff professionally. Then I recruited some college students through another contact, had them drive here (to Charlottesville) from Richmond, and spent a day filming. The result was the Young Virginians For Truth ad that you can see at YouTube.
(an aside: I first went to the UVa Dems to recruit people for the commercial, but they thought the project was "too negative". ugh.)
Unfortunately, I didn't think the final product was as slick as I wanted it to be. Looking back, I was probably wrong - it was a commercial filmed by a college student group - how "slick" did it really have to be?
Anyway, I happened to be put in touch with a corporate video shop. I looked over their portfolio, and man... these guys were awesome! And they wanted to help - for cheap. It wasn't that they needed the work - they clearly didn't. No - they truly wanted to use their talents to help win this election.
So I set up a shoot in DC for the next week.
Then all hell broke loose. The n-word story broke huge. I'm not sure how much you remember it, but before Mark Foley, for about a week, every talk show was talking about people coming forward about George Allen the racist.
Kinda dwarfed the allegations about the white supremacists and confederate flags... But on the other hand, people were still giving Allen the benefit of the doubt about using the n-word, so if I could put that into context by highlighting all the other stuff, it still woulda been worth it... So I tweeked the script a little, and we decided to go forward.
For the shoot, we rented a hotel room for the day - and this is where stuff broke down. I had a guy helping me in DC, and I was out here in C'ville. We were supposed to round up between 20 and 40 people to come in and do the shoot. Unfortunately, only about 5 or 6 people showed up. I, myself, couldn't show up until 6 that night.
Well, that just wasn't enough people. There wasn't enough decent footage to make a decent ad. For over the next 2 weeks, we tried to do different things to compensate, but these guys had a full production schedule and could only work on it nights and weekends. I think not having enough people on site for the shoot really took the wind out of their sails - without raw footage, we just weren't going to get the top-notch product we all had envisioned.
So the project languished.
So in all, I spent the $4,000, but had only the Young Virginians ad to show for it. The corporate team has been in touch with me and told me that they are going to refund some of the money I paid them, but I don't know how much they are sending back.
So that's why I don't know about personal fundraising. I tried it and was successful at raising the money. But I was much less successful in creating the product that I thought would change the election. As it is, I feel bad that most of the money you folks sent me went to waste. I'm glad Allen lost, and I like to think that my original n-word question had a lot to do with that - but that's not what you sent me money for...
So I don't know the answer to the question. On the one hand, it was my first try doing something like that, I've learned some lessons and I know how I'd do things differently next time. I don't want to forclose opportunities for myself or any others that have great ideas but need small dollars to get the idea off the ground. This community was wonderful to me in that way.
But... Whenever any community grows large enough, you're gonna find your snake-oil salesmen. I didn't read yesterday's diary, so I have no idea what y'all are talking about, but I see why Kos is putting the question out there.
This is a great place. An awesome group of people. And this is a damned hard question.