Show them.

Yesterday morning I checked out the Huffington Post's celebrations from around the world pictures (re: Obama's win) and I immediately began crying.

Allow me to contextualize (beyond the fact that I'm just a big crier):

This election has been emotionally exhausting and there is a strong chance that I was under-unrested, if not a little drunk when I woke up yesterday morning.

However, we shouldn't allow these elements cheapen what the Huffington Post was doing right on behalf Obama's brand with their feature. Their success (in making my cry) should reaffirm that Barack Obama was able to sell his brand not just because he talked a big game about hope, change, and inspiration, but because he was able to show that he was actually making these things happen via the documentation of those he lit a flame inside of. His campaign did not rely solely on promises - it, and its supporters, were able to show its documented successes as they happened.

Show us what YOUR project can do, especially if you're out to make people's lives better. Show us pictures, video, and all documentation of the change you're making. Make the slightly drunk, overly exhausted, emotionally fragile person deep down in all of your potential base cry, gosh darnit, then ask them to give you a hand. If you're looking for a way to launch into this, you might want to give Collective Lens a try.

Once you show them, organize them too.

If you're still considering hiring an outreach coordinator, or if you're in the process of looking for a consultant, strongly consider bringing on someone who has actual community organizing experience. The time is now, friends, as it's a pretty damn good time to do that. Somewhere around a million-billion community organizers are now jobless due to the end of campaign service, and they need to make some money/find a place to work. At least look into picking their brains and asking how they operate. The Internet can't do any of this stuff for us. Applications won't win it for you. Mary Ann Hitt from I Love Mountains noted last week when its easy to get caught up in the gagetry and forget about the strategy. Community organizers have been there, they've been on the ground, and they've strategized with little to no resources.  

Focus the Nation is great example of why community organizing experience, mixed with an introduction of web outreach strategy, is helpful for overall success. I had the pleasure of meeting with the group a few days back, when they, all under the age of 25, explained their backgrounds in some degree of on-the-ground community organization where they developed strategy before developing skills in 2.0 mastery. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, as the relatively new non-profit that organized a teach-in on climate change at over 1900 schools last January - largely driven by their off- link skills which were augmented and made easier via online technologies.  

Further, the staff of Focus the Nation can came into their existence as an organization a year and a half and had no internet tools, aside from a Excel sheet, to their name before pulling out an organizational structure and then finally building their web presence around that.