Micah Sifry has written a post-mortem about the Andy Rasiej campaign for NYC Public Advocate. Some important lessons there for anyone using the Internet for leverage. Here were a few that hit home for me:

We misjudged how much people would care about our initial pledge to not take more than $100 per donors, and we overestimated how much the Internet could compensate for our weaknesses, in terms of spreading our message and assisting with fundraising;

Low name recognition plus low voter attention meant that network effects (such as a message spreading virally, or friends of the campaign being able to convince their friends to donate money) were almost impossible to produce.

From micah.sifry.com
Referenced Wed Nov 02 2005 09:39:33 GMT-0700 (MST)