Just saw that your comment from a few weeks was stuck in the moderation box, sorry for the delay! Couple thoughts…

1. The money was just pledges, not actual donations, so I’m not sure how much the specific language matters. The point is they’ve got a list that they can threaten to hit, and a number that they can trumpet in the media.

2. Those are probably the right metrics to use if we wanted to study this in greater detail, but I still have trouble equating them with “effectiveness.” That just seems like a pretty weighty term to me. What we’d be going for in essence would be “how well are advocacy groups doing against the yardsticks they themselves set?” If we add comparative data — say, media mentions of a moveon tactic vs media mentions of a health care action network tactic — then we can say something pretty authoritative about which groups are *more* effective against shared goalposts. But the blog measure gets tricky because it’s difficult to defend against the “echo chamber” charge. If MoveOn takes an action that gets heavy play amongst progressive blogs, even in the midwest, does that necessarily move Ben Nelson? If it doesn’t, then it’s much noise signifying little.

For that reason, the PCCC has been the group that’s impressed me most in the past 6 months, specifically because they’ve been taking out commercials that both get heavy earned media attention and because they’ve forced reactions from their targets. Likewise with Accountability Now PAC, which is the moving part I’ll be most focused on in the 2010 election.

So short-version response on point 2: blog and media data definitely CAN be used as a proxy, but it’s only for one dimension of effectiveness and I think the research community needs to tread carefully with the data, because it would be extraordinarily easy to make too much of it.

3. Nope, not yet. That’s the type of concerted push that I’m likely to make as a follow-up to the book project, so we’re talking a year or two down the road. It would be a multi-person affair, so if you’re in a place at that point where you’d want to engage with it, let me know.

4. OfA is next on the agenda. You’re absolutely right that they’re the most important black box in this research area right now.

Hope the semester went well for you, would love to hear your reaction (particularly on the effectiveness-measures point…)
-DK

Interesting post. It really is quite crazy how little data there is on this subject. A few questions:

1) Though it was implied in one of the emails you quoted, was the money pledged supposed to *specifically* fund a primary challenger and did MoveOn promise to follow through? I.e. if a Dem senator does vote against cloture, etc., will MoveOn send an email to their pledgers to make good?

2) Is it impossible to measure effectiveness here? One of the MoveOn emails states “Then, we make sure the media, Senate leadership, and conservative Democrats know just how many of us are willing to support a challenge against anyone who blocks reform.” Did you look to see if the results of the pledge drive were widely discussed in the blogosphere or media? Especially in blogs/media in the conservative Dems’ states? (I have a continuing interest in seeing if blog and media data can be used as a proxy for at least one dimension of effectiveness of advocacy groups.)

3) Have you ever been successful in getting Sierra Club or another group to give you access to their email response data? That would, of course, be a fantastic way to get at effectiveness of different types of appeals/organizing drives.

4) Have you turned this lens on Organizing for America? I’m not sure which cross-cut of the OfA email list I’m on, since I don’t generally take action from them, but I did notice that they seemed to get a lot more active in organizing for a positive agenda on health care reform, to a degree I hadn’t seen them do before.

cheers,
Conor