Dallas for Kerry/Edwards was a volunteer grass-roots effort in Dallas and Collin Counties that worked diligently to help elect Senators Kerry and Edwards in the 2004 Presidential campaign. We were a congregating place for local Democratic Activists. We staffed and operated a Dallas County phone banks twice weekly for months, expanded to include thrice weekly phone banks in Collin County, and during the last two weeks in October organized and operated that largest swing state phone bank in the country. We helped organize monthly Meetups and seven rounds of House Parties that attracted on average 200 people to each event. We walked in selected precincts. We were very involved in voter registration, culminating in our voter registration madness weekend where we had registrars in over two dozen locations during the last 72 hours of registration. We had, in my humble opinion, the best online grass roots website in the country that was far superior to most paid-for websites (although with the advent of Civicspace, much superior websites such are now easy to create).

Our website offered a dynamic calendar that anyone could submit events to, local information and contacts, an email subscription list with interest areas, daily news content, multimedia links, demographic community sections, search capabilities, links to related sites, and a humor section; bundled with pleasing colors and an easy to navigate presentation. Through the website and the events we built an email list of approximately 2600 people. I say approximately because our email list actually had over 3200 email addresses; but this number should be reduced by 450 due to bounces and reduced by another 150 due to people with more than one email address in the list. The actual number of people is probably larger than this because we know that some couples share an email address. The website was developed in ASP. (I neglected to take a screen snapshot after the election. This picture I recreated on my local computer, but is missing the calendar events and latest blog entries.)