In just six days, Citizen Action of Wisconsin received more new member records than two months of field canvasing could have brought in – all with one Facebook petition.
Wednesday, I caught up with Citizen Action of Wisconsin’s Director of Operations, Brian Wooldridge, and got the scoop on this. Here’s what he told me.
When Wisconsin Gov. Walker proposed cutting many insurance platforms in the state, he planned to decide which ones to cut by posting a survey on the state’s web site asking people to vote which programs to cut. The problem was, he didn’t offer any other possibilities to get around cutting them, for example: “Would you rather have your taxes raised than cut funding.”
Citizen Action of Wisconsin used a Facebook petition to give people a chance to express the anger and frustration they were feeling, and offer a way to do something productive with those feelings by speaking out against the Medicaid cuts. The response was unprecedented for C.A.W.
Within the first six days, over 1200 people have taken action on the petition, and Citizen Action has added 159 new members to their database. According to Wooldridge, “getting those same results would have taken our field canvassers around 2-3 months. It’s really great how successful this has been; we are planning to use more Facebook forms in the future.”
*UPDATE 10/24/11*
Citizen Action Wisconsin Presents the secretary of the Department of Health Services with 2,000 signatures – see the photo!
thedatabank, gbc is technology for change, and we walk the talk. 
