Volunteers Gone Wild! -- House Party Activism and Member-Driven Events

What happens when volunteers take charge. Grow your list, increase membership, elect a candidate, build a movement by providing an online house party program for your most passionate supporters. Engage your members and supporters to devise and take ownership of ideas and campaigns to grow your organization and effect change.

Discuss with David Salie best practices in developing and deploying a house party strategy for fundraising, listbuilding, member engagement, and media cultivation.

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David Salie

Invited by Governor Howard Dean to work on his presidential campaign in 2002, David Salie became Dean for America's Director for House Party Fundraising. Over the course of the campaign, David built relationships with grassroots leaders nationwide, and developed a new outreach strategy for political campaigns.

Under David's leadership, the Dean House Party program engaged more than 80,000 participants and taught more than 3,500 supporters how to become grassroots leaders, and it raised more than $2 million for Governor Dean's campaign. "National House Party Days" became the signature events of the House Party program, with simultaneous nationwide gatherings, each featuring some form of live interaction with the candidate himself. The "New Year for America" event, for example, raised more than $850,000 and brought together 1,400+ separate house parties nationwide; an unprecedented feat.

David works with clients to replicate aspects of this grassroots outreach and fundraising model. Political campaigns, non-profit groups and businesses are all exploring how this outreach model can work for them. A key element of David's approach is to remind clients that success still comes from building relationships with people. Technological innovations are powerful indeed, but they are only part of a successful engagement strategy. By learning to balance the use of state-of-the-art technology and good old- fashioned personal engagement, David's clients learn to connect with more people, at a deeper level, in shorter time-frames.

As co-founder of Party2Win, Inc., David has used his party expertise to build a powerful party portal for organizations of all sizes. The site allows you to set up your party and guides you through creation and management of your party program.

HOW TO SELF ORGANIZE?

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