Working Assets

A few quick hits for a Saturday morning:

• Rock the Vote and Working Assets have unveiled their voter registration widget. By the end of the summer it is supposed to be portable to any website, blog or social network. This could be huge for online voter registration in 2008.
• The North Carolina General Assembly has passed a same day registration bill that will let voters register and vote on the same day up to three days before the election. The bill is awaiting the Governor's signature. Read our previous coverage of this here.(h/t Rock the Vote blog)
• Democrats Work is teaming up the Young Democrats to host a community service operation during the YDA Convention in Dallas. The groups will assemble back to school backpacks for the children of soldiers deployed in Iraq. Sign up here.
• AlterNet reports on the Bush Campaign's anti-protestor advance manual. The handbook outlines tactics for sidelining protestors and marks Young/College Republicans, local sororities/fraternities, and local athletic teams as footsoldiers to do the dirty work.

Shai Sachs at Planting Liberally has another post about how to fund progressive organizing and ease the reliance on big donors. Shai's idea - to fund an incubator that would promote for-profit/non-profit partnerships - is pretty ambitious, and I think there'd need to be some serious cost/benefit analysis to see if his model would be more efficient/sustainable than the current big-donor model.

My ideas in this area tend to be smaller in scale, like how to build revenue into projects. At MFA we tried selling merchandise, and had a very successful partnership with MoveOn, Barsuk Records and McSweeneys). I've also talked about even smaller scale stuff like College Democrat chapters, which have budgets in the thousands of dollars, hooking up with Amazon to bolster their budget.

Yesterday I read about a new project by Microsoft to promote their new instant messenger service. Called "IM (making a difference)," Microsoft has created partnerships with a number of nonprofit organizations including Sierra Club, The Human Society and the Red Cross. When you download Microsofts new IM client, you can choose one of these charities. Every time you IM your friends, Microsoft donates some of their ad revenue to the charity you selected.

I was thinking that something along these lines would be perfect for youth organizations to pursue in partnership with Working Assets. If you don't know, Working Assets is a dual for-profit/nonprofit organization that is in the credit card, wireless, and phone biz. Part of their profits go to supporting progressive causes, and since its creation in 1985 they have donated over $50 million to help sustain progressive organizations.

I have no idea if and how such a partnership could work (or if WA is even interested in the IM/chat business), but I saw that Microsoft program and it got the wheels spinning a little.