The NOI Story

In 2005, 17 senior staff whose 2004 campaigns broke grassroots mobilization and fundraising records came together to ask: “Where do we go from here?”

Across the board, the progressive movement's major 2004 successes had been fueled by breakthroughs in online organizing. The handful of campaigns NOI founders represented had raised well over $200 million, mobilized hundreds of thousands of volunteers, and contacted tens of millions of voters—largely by leveraging existing web-based progressive social networks in new ways. But they were the exceptions, not the rule.

The vast majority of progressive issue-organizations and candidate campaigns either failed to understand the potential of online organizing or lacked the skills to execute a successful online campaign. The progressive community was floundering, asking questions about how to better engage potential supporters using the new technologies that began to surface during the 2004 campaign cycle. It was plain to see that if progressives did not develop a training infrastructure for online organizers, we would quickly be left behind in a field we’d virtually invented.

Since its first Boot Camp training in March 2006, NOI has trained over 700 organizers across the country, including trainings in the battleground states of Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. NOI’s trainees have gone on to take leadership roles in dozens of prominent advocacy organizations and campaigns at the local, state, and national level. NOI alumni are changing the face of campaigns, advocating for the integration of online work into every corner and at every level of campaign structure.