Inspiration and innovation will be flying thick and fast in CP, but the last thing we want to be is all beret, no change.  So we’ll be continually asking you what ideas you’ve heard in the blog community that you think are most worth making reality, starting now.  Every quarter, we’ll be pulling together the top nominations, asking you to pick one for us to pursue as a community, and this space will be where we work together to get the ideal and real to switch places.

At the same time, we know there are already a lot of other great, creative ideas riding the high seas, with great organizations behind them, and we’re determined, with your help, to identify those that are most in sync with our values, to give those causes and groups a portion of any support we’re fortunate enough to receive.  Again, starting right here, right now.  And in these existential times, we’re always open to–and will be mounting ourselves–any number of campaigns with no policy goals at all, dedicated, for example, simply to beating Donald Trump, and beating him so badly that his own recourse is a plea bargain.

Think this is just so much durum flung into the stratosphere? Think again.

Going Wherever It Takes

Carrot-Sticker
Our most ambitious campaign yet–by far–and the first online community-based sticker campaign anywhere, using tried and true methodology to separate Trumpkins from their idol (and, more importantly, from their votes for him), (even more importantly) buck up, support, inspire, and motivate the defenders of democracy to do what needs to be done to crush authoritarianism in our country, and (most important of all) do so without tearing the country apart, indeed bring it closer together instead.  Note: due to the sensitivity of this campaign’s content in this most important election year of our lifetime, access will be by application only.  Click the pic or title to fill out the brief application form–we’ll get back to you as soon as you can.

Going High

Greetings
We’re going through the most divisive waters in our nation’s history since the Civil War, in a time of multiple unprecedented existential challenges and global threats, and we need to come together, fast. As always, when stakes are at their highest, we, the people, are the ones who need to address them, not the politicos.  In the Greetings campaign, we’re creating cards, stickers, buttons, and more that we believe will help bind up the wounds both “sides” have experienced over the past four decades.  Our hope is that you’ll join us in casting bread on the waters and, better yet, give us ideas on more “collateral repair” to create…

Bill Of The Day
When we began this campaign, the current occupant of the White House was gearing up to run against the “do-nothing” Congress in the 2020 election.  But the House had actually passed more than 400 bills that had never been taken up by the Republican Senate.  Because 400+ unpassed bills is, to paraphrase Papa Joe, a statistic, we decided that every day, we’d be posting a brief summary of one of these bills on social media, with a link to the full list of summaries to date, suitable for distribution to friends and colleagues.  Once we got into it, though, especially when the pandemic rifled through government as we knew it, we realized we were really doing something else, something better and more inspiring: illuminating what government should be and could be again…

Going Low

Brand Awareness
As we all know, there’s nothing Donald Trump loves more than to put his name on things.  In the spirit of bipartisanship, we’ve decided to help, and so can you, by printing out and affixing one of the many stickers & labels we’ve created (and are still creating, with your help) to every last person, place, or thing that really should be a Trump brand extension after the last four years, not just for the election, but for the relentless war of intimidation, propaganda, and sabotage we have ahead of us, in which we, the people, will need to continually remind our fellow citizens of the bad old days and that we, the people, the majority, have not forgotten…

Just Say No
For many Americans, Donald Trump has been an addictive toxin that threatens to destroy our democracy–and those are just the people who like him.  For the rest of us, it’s time for an intervention, a restoration of reality everywhere, for a 24/7 show of force across America from now through the election until however long it takes to get him out of our system.  It’s time to just say no, in a way that combines the newest of the new and the oldest of the old in politics…

Loyalty Test
It’s reached a point with Donald Trump and his alarming combination of authoritarianism and divisiveness where we need to reach out to our friends and neighbors who still support him, not to try to persuade them not to, but to work together to find common ground where he’s concerned, to come to agreement that there are things he could do that would compel them to walk away, because we will need that consensus among us so that we can unite again after he’s gone, or unite against him if and when he does the truly unthinkable (and he gets closer every day).  Based on our own experience talking with his supporters (we live deep in Trump country), we’ve created a guide you can use for those discussions…

In Waiting

Campaigns to come on deck–click on any you’re interested in to help make them happen!

All Polls
Help push pollsters to conduct more polls of all voters and all Americans to promote civic engagement, rather than polls of so-called “likely” and registered voters (which only normalize voter suppression), and press media organizations to publish and promote more of the former, less of the latter–and not to publish the results of “likely” voters at all.

Project Reality
Candidate debates have become less than useless in helping voters choose the best for any office, while many reality television formats can be adapted to tell us much more about how would-be leaders will perform in office.  Help us develop new vehicles to help voters compare and contrast the aspirants before them, and convince major networks and/or online providers to add them to the mix.

We Were There
Help us ensure Trump and his supporters aren’t able to leverage the all-American propensity to forget the past and rewrite the history of the worst four years in American history–which they are actively doing, aided and abetted by the corporate media–by helping us produce and distribute a daily newsletter that reminds everyone (as needed) what it was really like and what really happened–day by day–in 2017-2020, while hammering home the Big Truths about him and his administration.  Nobody will want to read it every day, but whenever you’ve got a waverer in need of inoculation, it will be there for you to forward…

The Apologist
Donald Trump never apologizes for anything, so we’re going to do it for him.  The Trump Apologist will be an account on the platform formerly known as Twitter that many times a day apologizes on his behalf for one of his many lies (the most egregious ones only–we have 50,000+ to choose from, after all), vile attacks on other Americans (especially those not “in the game”), and flat-out screw-ups…

Debunko
Why do people believe social & other new media BS?  Because it comes from “ordinary people like me (and you)” not experts they no longer trust, and because said experts, clueless and arrogant, won’t respond (and usually don’t even know what’s being said). It’s how and why a baffling proportion of Americans in key Democratic constituencies are seriously considering voting for Trump.  Created by the team that brought together 20,000 teachers to handle 1 million student homework questions a week (developing the first online user & community-generated database to scale), modeled on the Digital National Guards of Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine–which have been successfully obliterating Russian disinformation for years–the Debunko Squad will be ferreting out the latest in lieware, developing responses (not to mention potential messaging for candidates at all levels), and learning by trial and error how to weaponize the truth.

Swift Boat 2024
God willing otherwise, but we have to be prepared for the real possibility of serious violence on the part of Trump supporters in the run-up to the 2024 election and beyond, and that our men and women in uniform may well be asked to choose sides.  Swift Boat 2024 will be dedicated to ensuring as few of those who serve as possible believe one of the most insidious lies of all–that Trump and the GOP are the military’s true champions.  Help us engagingly compile and distribute the myriad disproofs that collectively send this BT to kingdom come where it belongs (PS That Atlantic article only scratches the surface)

A-Lago
It’s been fifty years since Watergate, and yet the media goes right on adding “-gate” to every new political scandal, as if that third-rate burglary is the plutonium standard for malfeasance.  We all know nearly all of the Top 25 corrupt acts of the modern era occured in the Trump campaign, administration, and aftermath.  It’s time to get the media to change hotels and append -a-lago to every scandal going forward–which will also make the perpetrators sound ring-a-ding ridiculous, rather than the masterminds they believe themselves to be…

Trump Verbatim
Republicans have worked overtime to make Joe Biden look too old to be president, but have you ever read a verbatim transcript of a Trump rally, press conference, or interview?  With whatever charisma the man has stripped away, what’s left is appalling, even when “cleaned up” by his friends in the “liberal” media–nothing but word salad, and clearly far more demented than anything Uncle Joe has ever stumbled through.  Since the average voter will never take the time to read them, Trump Verbatim will do the reading for them.  We’ll set up a text to speech app that does nothing but read Trump’s words in the completely objective monotone such apps are famous for, and let the meme-o-sphere do the rest.

Trump Trump
From the same transcripts, we’ll also create a corollary app, a simple game we’ll continually add to, in which we’ll take the factual errors he’s made and turn them into multiple choice questions voters can answer for themselves.  Odds are pretty good, we believe, that even uninformed voter will be able to answer a lot more correctly than Trump did, and each time they beat him best-of-five (with leaderboards included to incent them to share with friends, it will be a reminder that Trump is not just like them–he’s dumber and more ignorant, and if their self-esteem is low enough to support him, is that really who they want leading us?  A similar game we created had an NPS of 90; another helped close the gap between a primary challenger and an incumbent governor by double digits in the final weeks of the campaign (and could have done even more had the old school campaign manager released it when it was ready, 10 weeks out)

The Dead Seas Scroll
One of the most powerful exhibits in the US Holocaust Museum when it opened was one of the simplest and not even officially an exhibit at all—a television screen behind the ticket line displaying an endless scroll of all the laws the Nazis passed against the Jews, as if every day they had to come up with some new way to punish or restrict them.  The Dead Seas Scroll will be developed using the same approach, and targeted directly at a key wavering population—Gen Zs—by focusing on the environment, Trump’s relentless attacks on it, and what he is already (gleefully) planning to do to it if he is “re-elected,” all accompanied by compelling soundscapes we have a specialty in creating.

The Price Is Wrong

The Wall Of Shame

CP founders were responsible for assembling a who’s who of media, technology, education, political, business, and other organizations to create AOL’s top content channels when most Americans didn’t even know what a modem was yet.  We’ve rinsed and repeated this kind of new media coalition-building (far more effective and lasting than anything “viral”) many times over the years since, most recently behind the cause of connected education, where we pulled together more than 1,000 major education organizations and companies for a month-long online event that mushroomed into a year-round movement, promoted and discussed at more than 6,000,000 online locations, reaching 15-17 million educator and education supporters around the world daily via Twitter alone.

Along the way, we literally wrote the book on online community building, followed by seminal, defining research on online influencers (we coined the term), who they are, why they’re important, what they want, and how to get–and keep–them behind your cause.