The days of sweltering repose that are August are drawing to a close;
silly season in Washington reconvenes a week from Tuesday, and not just
the annual rite of misbegotten optimism for the football team with the
racist moniker.

In addition to September's bookend marquees -- the John Roberts kabuki dance (opening September 6) and a massive anti-war rally (September 24-26) -- the nation's parliamentarians have lodged a predictably nefarious docket heavy on fiscal austerity that's a calculated purpose of the Bush tax cuts. (oh, there's another one of those in the pipe, too.)

Target Analysis Group has released its first-quarter Index of National Fundraising Performance
(this link goes to a .pdf), which is based on a survey of a few dozen
very large organizations. Though it's nothing that's going to
cause you to rewrite your day planner, it's enough to make water cooler
chat if your development department is large enough to have a water
cooler chat.

Andrew Rasiej, a progressive Internet entrepreneur who's using the DemocracyInAction platform through DemocracyInAction.com
(a socially conscious business, as distinct from DemocracyInAction.org,
a nonprofit), is running for Public Advocate in New York on a platform
of increasing technology access -- including wireless throughout the city and in the subway tubes.

The first entry in a franchise of peeks at effective e-advocacy strategy by the folks on the other team brings us to Brian Reich's entry on Personal Democracy Forum
comparing the Republican Party's smooth-handling web redesign to the
Dems', about which the best that Reich can offer is that it isn't as clunky as it used to be.

I'm afraid Friday's post indulged a too-flip conclusion that's worth re-examining.

As
is the case with our coterie of progressive philanthropists, it will
not do to let the frisson of resistance stand in for an assessment of
the terrain.

The
netroots has the luxury of opposition status, and opposition to a
particularly grotesque junta to boot, which leaves in its wake plenty
of blog-fodder and the mirthsome pleasures of watching the right
blogosphere defend the First World's very worst chief executive. That's
a fine party favor, but it won't long remain tenable to
withhold a firm stand on Iraq, and that issue could fracture the
Democratic party as easily as -- perhaps more easily than -- the
Republican.

Appearances to the contrary, we do a lot more here than streaming Kintera's stock quotes.



DemocracyInAction
is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing robust and
affordable e-advocacy tools to other nonprofits. That's from the
company pamphlet, or would be if we had a company pamphlet. What it means is, it's a hell of a lot of fun
to work here.



We have around 200 clients, everything from small local arts
organizations to enormous brand-name groups. Among them, they do
a humbling array of good deeds, with an astonishing range of strategies.



Both of which bring us to Cindy Sheehan, the accidental spokesperson of
America's three-years-overdue disenchantment with the Iraqi blunder.



We're lucky enough to be hosting the donation page for meetwithcindy.org,
a site that went live less than two weeks ago and has become one of the
web's most heavily trafficked. We're also serving Operation Truth and CodePink,
and know a lot of the IT folks who have gotten involved in this amazing
netroots phenomenon. It also means we get a view of a lot of the
sausage-making.



Last week, David Swanson posted this survey
of meetwithcindy.org's preternatural gigantism. Amazingly, at the
time this post went up, the site didn't even have a donations page.



In the week since, it's gone still higher,
cracking the top 10,000 web sites worldwide and being widely featured
in mainstream media. Yet meetwithcindy finally put up its
donations page, using DemocracyInAction tools, just this Wednesday. From that time to this, they've collected (and I'm obliged to be at once vague and emphatic) a lot
... even though the page's donate button is decidedly
understated. It's a staggering flood -- but only a fraction of
the sum left on the table by not having a donate page up a week earlier.

Kintera finally went public with the gory details, raising their projection of 2005 losses from $0.93-$0.99 per share to $1.15-$1.24 while lowering revenue forecasts from $50-55 million to $42-45 million and pushing projected profitability back from Q1 to Q4 of 2006. The market promptly battered share prices down to $2.85, nearly a third off its price just two weeks ago. If you've got the best part of an hour to kill, you can tune into their shareholder call here, or read all about it here.

Kintera finally went public with the gory details, raising their
projection of 2005 losses from $0.93-$0.99 per share to $1.15-$1.24
while lowering revenue forecasts from $50-55 million to $42-45
million and pushing projected profitability back from Q1 to Q4 of 2006.
If you've got the best part of an hour to kill, you can tune into their
shareholder call here, or read all about it here.

This post is a bit of a catch-up; a couple of weeks before we launched this blog, the Congressional Management Foundation released a report about how Congress is handling the flood of citizen e-mail.

As we've known for a while, they're struggling.

I did my time in the Capitol Hill intern factory in the mid 90's. The communication was pretty much all of the traditional variety, but here's how we handled it:

• Mail and faxes went to a back room, where a recluse spent the entire day shuffling it into various subject cubbies ("Defense," "Environment," etc.), which then went to the staffers covering that area. These in turn parsed them however they liked to get a feel for the issue, and had their interns generate the tedious blow-off replies you get when you write to Congress.
• Phone calls relating to upcoming votes generated a tally. We rotated duties and just put a mark on a sheet: Fer it or agin it. We all indulged the temptation to cook those tallies now and again. At the end of the day, we'd pass on the sheets of tally marks.
  

Every office is a little different, but this is not the sort of institutional agility that was going to make a rapid adaptation to a medium allowing thousands of instant communications. Nowadays, your best case scenario for an Internet campaign is that it's handled like those phone calls and tallied, or at least approximated.

Ouch.

Kintera's laying off 10 percent of its staff and announcing big second-quarter losses.