We're a Fast 50 Company!
We've all heard it before -- the Internet is changing the way we live our lives. Our staff has taken this mantra literally and changed the way political campaigns communicate online. Now their innovation and creativity has landed us a spot on Fast Company magazine's Fast 50 companies for 2006. This year's Fast 50 list focuses on people who will change how we work and live over the next 10 years.
Blue State Digital consults with campaigns, non-profits and corporations to build robust, active online communities by providing and creating original technology and advising clients on strategy, such as blogging and raising money online. The four partners were nominated by the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Gov. Howard Dean.
The partners of Blue State Digital - Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Clay Johnson, Joe Rospars and Ben Self - started the company immediately after working for Howard Dean's presidential campaign in 2004. Since then, the company has grown to 22 employees with offices in Boston and Washington, D.C. and works with over 40 clients - including Sen. Ted Kennedy's (D-Mass.) campaign, Gov. Tom Vilsack's (D-Iowa) PAC -- Heartland PAC, the AFL-CIO, the DNC and the Democratic Governors Association
In celebration of Fast Company's 10th anniversary, their fifth global readers' challenge spotlights leading creative thinkers who have already made significant accomplishments but whose best is yet to come, and who stand to have a significant impact on the next 10 years. Past winners have included people from Quizno's, Zappos.com and Skype. Fast Company has a circulation of approximately 750,000.
Here's what they said about us:
Politics is about to get even more local. In the 2008 election, candidates will use global-positioning systems and mapping technology to target voters in key states, block by block. They'll send SMS messages urging supporters to donate money. And they'll buy Google key words to find constituents. You'll even have "Governor Tom Vilsack blogging from his BlackBerry while running across a field in Iowa," says Clay Johnson, cofounder of Blue State Digital, a consultancy that helps incorporate Web technology into lefty campaign strategies. Blue State Digital was started in 2004 by Johnson, Joe Rospars, Jascha Franklin-Hodge and Ben Self, veterans of the groundbreaking Internet Component of Howard Dean's disintegrating Oval Office Run. "Wal-Mart has a record of every transaction of every customer," says Johnson. That's "something all political organizations are working on. Knowing Who's a democrat and where they are and integrating mapping technology so you can give a precinct captain a list of where to walk around a neighborhood and whose door to knock on-- that's the future." For both parties, we're guessing. -- Michael A. Prospero.
