Robert Bingham, brought in as a new CEO of Unity08 to replace old Unity08 CEO Douglas L. Bailey, just finished an internet chat in which he answered questions about membership and delegates head-on. Remember, members are those who’ve signed up for Unity08 e-mail lists, while delegates are those who have signed up to participate in next year’s supposed online presidential nominating convention, for which Unity08 has set the goal of 10,000,000 delegates. Under Bailey’s leadership, Unity08 had let claims of as many as 60,000 delegates float out into the news media. Just yesterday, Unity08 exec Jerry Rafshoon had “informed” politico.com that Unity08 possessed 75,000 members. But as I just this morning calculated from publicly available data, Unity08 could not possibly have more than 41,769 delegates as of today, and even that’s after making a set of unreasonably generous assumptions.
During the online chat, I asked Bingham about this upfront. To his credit, Bingham answered in an upfront manner:
(Jun 22-12:15) jimcook: Would you please clarify the current number of “members” of unity08, the number of current “delegates” of unity08, and the distinction between the two?
(Jun 22-12:15) robert_bingham: As you might know, we’ve been signing up both members and delegates. The distinction is that delegates have given us name, address etc. and members have simply given us email, zip and name. We want to get as many people involved as possible, and will moving our message from the term ‘delegate’ to something that sounds like less work. We really need to get people signed in and hope to engage them to eventually become a delegate or voter when we get ready for the convention next june. Currently 62,000 members of which 38,000 are delegates.
That contradicts Bailey and Rafshoon. Marjorie Fox asked a followup question:
(Jun 22-12:55) marjorie_fox: How many delegates are presently participating? For a successful campaign, how many are needed for a critical mass? By when?
(Jun 22-12:55) robert_bingham: I mentioned earlier that we have 62,000 members of which 38,000 are delegates. We think it’s still not impossible to get to millions by June of 2008. The internet is about exponetial growth, and simply saying ‘well, Unity08 is only signing up XX number a day’ is an old way of looking at growth and should be applied to straight line growth industry for example. As we’ve seen with Bloomberg’s announcement, it only takes a few words to change the landscape. we’re working to make that happen.
But I responded to Bingham in a comment that didn’t make it onto the chat, even in the wake of Bloomberg’s announcement, Unity08′s delegate recruitment rate is about 100 per day, which is hundreds of times too small. The recruitment rate has not been exponentially increasing. It has been remaining linearly flat, and even decreasing somewhat. How will Bingham change that? Media appearances have been tried. Bloomberg’s quasi-announcement only nudged the recruitment rate up a bit. What’s left in the PR toolkit, or will something beyond public relations tactics need to be deployed?
