New Organizing Institute

Formed in 2005 by American progressive activists who had used online media effectively in 2004 campaigns, the New Organizing Institute (NOI) was created as a mechanism for educating in skills they had developed. The two co-founders were Judith Freeman, who had been in Internet operations for the John Kerry campaign, and Zack Exley, who worked with Moveon.org and the John Dean campaign.

Other experience came from campaigns including those of Ned Lamont, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards, as well as the Democratic National Committee, and the AFL-CIO. "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 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."