Living Liberally
Living Liberally provides easy entrance into progressive involvement, using social interaction to promote political action. LL is built upon networks of local gatherings -- Drinking Liberally's weekly bar socials, Screening Liberally's progressive film series, Laughing Liberally's comedy shows, plus Eating, Reading, Bowling, Biking and Shooting Liberally events. Through these events, Living Liberally creates communities for progressive political engagement.
Challenges & Needs
LL grew alongside, and thanks to, the liberal blogosphere's exponential growth. It quickly grew to hundreds of chapters all across the country using what amounted to an "open source" model.
As the network grew and morphed, it pushed the human capacity and the technology of the volunteer organizers. They were running numerous web applications that had been cobbled together in the time of chaotic and spectacular growth.
Drinking Liberally, as it was still called at the time, needed to be redesigned to incorporate the new Living Liberally umbrella. The various websites needed to be rebuilt and fully integrated in order to sustainably manage the size.
While the viral nature of the network means that its growth can be random, the organization of the chapters is anything but ad hoc. Regularly scheduled check-ins with chapter leaders and field organizers are required. The placement of orders for branded lapel buttons, the shipping of the packages, the distribution of literature to chapters, as well as the myriad email update types that need to circulate through the system, add up to a complicated regulatory system.
Solution
Advomatic volunteered our time to this vital component of the progressive movement. Custom modules were built to tackle some of their specific check-in needs.
Now at hundreds of chapters and thousands of members of the organization, Living Liberally 2.0 is architected in such a way that new 'channels' and 'chapters' can germinate with slight executive steering.
Because the complexity of their network required a laundry list of special feature requests like multiple international chapters, email delivery reporting, irregular event scheduling, dozens of customizations were made to the following modules:
- Events
- Location
- Chapter
- Chapter Blogs
Custom APIs were written to manage the email messaging services from Bronto.
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