Who: Angela Petrella and her gal pals
The big idea: Online tools shot Petrella’s skill as a Mission-district publicity pro into the stratosphere. Relying on email, My.BarackObama, and Google Docs, she and a bunch of friends got more than 100 people to donate $100 each, party down, and dance for Obama last October at the headquarters of McSweeney’s publishing house, where Petrella works. The viral planning process also netted goods and services from many local businesses, including Bi-Rite, Tartine, and the Make-Out Room. In the end, they raised close to $15,000.
The nugget: “I’m middle class, so $100 is a lot of money,” says Petrella, “and every single person we invited was like, ‘This is gonna be hard, but this is how much I care about it.’ It was just empowering to a lot of people to give that much away. It was almost a weird tithe, like, ‘I want this to happen, so I’ll eat ramen for a month.’”

Who: Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, owners of ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
The big idea: Moonlighting apart from their day job, this brilliant duo made eight political ads for the Obama campaign, most of which ran only on the Huffington Post, YouTube, and their agency’s own website. But their mash-up featuring Ronald Reagan, many of whose real ads were created by Goodby and Silverstein’s former boss, ad giant Hal Riney, was aired on CNN. The killer concept: It used Reagan’s “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” debate line to endorse Obama.
The nugget: “Obama had a paid staff doing this stuff,” Goodby says. “They didn’t need out-of-control people like us, who were working for free and would have told them to go jump in a lake if they didn’t like what we did.”

Who: Tristan O’Tierney and a group of other programmers
The big idea: Last summer, O’Tierney and a bunch of friends spent two grueling weeks of unpaid, Red Bull–fueled nights building the Obama ’08 iPhone application that excited Mac geeks and campaign volunteers alike. O’Tierney personally built the Call Friends feature, which automatically pulled up the phone numbers of iPhone users’ friends in key swing states. The Issues tool offered a quick summary of Obama’s major positions. O’Tierney checked his iPhone minutes after Obama won the election and found that 39,802 volunteer calls had been made using the app.
The nugget: “It was intense, but people were just sucking it up because we all knew that the project was bigger than us,” says O’Tierney. “I hope to be there when the next innovation is created. An application that calls your congressman, a virtual phone bank on your iPhone…the possibilities are endless.”

Who: Meena Harris, Obama’s Silicon Valley grassroots fundraising head
The big idea: Harris did through Facebook what her father, Tony West, Obama’s California finance cochair, did through business networks, only on a much smaller scale. He convinced individuals to donate the maximum ($2,300) to the campaign, which won them entrée to the Fairmont San Francisco meet-and-greet for Obama, while she used her Facebook page to persuade a bunch of friends to each give enough to send her to the event. Then she enlisted them to do the same with their Facebook friends—so 15 or so young people short on funds were able to attend the record-breaking fundraiser, which netted more than $8 million.
The nugget: “I did have one 24-year-old friend who wrote a check for $2,300—it was an entire month’s salary. It shows the lengths people will go to for a cause they support.”

Who: Alex Wise and Moira De Nike
The big idea: In September 2008—saddled with busy tech jobs, a new baby, and no time to travel to a swing state—this Glen Park couple created a way for people like them to invest in ready-to-go but cash-strapped volunteers who registered on their site, ObamaTravel.org. Among the 220-plus beautiful connections that resulted: San Francisco resident Justin Wiener, who was so upset by Sarah Palin’s convention speech that he turned down a job offer to work full-time on Obama’s campaign, signed up and got exactly $257 for airfare to the swing state of Pennsylvania.
The nugget: “The Bay Area’s got hippies ready to go knock on doors, guys with BlackBerrys ready to write the code, and VCs ready to write checks. We wanted to get all those archetypes under one roof,” says Wise.

Who: Daniel Cox, Louis Eisenberg, Benjamin Rattray, and Brad Wolfe
The big idea: Scared out of their minds by Sarah Palin’s nomination and McCain’s post-convention surge (“We were like, ‘Oh my god, what just happened?’” says Eisenberg), these Noe Valley housemates dreamed up Hungry for Obama, a network of what they called “viral dinner parties.” Hosts sent out email invites to their friends, who came together to eat, schmooze about the election, open their wallets (or laptops) for the campaign, and then also commit to hosting a party of their own. A party for 10 soon led to 10 parties for 100, and ultimately, 1,331 people attended 147 dinners—mostly in the Bay Area—and, um, forked over a total of $50,577.
The nugget: “We didn’t have any direct contact with the Obama campaign,” says Eisenberg. “We’d kind of hoped that the word about us might get out. But we never ended up talking to them—which is fine. I mean, we didn’t need their help.”

Who: Jim Klar, founder of All-Clear Productions
The big idea: Unable to afford more than a few hundred dollars in personal donations, this passionate amateur singer-songwriter decided—with barely three weeks left in the campaign—to produce and sell a CD of 13 of his own originals, then donate all the profits to Obama. He was inspired, he says, by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s call-to-arms email looking for volunteer fundraisers, and by a website that let people marry their personal logos with Obama’s official circular logo. At $10 a pop, Benefit for Barack netted $300, almost doubling Klar’s contribution. Klar plans to keep selling the CD through at least 2010 to raise money for liberal political causes.
The nugget: “I was surprised by some of the people who came out of the woodwork to buy this,” says Klar. “There was even a McCain fan who told me, ‘I don’t like Barack, but I want your CD.’”

Who: Writer Adam Ottley, director Corey Rosen, and Alice Radio host Hooman Khalili
The big idea: Khalili wanted to make sure that whoever got elected (and he wanted it to be Obama) would be supported by a genuine majority, not just a majority of people who voted. So he decided to target young people—the biggest abstainers, and the most likely to be Democrats—with a crackerjack video that would play on their guilt. (“They need a fire lit under their ass,” he said). A Citizen’s Cry shows an old woman regretting not having gotten politically involved when she was young. The video eventually garnered more than five million views; that’s more than three times the number of hits earned by Leonardo DiCaprio’s celebrity-laden GOTV video, which launched the same day.
The nugget: “I’m hands-down the most connected person I know,” says Khalili about why the video succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. “Every single person I know asks me for something. It’s nonstop, and I always do it—so, for the first time, I was able to call on nine years of built-up favors.”