An online petition in 2003 pushed the Human Rights Campaign into the world of online fund- and friendraising. And the organization never looked back.

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

“So we’ll be starting all over again with our campaign,” Grams says. “That’s what it’s like working on the Hill.”

As far as numbers for HRC, the Fight Hate Campaign brought in 2,000 new donors and 70,000 subscribers to the online community.

“I keep asking myself, ‘How are we going to top this?’ and then we do,” Grams says. “In December, we implemented an online membership drive campaign — ‘2008: The Year to Win’ — and over the next six weeks we had almost 10,000 people give $500,000. Roughly half of them were first-time donors to HRC.”