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

“Some of our biggest successes have come about from making the most of opportunities,” Crowley says. “We have a direct-marketing plan; we know step by step what we’ll be doing in the next fiscal year — but our absolute biggest successes have come about from finding out that XYZ is going to happen and asking, ‘What are we going to do about that?’