Heather Holdridge currently serves as the Director of Political Advocacy for Care2 (http://www.care2.com), the country's largest social network empowering civically active people to take action. Care2 supports progressive advocacy on issues as varied as women’s rights, environmental issues, human rights, animal rights, consumer issues and progressive politics, among others. Heather works to to provide a forum for organizations to promote their message and mission among Care2’s eleven million members. This interview was conducted by IM on May 14th and 15th and has been edited for clarity.

10:40 AM Anna Curran: What do you love the most about your job as Political Director for Care2? What is the hardest part of your job?
10:41 AM Heather Holdridge: What I love most about my job is having the opportunity to talk with all kinds of non-profits and political organizations about what they're working on online, and work with them to figure out how to connect them with the Care2 audience. I feel like I get a good sense of what the larger progressive community is doing, and I also think (or hope) that Care2 is contributing in a very small way to their success. Hardest... wow. I think it's a challenge sometimes to find the best way to work with folks that is a fit with our membership and is also valuable to non-profits. But that's the nature of the web overall--it's a constantly evolving medium: both in terms of what the folks who are maintaining sites are doing and the user experience and expectations.

10:45 AM Anna Curran: Where did you grow up? What did you study in school?
10:47 AMHeather Holdridge: Ha. I didn't expect these questions. I grew up in a very small town in upstate New York. Newark, NY in the Finger Lakes--about 10,000 people. In college, I studied Political Science. I'm a total political dork. But I never even had an email account in college (in fact I didn't even have a computer--I had a word processor. For reals)

10:40 AM Anna Curran: Wow! So from no computer to...working at the Carol/Trevelyan Strategy Group as the Online Organizing Director and for Project Vote Smart as the Legislative Director. How did those jobs prepare you for what you do today? What was a critical lesson that you learned at each job?
10:50 AM Heather Holdridge: Project Vote Smart was my first job out of college--I learned a valuable lesson about how to do web projects, or in that case, not. This is 1997. We knew at PVS that the Internet was going to be useful to people, but we really didn't know how to present our information--nobody did really. So, one day, we decided we were going to redesign our website, and all the staff--about 15 of us, sat around a table and had a meeting to just discuss how to reorganize the website. Not a great way to develop an information architecture. I also learned a ton about Congress--how it worked, who the players at the time were, etc.
CTSG was an extremely innovative place. It was really ahead of the curve in many ways in both website development and online organizing. I was CTSG's first-ever web project manager (which is not what they hired me to do, by the way). CTSG introduced me to the progressive advocacy world, which is something that I've built on and use everyday in my work. I also learned and was encouraged to follow my passions--what interested me and would also be useful for the non-profits we worked with. Mostly, I learned how to think strategically there.

10:54 AM Anna Curran: Do you have a mentor or someone who is inspirational in your career?
10:57 AM Heather Holdridge: Well, I'm inspired by so many people. It would be a very long list. I think a few people who have been instrumental for me personally include Dan Carol, who hired me at CTSG and who is always two steps ahead of where other folks are. I loved working with Dan -- he and Stu Trevelyan
(the other founding partner) let me and a few colleagues go off at CTSG and build an interactive multimedia department when very few others were doing that. More recently, I've become involved with the women's tech community and have just been blown away by the amazing work that is going on, both on a "techie" level, and some of the movement work going on: Shireen Mitchell (digital sista), Allyson Kapin, Morra Aarons, Deanna Zandt , Tanya Tarr , really the list goes on and on.

3:54 PM Anna Curran: Online community organizing is a hot topic these days. What are some key misconceptions that you would like to debunk? What are some fundamentals that everyone should know?
3:56 PM Heather Holdridge: That it's easy. I think organizing meaningful communities online is pretty tough stuff. It's not that the tactics are difficult, per se,
but I've always believed that content is king, and it's becoming increasingly difficult, I think, to cut through the cacaphony and find the right audience with a message that resonates that makes them want to say "Yeah, I can get into that."
Fundamentals . . . Lots of folks talk about this, but then maybe that's why this is a fundamental. I think that it's about telling stories--you want to create a narrative that's simple that people can connect with emotionally. The best facts won't (and don't) win the day, unfortunately. It's about making it obvious why something matters to somebody and how they can make a difference by getting involved.
I think everybody should know how to use the basic technology, everybody should know how to write a basic email, and everybody should know how
to post a basic blog post. Not that you should be doing it every day personally, but understanding the building blocks of organizing will, I think help organizations as a whole do well.

4:02 PM Anna Curran: At Care 2 you assist organizations that that have missions in lots of different areas. What issue are you personally most passionate about?
4:13 PM Heather Holdridge: Well, I'm part Italian, so I'm kinda fiery . . . I really am interested in so many issues and there is so much that needs our attention right now. In terms of my history, choice was a very important issue to me when I was first in college and I did a lot of activism around that and I still get very worked up around reproductive health and womens' health care. I'm also interested in LGBT equality issues--it's pretty amazing to see the tide turning on that. And I've also been very fired up lately around the economic collapse and the bailouts and the conversations about what kind of society we want and need to build. That last one is a little wonky/nerdy, but if we screw this up (i.e. we don't restructure our economic systems and regulatory structures to not totally gouge the working and middle classes), I'm not sure how we'll recover the next time.
I've been diggin' on the writings and appearances of Matt Taibbi lately.

4:15 PM Anna Curran: At Carol/Trevelyan Strategy Group you developed viral interactive media. Tell us about an experience that surprised you. What is your favorite viral video or campaign?
4:18 PM Heather Holdridge: Surprised-- has me stumped a bit. I'm noodling...
4:19 PM Heather Holdridge: I think I was surprised at the fact that I felt like I had a facility for it. That sounds horn-tooty, but I really just came to love the process--interacting with the client and figuring out what message we wanted to convey, brainstorming with our creative team, working directly with the flash developers and the sound engineers. It is definitely the most fun I've had doing client work.
4:23 PM Heather Holdridge: And it was an amazing learning process. I learned a ton about message development and how to try to effectively (and entertainingly) deliver that stuff. Favorite viral video . . . my favorite at CTSG was probably this series we did called "Republican Survivor" in 2004 for the DCCC. It was actually 6 "webisodes" plus an intro trailer that we did over seven weeks. The users actually got to choose which Republican got voted off every week, which meant that we couldn't script the following week's webisode until 5 days before we launched it. It was insane and I would never ask anybody (client or production team) to do that again, but it was a blast and the client was happy with the results. I only wish YouTube had existed then . . .
4:24 PM Heather Holdridge: I should also probably shout out for the Meatrix, by the way, which was done by FreeRange Graphics and was totally brilliant, and Lord of the Right Wing, which we actually produced at CTSG, but the creative was done by this great media consultant, Julian Mulvey, who now does TV. Ha!

4:26 PM Anna Curran: And finally, Laptop, cellphone, twitter, email, SMS---What can you not live without?
4:30 PM Heather Holdridge:I would spontaneously combust without my cellphone--and that's both voice and SMS. I'm way too much of a control freak. Twitter I use semi-regularly, but I could definitely live without it. Email I think I could probably replace over time if I really had to--I'd live. And while I do just fine without my laptop on vacations (in fact, I try to avoid them altogether), if that meant I didn't use the Internet, I wouldn't dig on that. There's just too much of the overall world that is vibrant and thriving online. I'd really hate to not have access to that part.