Malala “Person of the Year” Runner-up!

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January 14, 2013

Malala “Person of the Year” Runner-up!
Your votes helped make the difference!


Dear Walt,

On December 4^th we sent an email to all of our members, urging you to go online and vote for Malala Yousafzai for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.”

We also urged a “no” vote for Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.

You may recall Malala is the Pakistani student activist who, while riding her school bus, was viciously shot last fall by the Taliban’s radical Islamists.

In addition to our national email we pushed this on our Facebook page and on Twitter.

In the 24 hours that followed our actions, votes for Malala surged, as tens of thousands of people rushed to vote for her. At the same time, “no” votes for Morsi also surged. The timing of this surge could not have been mere coincidence. We know you, the ACT! for America grassroots, responded, by not only voting for her but passing the word along to your networks!

The cyberspace positive buzz for Malala, and the negative buzz for Morsi, was clearly evident in the days following our email and as we continued to push for support for Malala on Facebook and Twitter.

When Time announced its “Person of Year” lineup, Malala was selected as the Runner-Up. And Morsi ended up fourth.

While Time says its decisions for “Person of the Year” are not bound by online votes, we have no doubt that the buzz and vote surge we helped create influenced Time’s editors to look closely at her as a candidate.

Malala’s selection was not only a recognition of her courage, but also a stunning repudiation of strict sharia law’s repression of women.

And you helped make that happen!

But there’s more! We didn’t limit our effort to Time’s Person of the Year. We used an array of social media, in collaboration with our chapters in Britain, to target The Guardian newspaper’s Person of the Year poll (The Guardian is a major British newspaper). These efforts helped cause a surge of support for Malala, and the newspaper also named Malala as its runner-up for Person of the Year.

Once again, we witness the power of an organized, grassroots citizen network in action. Whether it’s generating 30,000 phone calls and emails to Kansas state legislators in support of ALAC (“American Laws for American Courts,”), or helping push a surge of support for Malala for Time’s Person of the Year, we continue to demonstrate that grassroots people power does make a difference!

Yet another example of “When everyone does a little, together we accomplish a lot.”