The 16 members of the Causes team want to thank all of you for donating your status and participating in our election day rally on Facebook. In just under 5 days, 1,745,754 people sent out 4,919,071 status messages.

No matter your political persuasion, November 4th was a historic day. This is particularly true for young people. We at Causes are all in our twenties, and we are very proud that our generation overcame many doubters and turned out to vote in unprecedented numbers.

But our generation did not just vote, we built innovative tools that changed how the election was conducted, and the Election Rally was just one of many successful initiatives. Our goal was to make sure as many people in our generation voted as possible. We did not think it would be enough just to remind people, you would have had to have been living in a cave to not know it was election day. We wanted to use the unique social nature of Facebook to create peer pressure to let everyone know that all of their friends wanted them to vote.

To this end, the focus of the initiative was the “Midnight Rally,” which people could sign up for starting the evening of October 30th. Just after midnight the night before the election, 932,846 people's status messages all changed at the same time. This rippled across Facebook and Feed, leading millions of the friends of the participants to wake up the morning of election day with multiple friends reminding them to go vote. This was perhaps the largest simultaneous action in internet history. We can never know its true effect, but we like to think it made a significant difference.

Thank you again from the Causes Team:
Jimmy, Kristján, Jen, Kevin, Chris, Josh, Chase, Brad, Joe, Susan, Sarah, Matt, David, Jill, Shari & Sean.