My fellow Kossacks, I'm asking for your help. As you may know, I run a research consulting business, doing focus groups and polling.
Intuit is holding a contest for small business owners at Small Business United: share your story, and contest winners receive anywhere from $25,000 to $5,000 prizes based on votes earned and other criteria.
My entry is A Vote for Doing What You Love: I talk about my experience as a small business owner, and what led me to an interest in politics. In order to have a chance at winning, I need votes. Once you create an Intuit account, you can vote a maximum of three times by clicking "Useful", "Inspiring", and "Funny".
Now here's the deal: if I win any prize, all that money goes to pro bono research on behalf of progressive causes. Every single dime of it. I promise.
The fact is that there is a ton of research I've been dying to conduct on behalf of progressive causes and candidates in a number of different areas. One such example was a poll among African-Americans and Hispanics in the immediate aftermath of Proposition 8 to determine with confidence the difference, if any, between those populations and the general population on that issue. Another involves research on the public perception among independents on the issue of accountability for Bush Administration officials. Yet another involves research on the best framing for a voluntary simplicity movement that is currently viewed as the province of granola-munching hippies. And there are many, many more besides.
Unfortunately, there are no organizations interested enough in the answers to these questions to do any major public research on these topics, and my pockets are not deep enough to be able to fund them myself. Research is expensive.
That's why this contest caught my eye: an opportunity to win some cash to fund some of these projects.
In the comments, please let me know what questions YOU would like to see answered by basic polling or focus groups. And if I win, I promise to do a poll among the DailyKos community to determine what research project(s) I should fund pro bono.
So please take a moment to vote for me here! And thanks so much!