During our time as political volunteers in 2004, we also met people like Denise, a nurse from Queens, who wanted to volunteer her time, but found that every group she approached wanted her to cold-call strangers, a job she couldn't stand. Wasn't there something else she could do that would help? We met Ben, an artist from Staten Island, who also wanted to volunteer, but not if it meant passing out flyers or knocking on people's doors. “Couldn’t I paint a mural instead?” he asked.

We wanted to help these people, but once again, we didn’t know how. There had to be ways people could contribute other than phone banking, canvassing, and flyering. Surely there was a group that would love to display a mural by Ben at their next rally, but which one? What was needed was a matchmaking service that would help potential volunteers find others who shared their passions and their preferred activities, and a way for them to think up novel ways to make a difference. Participants could list the issues and candidates that they supported, and the jobs or hobbies that they enjoyed, finding others that they were compatible with. Together, they could brainstorm their own unique ways to make a difference. We began formulating the ActionMatch service.

We encountered a third type of problem as our political activity increased. Friends and acquaintances began to think of us as “in the know” and to call and email us with questions. Marjorie emailed almost every Thursday in October to ask us if any important public events were happening that weekend. Steve had heard of a group that had identified undecided voters through a phone bank, and was now going to go knock on their doors and try to persuade them off the fence -- did we know who this group was and how he could contact them? We did our best to find answers to these questions, but often discovered that multiple Google searches were insufficient to pull together all the relevant information. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a bulletin board where the activities of a broad range of national and local groups were posted, preferably with a calendar that showed what was happening when? We started discussing how to set up an Activist Newsletter and Calendar of Events.