Case Study: Facebook Groups in the Amy Klobuchar Campaign
Up to this point, we’ve talked about how to get started and use social media. Now let’s talk about how we turn that knowledge into honest to goodness organizing. And to do so, I’m pulling back the curtain on one of my recent organizing successes - the Presidential Campaign for Amy Klobuchar.
In only two weeks, our little scrappy Virginia team secured three workspaces, knocked thousands of doors, held not one but two rallies (one of which was described above as “standing room only”), locked in six endorsements from current and former elected officials, and defied expectations for what anyone thought realistic given the circumstances.
How the hell did we do that?
Well, beyond a killer staff … let’s pause for a moment: they were rockstars, many of whom are available for hire to campaigns right now. Digital or not, one of the best ways to run great campaigns, or any business for that matter, is by hiring great people. So, to any managers or field directors who may be reading this, don’t sleep on these operatives.
But back to our story, we had a secret weapon. When I was first hired, I made one of my typical grandiose Facebook announcements, and was subsequently invited into the Amy for America Virginia Facebook Group, a collection of 600+ supporters that the campaign’s crack distributing organizing team had mobilized months in advance. They identified supporters, built a virtual space for them to congregate, and set the foundation for what eventually became an independently sustainable group.
Suddenly without warning, I had leads on office spaces throughout the state, our Field Team were introduced to volunteers that we could mobilize into canvass shifts, we had a digital army that could amplify our events among their own networks.
Suddenly, we were able to do the impossible.
How did this group become so powerful? By building a powerful digital community in these three ways:
Welcoming new members.
Each week, super users made an introductory post to their new members, calling them out by name, using the tool built into the Groups function.
Why it worked - Small actions like this are effective because they both make folks feel special, giving them the nice Dopamine hit humans receive from seeing a notification, and they make people feel as if they’re part of something bigger than just themselves. Campaigns have always seen success through building this sense of association in their supporters, bringing together disparate folks with a common dream and demonstrating to them that a lot of people feel exactly like they do regarding their cause. Now, more than ever, no one wants to feel like they’re alone in the hinterlands.
Engaging consistently.
By the time I was introduced to this group, supporters were posting their own content, independent of the campaign, daily. And then other members responded to that content, creating a dialogue. There were new posts and articles to read every time a user logged in.
Why it worked - No one wants to be the first or last person at a party, they’d much rather step into an already vibrant scene. In the digital world, that means activity and content. If you have an empty group, you need to purposefully inject new content in daily at the very least. At the beginning of a campaign, field organizers traditionally have had to make a lot of volunteer recruitment calls to find folks willing to talk to voters. But eventually, the campaign will develop a natural momentum and people ask to get involved of their own volition. This is that same phenomenon but in digital format.
Making asks of each other.
The members were constantly growing their numbers by directly asking each other “can you find 10 other people? How can we grow this week? Can you help share this with your own networks?
Why it worked - As mentioned previously, organizing is about asking, taking an organic interest and translating it into action. Offline, we’ve always been trained to think in the same paradigm - meet a prospective volunteer, figure out a way to escalate them into traditional direct voter contact, ideally through canvassing door to door. And now, we’ve seen that a lot of campaigns are falling into that same rut - simply transitioning into making phone calls and text messages. And let’s be clear, those are still valuable actions, but as we move into a primarily digital construct, asking volunteers to invest into light touch relational organizing like asking them to join a Facebook Group is going to be increasingly more effective.
Key takeaway:
Facebook Groups are a valuable tool to help you exponentially multiply your own campaign’s efforts.
Here are some other actions you should take to make your own group successful:
Keep things under control, build a positive experience for your members. Moderate your group’s conversation, don’t let it turn people off. Create “norms” and post them in your description so everyone can see them, but be as succinct as possible. Use the administrator tools if necessary.
Learn from Group Insights. Once you’ve organically attracted a few members to your Group, you can use this tool to learn about your audience. If they’re a specific demographic, then you could hypothesize that outreach to groups overlapping that demographic may prove fruitful.
Use posts to collect user-generated content. Supporter stories are one of the most powerful tools in organizing, but people can often be initially shy about sharing them in public. Because this is a curated group, people may feel more comfortable sharing anecdotes or facts they fear may put a “target” on them in openly public settings. So ask them!