Constituency Organizing while Social Distancing
Let’s start with talking about what it takes to win an organizing campaign.
It’s simple: figure out who your voters are, also known as your electorate, and get more votes than the other person or side, be it for a candidate or issue. It’s not easy, but it is simple. Understanding the make-up of your voters in gender, race, economic status, and ideological terms is imperative. What issues do they care about? What messages resonate with them? What is their likelihood of supporting your candidate or issue?
That’s where we turn to polls - whether done in the conventional fashion of calling by phone a statistically significant enough amount of likely voters or by other means, polls help campaigns develop a data-set that leads to answer to those questions.
One of the common misconceptions about polling is that it’s determinative. In my experience, it’s more of a guide to determining probable strengths and weaknesses in electoral strategy.
Like GI Joe infamously said …
With the knowledge gained from polling, campaigns can attack those weaknesses and highlight strengths through constituency organizing - directly tailoring their message and tactics to specific demographic segments of their electorate. Think “Veterans for Obama” or “Republicans for Hillary” or “Blacks for Trump.”
But in the age of social distancing, it’s also a tactic optimal for digital organizing. I’ll explain how in the following eight steps:
Recruit your founding members. Find a critical mass of individuals who will be the initial members of this new group. When possible, strategically select individuals with prominent public profiles and robust social networks. The larger the profile, the more exposure this group will receive because the press will in turn have a greater incentive to write a story about its genesis, particularly in the “click-driven” economy.
But when doing so, authenticity must your lode-star. Circling back to one of the tips mentioned in “Social Media Best Practices,” voters will smell any sort of pretense from a mile away. Don’t go out of your way to enlist in people to be part of the group unless they genuinely support your candidate or cause.
Explicitly ask the members’ permission. The purpose of this group is to drive attention to the campaign - it’s important that everyone is on the same page and bought into their responsibility in doing so. At the bare minimum, these individuals will be named in any press release and tagged on their social media accounts. That may make some people uncomfortable, and it’s imperative to discover this reticence before going live. The last thing any campaign wants is to have to roll back an initiative after it’s already out in the public domain.
Don’t neglect a conventional press strategy. While this is a guide for digital organizing first and foremost, good campaigns should never neglect any communications channel. Create a professional press release including all the members by name and title and email it out to a curated list of press contacts.
But don’t expect your targeted recipients to read this email in a timely manner. Maybe they will, which would be fantastic! But there’s a good chance they won’t, for all the reasons discussed previously. Be prepared to chase on your initial outreach - send a follow up email directing their attention to your previous communication i.e. the “bump email.”
Digitally promote your group. You might end up getting more exposure through your own channels than through the press. Reporters have a professional obligation to manage their signal to noise ratio, and there are likely dozens of competing stories on any given day. Don’t take it personally if you can’t catch any of the media’s attention.
As a good organizer, have a work around - share this press release on your own social media accounts and tag the participating members in the description. By doing so, the press release will not only show up on your own social feed, but also on theirs, and introduce your campaign to a whole new audience. Go beyond that first wave of exposure - ask the individuals named to re-share it on their own channels.
Utilize your new networks. If you were able to recruit well-connected individuals to join your group, think creatively about how and whether they might be able to leverage their own personal and professional connections for the advantage of the campaign. For example, do they have their own relationships with elected officials that could help you secure an endorsement? Have they previously worked with members of the media? In general, can they help you open doors that were previously closed?
On a recent campaign, we started a constituency group and found that these influential individuals only increased their engagement with the campaign and actively sought to help make connections for us. You may find the same with your own.
Keep engaging your targeted constituency. Once you’ve completed the initial roll-out, keep engaging your members and finding ways to draw attention to the organizing being done by and around this constituency. Organizing is about building relationships that lead to electoral or political power, and relationships are built off of consistency.
If you’re looking for a campaign that has been successful doing this, it brings me no great pleasure to direct you to the re-election campaign for President Donald Trump. On “Team Trump Online,” his team has been conducting weekly “Women for Trump” webcasts that regularly have close to 500,000 participants according to Politico.
A great way of doing this is by building a Facebook Group.
Don’t stop growing. Just because someone wasn’t included in the first press release doesn’t mean they can’t subsequently become a member. In fact, you may find that more prominent individuals in this demographic want to join because of the Jones’ Effect.
Practice addition by division. As your constituency group continues to grow in membership, consider splitting it into different geographic regions. For example, what was once a “Women for Candidate X” group becomes a “Virginia Women for Candidate X” group becomes a “Richmond Women for Candidate X” group becomes a “West End Women for Candidate X” group. The more granular you become, you’ll find the the more members themselves may be encouraged to take on building their own numbers.