Digital Field Organizing
Let’s start by acknowledging a brutal truth - field, or all the activity connected to direct voter contact including managing and recruiting volunteers to do so, may be the most challenging transition any campaign will have to make in the new era of social distancing.
For a long time, field organizers and directors have lived by a simple paradigm - keep calm and knock doors. It’s become a meme, a mantra among hardened campaign veterans, and a response to anyone who’s “wetting the bed.” Across all departments, campaigns have drilled into their staff’s heads that while every volunteer action is appreciated, from writing postcards to making phone calls, all of it pales in efficacy compared to door to door canvassing. Obviously, that’s out the window.
Politics has always been about adaptation and this is no different. We need to adapt.
The hardest part may be within each of us - adjusting our minds to the new task. Already, too many good operatives have thrown their hands up in the air, said “we’re on a pause,” and punted the football.
Stop it.
That kind of thinking isn’t productive. Moreover, it’s a recipe to lose. And even moreover, this is 2020, the year for all the marbles. So let’s put on our thinking caps, stop making excuses, and figure this thing out.
“Organizing is about getting shit done. The turf may change, but the game remains the same. In this case, the turf’s gone virtual. But it’s still the same game.
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Let’s talk about what that game is, and break down what we call Field into the two different categories:
Volunteer Recruitment and Management
Typically, volunteers have joined a campaign from one of two different methods: events or as a byproduct of direct voter contact. Yes, there’s always a certain amount of people who independently join the campaign. No, it’s never enough.
Virtual Events
We discussed how to use webcasts as virtual events in this new normal, but this needs to be repeated - for every event a campaign conducts, data (a phone number or an email address) collection is key. Once you have that information, timely follow-up is a must.
Volunteering for a campaign or a cause is an impulsive decision, and impulse has a half-life - it decays as other impulses compete for a person’s attention. Good organizers reach out to prospective volunteers with a personalized follow-up within 24 - 48 hours. If this sounds a little labor intensive, consider applications like Mobilize.
Counting on virtual events as your sole source for volunteers likely won’t be enough. Organizers will have to be creative in finding other potential sources.
Google Fu
This is the skill of learning how to use search engines optimally to find the places where potential volunteers already live online be it in groups with a similar mission and introducing your campaign. It’s more an art than a science, but involves being specific and using coded short-cuts in the systems.
Think of it as the virtual equivalent of “knowing your turf.” If you were an organizer on the ground, you’d learn where the places of worship and schools were, you’d learn if there were any scheduled events, you’d become an expert on the geographic area to which you’d been assigned. Well, going outside may not be possible, but thankfully the internet’s got you covered.
Voter Contact
In the interest of trying to provide as complete a list as possible, some of these are going to be familiar, some will be innovative.
Phonebanking
The old reliable becomes the new hot skill. With door to door canvassing no longer available, many campaigns have returned to calling a targeted group of voters over the phone. If you can’t have face to face conversations, it’s the next best thing. However, this tactic has been declining in efficacy over the last several cycles.
Nonetheless, some campaigns are reporting that they’re seeing better contact rates than normal during social distancing. This makes sense: everyone’s at home with nothing better to do. Many people probably are craving social interaction of any sort, so a phone call could be well received. Understandably, people may still not jump to pick up a call from a number they don’t recognize, particularly if it’s from outside of their geography. When organizing for Jon Ossoff from California, we found we could increase our contact rate by spoofing the local area code with apps like Sideline.
Phonebanks are most effective as social activities with specific goals. In campaigns, volunteers come for the candidate, but they stay because of the connections they build with other volunteers and organizers. To simulate this, consider using a webcast service with a “Brady Bunch” style layout to give broad instructions to the larger group, then breaking out volunteers so they can ask questions in a smaller setting, followed by asking folks to individually separate for making calls, and then reconvening into the larger group, highlighting the team’s progress to goal so there is a sense of a shared project.
Texting
As phone banking contact rates have declined, more and more campaigns turned to sending text messages directly to voters. This is subdivided into two categories:
Broadcast SMS - for mass communication. One message is sent to multiple users. Getting supporters to opt-in to this form of communication is key. But this is impersonal communication and should only be used for motivating voters who may need a reminder on where or when to vote and information on how to do so. It can also be used to drive attendance for virtual events.
Peer to peer - for individual one to one contact. The same message may be sent to multiple users, yet each is its own individual message with its own respective individual conversation, allowing for the opportunity for persuasion.
Texting is time effective - a volunteer can make exponentially more texts than they can phone calls. Also contact rates have to now been high, but there are downsides. First, because texting is so efficient, it can be quick for a campaign to complete a full pass through their targets which means it just isn’t a regular activity volunteers can participate in without burning through their contact universe. Secondly, because texting is a relatively new strategy, high contact rates may be due to novelty and could decline as more and more campaigns turn to it.
Relational organizing
Every campaign has a set of unique assets - the individuals who work or volunteer for it and the relationships those individuals bring with them. In relational organizing, campaigns ask their own volunteers and staff to personally reach out to those networks in whatever manner they choose, rather than a group of voters identified through data defined demographic criteria.
While reaching out to personal networks with political messaging may be uncomfortable because doing so carries along with it social risk, it can also be very effective as a form of persuasion because there are already foundations of trust built between the recipient and the messenger. As such, the recipient may be more open to the message than the cold-call involved in traditional outreach. Studies show that we all live in our own isolated bubbles of information - to pierce that cloud, we need to hear from sources that we believe to be credible. And now that the entire world is living on the internet more than ever, retreating to our own confirmation biases will be all too easy.
But relational organizing poses new challenges of its own - how do campaigns ensure volunteers are talking to genuinely valuable voters, i.e. individuals who compose a campaign’s electorate? How do volunteers know when a conversation is on balance productive versus a dead-end that is becoming a waste of time? Organizers will have to grapple with these questions going forward, because relational organizing will clearly be a critical part of the tool-belt going forward.
Traditionally, campaigns have done this through house parties and neighbor to neighbor postcard writing campaigns. Today, there are technological tools that have iterated on this process like OutreachCircle.
Notably, Pete Buttigieg’s Presidential campaign used this tactic to great effect.
Engaging online through coordinated direct action
In a recent interview, I was asked by a member of the audience “how do we make our priorities heard by our legislators?” I explained the real challenge is that lawmakers are human beings, and on any given day, there are hundreds of incoming requests, messages, or complaints that their brains are trying to filter. Consequently, elected officials look for patterns to identify repeated themes or statements and address those first. If a voice is one of a thousand different screaming varied messages in cacophony, it can get lost. That same challenge exists for campaigns trying to get their message to break through in this crowded media environment.
How can a campaign do that? By coordinating a large group of individuals to act in as close a time as possible using precisely the same message and hashtags, it’s possible to manipulate algorithms built into the communication platforms themselves. During the Fiscal Cliff crisis of late 2012, as the California Co-Field Director of The Action to End the Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy, we used Thunderclap to pierce that noise. Following Russian interference in the Presidential contest in 2016, Thunderclap was shut down, but the same principle can still be executed through instructive email and direct asks. Online campaigns have inspired boycotts, changed behaviors, and effected major policy changes. It goes to reason they can influence voter perceptions as well.
Be Creative
These unprecedented times will likely require equally unprecedented tactics that aren’t covered here. In the past few weeks, campaigns have employed influencer partnerships, social media challenges, online movie nights, and online trivia about their neighborhoods as a means of expanding their name identification and data collection with potential voters and engaging their supporters. A good organizer should keep their ear to the ground and gratuitously steal from other successful operatives.
I’ll be honest that I don’t have all the answers to this. None of us do. All of us must experiment and try new tricks using the tools available to us. During the Action, we often said we were learning to fly the plane as we built it. That is inarguably the case now as well.
Before we end this entry, the philosophy of organizing remains constant:
Organizing is still about building relationships. Relationships require maintenance and prolonged contact. Just as the campaign needs to post content on its social channels regularly to stay top of mind, organizers must do the work of sustaining relationships with their supporters and volunteers. That doesn’t mean texting or calling only during “big moments” like a fundraising deadline, breaking news, or day of action. Instead, it means regular communication with our voters, supporters, and volunteers. And it means having genuine, back and forth conversations, not just commands. It might feel artificial in the introductory stages but we will have to push through that awkwardness.
Regularly schedule “maintenance one on one” conversations with your top supporters by video if at all possible, phone if video isn’t available. These conversations shouldn’t be all about the business of the campaign but opportunities to learn more about each other and build a deeper connection. Then encourage those top supporters to do the same with their own networks. Model the behavior you want to see in others.
Relationships are about trust, and that also means presenting ourselves openly to each other, not as manufactured identities. Campaigns must humanize themselves, or they’ll feel incongruent to this fraught moment, and put real people behind their organizing by telling stories of their work using selfies or live videos on Instagram or Snapchat. And it never hurts to tell folks about your dog.
“Gamify.” Traditional goals are not always the right way to improve volunteer performance. Steal a page from online marketers and use a reward system. As Field Director on a San Francisco ballot measure, we incentivized our intern performance by giving individuals virtual points for each action taken that could be redeemed for campaign specific prizes be it a t-shirt or a one one call with the candidate or surrogate. We then publicly shared a “leaderboard” which helped inspire competitive instincts in each intern.
Obstacles present opportunities. What we’re experiencing now can sometimes feel surreal. But necessity is and has always been the mother of invention. If we adopt the positive, problem-solving mindset that led us all to get involved in activism in the first place, we may find new avenues of action that were never evident to us before. It can turn us into better organizers, better activists, better people.
Never lose the fierce urgency of now. Look, it’s understandable. When the whole world stops like it has now, inertia can become contagious. And because of Parkinson’s Law, November now can feel ages away. But regardless of how it might feel like you can take a breather right now, there is one resource you will never be able to increase before today and election day: time.