On Relational Organizing with Sangeeth Peruri, Co-Founder and CEO of Outreach Circle
In last week’s piece on Digital Field Organizing, relational organizing was one of several tactics listed available to organizers during social distancing. But this is a topic that warrants further discussion, so I reached out to Sangeeth Peruri, the CEO and Co-founder of OutreachCircle.
OutreachCircle has been pioneering the mechanics of relational organizing for a couple years now, but their tool has grown beyond that narrow use. They’ve also published valuable resources and videos to help campaigns transition to relational organizing with more coming every day. Check them out here:
Sangeeth and I discussed how to operationalize relational organizing into a campaign’s regular activities, how it can and should change the philosophy of how campaigns operate, how OutreachCircle can help campaigns with this new strategy, and even some great holistic advice for political campaigns.
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David - Hi Sangeeth, Thanks for taking your time to speak with me today! Let’s start with what is relational organizing? What does it mean to you? Why do you think it works?
Sangeeth - To me, it’s really just good organizing. It’s trying to get as much as your organizing to be friend to friend through warm relationships versus cold relationships. When I ran for office, I found it a lot more effective to talk to a friend than a stranger.
David - How does OutreachCircle work into this? How does it work?
Sangeeth - There are three main parts. The core is our supporter portal or supporter action hub, some call it an activist hub. The idea is to run everything through one place, whether it’s things you want to do on OC or outside of OC. We have a whole bunch of backend and supporter-facing integrations that we’ve built and a lot more coming out.
What we noticed is in the first cycle, if you ran relational organizing as a separate effort, it was really hard to scale.You really need to integrate into everything you’re doing. But there’s no good tech for that, so we decided to build it ourselves. So you can run all of your activities for supporters, donors, friends, family, staff, all through the same tool. You can track and manage your supporters through there. Nudge them, remind them, and you can also integrate third party tools that supporters can do - you can do EveryAction, Phone to Action, watch YouTube videos and embed them in there, Facebook Posts. We’re going to add more and more over time. There’s a whole suite of things that are not native to OutreachCircle that are third party supporter facing tools you can do on the same platform. So if you’re a campaign or large organization and you want to roll out a new tool, you don’t have to keep on rolling out new tools to your base. If they’re on OutreachCircle, you just put that new tool into OutreachCircle and then everyone on that base will get that tool.
David - That’s useful. It’s kind of like the Salesforce model?
Sangeeth - Yeah, I mean there are a lot of people doing this on the back-end side. Civis is integrating that way. EveryAction is integrating that way. NGP VAN is. PDI is. But no one is integrating on the supporter-facing side. The only parallel to that is Presidential apps - HFA, or MyBO the idea is everything is in one place. We thought others could use that. That’s the biggest part of the platform. That’s where most of our investment has been.
Two other parts on the relational organizing side. This allows supporters to get others involved. either by email, text, any app on your phone, or social media. It’s completely broadened out now. If you have a voter file or fundraising database, and you want to match that address against that, you can do it against those address books or you can do it without.
The last tool is Affinity texting This is peer to peer texting, but without a third party number, it’s with your own personal number, so not a short code, not a computer generated number. This is good for initiating and maintaining one on one relationships. Think fundraiser to donor, candidate to VIP, organizer to volunteer, union organizer to union member. Those are the kind of use cases.
David - I’m curious about the integration with other applications out there. I imagine that a lot of relational organizing will be going through social media these days, whether that’s a Facebook or Twitter message. How do you track the responses? I can imagine you’re playing in some unfriendly waters because I know Facebook sometimes is a walled garden, and they probably don’t like data being taken out, and I think Twitter might be the same way.
Sangeeth - Yep, pretty much everyone is. So there are supporters taking action in our activist hub, and then there are others taking action. If they’re taking action within our activist hub, we make it really easy to get them on, from your desktop, tablet, your phone, or any app store that you want. Once they’re in there, they can donate, they can watch videos, they can update, they can call their legislator - all of that can happen right in the feed. Everything’s all in there. And any of those actions you can get others involved as well, and that’s where we’re sharing with other platforms. If it’s by email or text, we can do a lot of tracking. If it’s via social app, all we know is we can track if they did it or we can track that they left our platform and went somewhere else but we don’t know the completion rate.
David - Sounds like you’ve created a really interesting one-stop shop. I want to dig a little more into relational organizing because that was popping up into my own experiences even from outward-facing actions. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience you share something on your social media from your campaign, and you get some trolls. And eventually those trolls are people you actually know. So you debate in your own mind - how much do I want to engage with this person? From the communications perspective, you don’t want to repeat the hit, you don’t want to give oxygen to a storyline that you don't want to see fester and grow. But on the other hand, you don’t want to be completely dismissive. First, that looks bad to anyone you want to persuade, it looks like you can't stand up to rigorous questioning. Second, it’s a good way to write off a huge amount of the electorate. And if you’re looking at relational organizing, and you’re looking at a 50-50 country, that’s clearly not a good idea either.
So how do you determine how to start a relational organizing conversation with a friend or a family member? And once it’s going on, how do you make sure it’s productive back and forth and not turning into a dead end conversation where you’re saying the same things over and over to each other?
Sangeeth - I think you always start with the relationship. When I do these conversations, I’m catching up and saying “hey, how’s the family?” These days it’s all about Covid, how’s shelter in place treating you, and then I’ll go into “hey, the reason I reached out is because this cause or campaign is really important to me. I thought this might be important to you as well. And I wanted to run it by you and get your thoughts.”
And then you let it come to you. If they’re really excited, then you make bigger asks. If they’re less excited, you make smaller asks.
The first step is to see if they’re interested. If they are, invite them to learn more. If they’re already sold and on board, then maybe you give them an ask. Otherwise, you keep it very small and have them walk up the ladder: that might be coming to an event, it might be joining OC just to see what’s there, it might be sending them information, it might be having them meet the candidate.
I’m helping to run a campaign right now, when I’m reaching out to people, I’m starting to reach out to people that I know well and or that I think would be highly interested. I don’t know their interest level is. Some will come back and say that’s amazing, I want to give you a big donation, so I’ll say, “That’s great, would you like to meet the candidate? I’ll say great, thank you, do you want to meet the candidate, do you want to have a virtual one on one. But if they want to give a smaller amount, I’ll say great, thank you, follow-up, and invite you to an event. Then once they show up, ask them to invite their friends to a virtual meet and greet. That seems to be working very well?
David - How do you handle the targeting? If you’ve got clear defined geographic boundaries for your district and this district is having the election, that’s easy to do. But gerrymandering exists. For instance, in my neighborhood, my city council district ends in this amorphous area a couple blocks away.
Sangeeth - That’s all built in. If you’re running an electoral effort, you can load in any target universe based on district, and you can put additional filters on it - race, party, likelihood to vote, anything you want. If your friends or supporters get on and they input their address book, it’ll pick out of those which of those friends are relevant and overlap with your universe. When you don’t have a voter file or you’re doing a non-profit effort, then it gets a little more tricky. At that point, they’re going to have to do it manually. It gets a little tricky when a campaign wants to recruit volunteers or donors.
David - From an operational standpoint, of a campaign wanting to do relational organizing. I imagine there is a bit of hesitation in folks in talking to politics that they personally know about politics because there’s sometimes a reputational cost associated with that. How do you approach that as the person running this campaign?
Sangeeth - It depends on if it’s partisan versus non-partisan, local versus national. The more non-partisan it is, the less likely you are to run into any issues, the more local it is, the less likely you are to run into any issues. But if it’s national or partisan, it gets trickier.
One thing you can always do is you don’t have to necessarily ask a person for a vote or a donation, you can just ask them if they want to learn more. Having someone join a meet and greet, that’s a pretty innocent ask. That’s a pretty good strategy. If they’re not even willing to learn more, you’re not going to be able to ask them to do anything, so it’s a pretty good filter.
And the nice thing is if you ask them to learn more, even if they don’t do anything, it’s still a touch, and it’s a persuasion message. So that person, if you have a good relationship with them, they’re going to be more likely to support your candidate and meaningfully so
Now If they’re crazy left or crazy right, you’re not going to change their vote. Maybe you’ll get them a little more in your direction, but that as you get closer to the polls, the less that will matter. But if they’re in the middle, it can definitely swing them over the edge.
David - Right, little light touches that keep pushing a person in your direction rather than a shotgun blast conversation trying to persuade right off the bat.
Sangeeth - Right, that’s why the earlier you are, we recommend you use our email tool. And later when you get closer to the election, it’s more about texting. With email, we have one-to-many relational blast capabilities. So if you have 500 friends in the district, one click and it will send individual emails to all of them, no other platform allows that as far as I know. That’s amazing for fundraising or persuasion. Our data show it works amazingly for GOTV as well.
David - Let’s go back to one thing you said about how it should be worked into everything else a campaign should do. When I was running a campaign, you had the opportunity to talk to me and the other campaign managers in Virginia about your tool. I was intrigued, I was interested, but I was also completely underwater doing everything else a campaign manager has to do. How do you actionably put OutreachCircle into the middle of everything you’re doing?
Sangeeth - I think the single biggest mistake that down ballot races do, and that I see with all training organizations whether it’s party infrastructure or otherwise, is that the traditional campaign world is you fundraise first, and then you do field. You need to start field and fundraising simultaneously from day one. What people think is “I’m gonna get dollars, and then I’m gonna get votes.” What people forget is, if you get votes first, you don’t need dollars for those votes. When you do field early on, one interaction can ultimately lead to 100 or a 1000 votes. Depending on how much it costs you per vote, that’s a lot less money to raise.
But if you do a field interaction right before election day, the most you’ll get is 2 or 3 if there are multiple people in a household. You want to do these early on and have fundraising, persuasion, field, all of it mixed up very early on. When you think of it that way, it’s all very natural. Because you’re reaching out and building relationships in the community. And when you build those relationships, some will yield money, some will yield votes, some will yield volunteers, you don’t know what people want to help you with. So when you start out early, and you treat people as people, not either as volunteers or money, there’s a lot of opportunity.
David - That makes a lot of sense. Anything else you wanted to say about OC or relational organizing going forward in social distancing?
Sangeeth - I said the single biggest mistake. The single biggest advice I would give for a local race, congressional or smaller - focus on school communities. Parents are by far the most engaged, and the most connected, and they trust other parents. So if you want to win a local race, if you’re outspent massively, make a list of every single school, private, charter, in your community, try to meet at least one leader early, get to know them, and see if they can arrange a meet and greet for you
There is no faster or more efficient way of winning votes but it only works if you do it early.
David - I love that you said that! In San Francisco, I worked on the Shared Schoolyard Project. It was all about organizing around the schools. You’re absolutely right, the PTA’s and the parents groups that circle around that are untapped gold in so many ways.
Sangeeth - There are other similar groups! I always emphasize schools because it’s so easily forgotten. But there are also churches, rotary clubs, and other community groups.
David - Exactly, existing institutions.
Sangeeth - That's the best way to create a network or to organize - leveraging existing networks versus having to create them from scratch.