Lessons: Training and organizing political volunteers at scale

January 6, 2022 4:05 AM

Being really intentional about the space you're creating virtually or in person can help people feel comfortable and want to come back. That's how you build volunteer leaders. Then, the more volunteer leaders you have, obviously the more you can scale and remove the responsibility of work and burden on the actual campaign staff. For new newsletter Campaigner, Debra Cohen of political training organization Arena interviews strategist Ashley Williams, who worked on two of the largest volunteer recruitment and training efforts to help dump Trump: Organizing Together 2020 and Vote Save America.
posted by Bella Donna (4 comments total)

Thanks for posting this. Electoral politics aren't the only important thing, but they're very, very? very important.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 5:40 AM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Organizing Together 2020 was sort of an experiment to see what would happen if Democrats built up field staff for a potential nominee in advance of that nominee being chosen.

This is a bit of a derail, but as someone who has had direct experience with supporting the 2020 primaries and the campaign, I want to say the key lesson that the DNC took under Tom Perez's leadership was that they really needed to pivot to being the infrastructure by which Democratic campaigns needed to operate, agnostic of whoever the eventual nominee would be and persist beyond campaign cycles. Certainly the policy of blacklisting consultants who worked for primary contenders went against this, and I'm glad that the DCCC has recently ended the practice.

But I remember being interviewed for a job in July 2019, and being asked specifically, "will you do this work even if your preferred candidate doesn't win? Even if it's (name your favorite "Wild Card, why the fuck are they even running" candidate)? This won't be about getting Warren or Bernie or Biden or Harris into office. If you want them specifically, go work for their campaign. If you want more Democrats to win, work here."

And, sure, we individually had our favorites, but we never really got into this candidate vs that. We never had livethreads on the primary debates. We had other things to do, other concerns to think about. Like how we'd make sure voter data was accurate, and whether we could provide all the candidates with good demographic models.

I do think that there's a certain magic that comes from working for one inspiring figure ... people talk all the time about how Republicans want someone to tell them to fall in line, while Democrats want someone with whom they can fall in love. But campaigns are very short lived creatures and unsustainable as organizing models. Our candidates aren't superheroes: they're vehicles for the policies, desires, hopes that we all have, and we need to organize around those issues and not the idols.
posted by bl1nk at 8:16 AM on January 6, 2022 [9 favorites]

This twitter thread provides something of an interesting contrast, discussing the 2020 Ossoff campaign strategy of identifying and paying low-propensity voters to message to their disproportionately also low-voting-propensity personal networks.
posted by kickingtheground at 2:24 PM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

The most important thing for campaigns to know is to not make it hard. Don't make it hard to sign up, put the start and end times of your events everywhere. Make it clear if there's gonna be training beforehand, or if there's gonna be an interpreter. Don’t make people guess the details of an event. Some people are already nervous or scared about volunteering. They are giving you their time and that is valuable.

Yep. Lots stuff to talk about vis-a-vis volunteers and campaigns. But this point is so true. Having people know you are respecting them is the most important thing. Even if they come in the door once, knock a tenth of the turf, and never come back. If that person didn't like the work but felt good about the day as a whole, that person will talk it up in grocery lines and water coolers, etc. There is a limit to how many people a volunteer can turn or make into a guaranteed vote. That number in my experience is not that high. But having 100 volunteers as ambassadors out in the community for the other six days that week is huge.

There can be a mix of volunteer and occasional paid campaign work (the kind that is like piecework or gig work) but it still applies. If someone is paid to do the canvassing or flyering, and they also feed respected, the ambassador thing works there too.

All in all, I am excited to learn things from this thread.
posted by drowsy at 7:03 PM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]