Some Progress in the Pursuit of Campaign VIRAL 22 September, 2006
Posted by Zack in Online organizing.1 comment so far
Recently, many political consultants and communications people have developed a small obsession with producing “viral” animations for their campaigns. One shouted despairingly at members of the Kerry Internet team after 2004, “If you had done a JibJab you would have won!!” He was referring to the truly hilarious animation featuring a smart parody of “This Land is Your Land” with, among other clever things, Kerry, Bush and Dean dancing in leather bondage outfits. Millions watched, and since then many a consultant — with the best of intentions — has uttered the fateful words, “Give me $16,000 and I will give you JibJab!”
Of course, campaigns can’t get away with making their opponents dance in scandalous outfits to controversial rewritings of patriotic songs. As a result, they make deathly-boring, poorly-produced crap that no one will ever watch, like this GOP production:
What you’re watching is tens of thousands of dollars of GOP funds being wasted on a really dumb way to present standard oppo research text. No, the pretty colors do not make us want to read your boring facts. In fact, the tiny font you used, and all the clicking around you make us do, deter us from reading it. Anyways, it’s all moot because the annoying, two-second sound track loop will prevent ANYONE from watching for more than 10 or 20 seconds.
With that being the state of the art in U.S. politics, it’s not surprising that there hasn’t been a single example of a U.S. campaign making an ad that truly “went viral.” (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
However, from Britain, where parties tend to work with commercial ad firms (instead of ghettoizing their media into a separate politics-only ad sector), we’re getting some examples of how it might be done well.
Tim Ireland, a usually ill-tempered British blogger, lightened up recently to do this great piece for the UK Liberal Democrat Party:
(It seems to be taking a while for the animation to load, but it’s worth the wait if you’re in this business.)
A great example from the Labor Party came earlier this year:
http://www.davethechameleon.com/…
I hope not too much will be lost in translation: The Liberal Democrats are a 3rd party with a significant share of the vote. They had a chance to overtake the Tories (the Conservative Party) as the primary opposition party in the last election, but blew it primarily because they failed to use Internet organizing (petitions, events, etc…) to rally anti-war anger against the otherwise lightyears-to-the-left-of-the-Democrats Labour Party. (Where were you when they needed you Tim!?)
Now, the Tories have a “charismatic” new leader who is taking symbolic stands on the environment to convince British voters that his party is really, truly, finally done with being the party of the old, the crotchety and the weird. For example, he rides a bicycle to work! (Of course, it came out instantly that his limo follows behind.)
These are the only animations produced by campaigns that I’ve actually wanted to keep watching after the first 10 seconds. On Tim’s, the production values are high; The face — those unmatched eyes — is creative and really conveys something about Cameron (is one of the eyes Blair’s?); and the pace is fast (too often political campaign animations seem to drag on, with long pauses between each sentence). The Labor video is just so nicely done, but does fall into the trap of laboriously trying to go through the Communication Department’s checklist of important messages to deliver.
Neither are hilariously funny, and so they won’t go “viral”. But they’re just one step away from it. Both show the parties are willing to be as irreverent as they would need to be for a hit.
They’ve engaged the production professionals. Now they just need to get real comedians involved. Attention Labor: Don’t forget John O’Farrell!
Of course, if YouTube had existed during the 2005 elections, when the right-wing nationalist UKIP aired their “Big Blue Octopus” election broadcast, I GUARANTEE YOU it would have gone viral. WATCH THE BIG BLUE OCTOPUS!
But that brings up another danger of campaign viral video: when your piece goes viral, is it because they’re laughing with you…or at you?
(Cross posted at HuffPo.)
Finally putting online organizing tools to good use 20 September, 2006
Posted by Zack in Online organizing.add a comment
A few days ago, three friends and I launched a site called FrakParty.com to allow Battlestar Galactica fans organize viewing parties. (Yes, I’m a sci-fi dork, I admit it. But this new Battlestar series is *really* cool — watch the premiere Oct 6 and you’ll understand.)
This idea started at a gathering of Internet/organizer types a few months ago where Madeline Stanionis, Josh Hendler and I hatched it over a few beers. We got Mave Gibson involved because (A) we needed a token Canadian, and (B) she’s a kick ass designer. And then there were four.
So, Madeline and I have up to this point just been floating mavens offering unnecessary advice and a touch of text here there. Mave and Josh have built out the site. I believe this was Josh’s excuse to really delve into Rails, and he finally admited “Hrm, yeah, it really IS cool.”
So, I realize this is all about BSG and not…anything else. But while on the subject of Josh’s first Rails project — please notice that he’s built out this whole event tool in a few spare hours after work. If that is possible — then WHY…WHY…WHY… is it so difficult for many organizations and campaigns with pretty decent tech budgets to get web firms to build out basic tools like this when they need them?
Enough philosphizin. Back to Frak. Spread the word. Here’s why: TV has grown over one short half century to become about 60% of our entertainment as a society. Fine. With great shows like BSG, I’m not going to complain. But why not make a party out of it? Let’s make TV a social event. We’re starting with BSG.
When you campaign in cyberspace, don’t forget your organizer 5 September, 2006
Posted by Zack in Online organizing.add a comment
Last week Mark Warner held a press conference in “Second Life,” a virtual world where people fly, build cool things and pay for sex. A new kind of marketing company, called “Millions of Us” arranged the gathering at a virtual theater with room for a thousand or two. Less than 30 Second Lifers showed up.
Considering that people can teleport anywhere instantly in second life, the sparse turnout was a huge failure. Tens of thousands were online at the time of Warner’s event. Second Lifers spend an average of four hours per day in the virtual world — so it’s not like they didn’t have time to check out the first pre-presidential visit to a virtual world.
Why? No one told them. And therein lies the key lesson for all politicians attempting to take their campaigns online: don’t leave your organizer behind.
There is no magic on the Internets, no matter what Ted Stevens told you. It’s true that the Internet has made many things easier for campaigns: communicating with millions of supporters for free via email, allowing the grassroots to self-organize with simple web tools, enabling volunteer researchers with blogs and wikis, etc…. When used properly, the Internet gives you more results for less work.
But you still have to do the work.
- Guerrilla ads will be viewed by tens of thousands on YouTube – but only if you or your supporters: 1) make them, 2) make them great, and 3) get them mentioned in the press or laboriously push them on the blogs and elsewhere.
- You can mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers in key states to do productive work for your campaign – but only if you sign them up, ask them to volunteer, and give them some basic tools to work with.
- You can use text messaging to help your volunteers and local campaigners better coordinate with each other – but you have to do the work of spreading best practices and systems for them to use.
You might even be able to win over a fast-growing virtual world by campaigning there. But in politics, “just showing up” is not 90% of success, but merely another opportunity for fun at your expense. The same is true for Internet politics.
And on that note — fire up your Photoshop people…
(MAC users, here’s the Comic Life file.)
Can the Internets make me president? 16 August, 2006
Posted by Zack in 2008, Online organizing.add a comment
I’m working on a new article series, and I’m simply publishing it as I go — even as I edit and revise it. I’m hoping that others from the field will contribute comments into the document, disagree, and discuss.
You can read the article in progress at the New Organizing Institute wiki. Here’s an excerpt:
A long time ago in America, politicians stopped being leaders. Let’s not blame them, it was a long string of historical factors that forced politicians to become what they are today: packaged, advertised, distributed products. For a long time, the rules of the game have favored simply “the guy you’d most like to have a beer with,” taking no stands riskier than “cut taxes” and “love families”, and mechanistic deal-making with constituency groups.
While all of that still holds, the Internet, other technologies and new media patterns are beginning to reward politicians who can find it in themselves be leaders again.
The power flows from the new political principle of “Direct Connection.” Suddenly you have a communications channel available that runs directly and exclusively to your supporters: fans, activists, donors, campaign workers and staff. While the Internet has a lot to do with it (mass email, blogs, podcasting), this phenomenon is also driven by changes in targeted traditional media (direct mail, local radio advertising, specialized print publications).
Howard Dean raised tens of millions of dollars online because he lead, however imperfectly, on issues that other Democrats were afraid to touch. John Kerry raised more than 100 million dollars online and mobilized a quarter million first-time ground volunteers by leading, however imperfectly, the charge against George W. Bush. Ned Lamont pulled off a primary victory that would have been impossible without the massive number of campaign workers recruited and organized effectively online.
For many federal and local races, these new tools will have little impact. Presidential primaries, however, were made for the Internet.
Read more here.
Remember MoveOn.org? 26 June, 2006
Posted by Zack in Online organizing.add a comment
As if on queue, Newsweek proves the point of my post-Yearly Kos article from a couple weeks ago:
The best test of [Kos's] new power: Sen. Joe Lieberman, an old Moulitsas nemesis who stands a good chance of losing his August primary thanks to heavy blogger backing of his opponent, Ned Lamont. Moulitsas’s success in that race, and a handful of other contests that may well turn on the politics of the war, will help determine if he’s just the latest in a series of faddish Internet phenomena (remember MoveOn.org?) or the future of the Democratic Party he so longs to be.
According to ActBlue, Kos and several other bloggers combined have raised about $65,000 for Lamont. And his CT readership is probably somewhere in the range of 3,000-12,000. Those are big achievements, but fairly small potatoes compared to what a three million person email list can do.
Nevertheless, journos aren’t interested in actual results. Just the hype please!
A rare, good use of campaign video 23 June, 2006
Posted by Zack in Online organizing.add a comment
Oh my God, I can’t believe it. A politician finally did online video right. Of course it was John Edwards.I got an email from Edwards’ One America Committee, signed by John himself. With the subject line “End Poverty” (ok, obviously a last minute subject line that could have been better).
I open the email and there’s a really long, pretty boring email. To be expected. But theres’s a big picture of Edwards with a large-type quote that catches my eye: “We can end poverty in 30 years.” There’s a link: “Listen now,” with an attractive arrow.
30 YEARS! And I just posted yesterday about how no Dems will touch the long-term. Shame on me!
I click on “Listen Now.” It takes me to this awesome graphic of an old TV set. I think it is the exact model I grew up with — so maybe that means Edwards is alienating the youth constituency.
Anyways, the whole thing is perfect: Edwards is a little off center, the video is a little too crisp, he’s in front of a cheesy flag that’s obviously been chosen to be the exactly right amount cheesy — just perfect.
And he’s actually talking like a human being! Thank God almighty, a Democratic politician has figured out how to talk like a real, regular human being.
Not once — not even once! — does he raise his hand and do the Bill Clinton / Politician gesture. (Bill was its only legitimate user, because he invented it. But now whoever uses it: they’re just screaming “kick me I’m a politician!”).
It’s just as though, in the middle of his busy day, he stopped to tape this little podcast, and did it in one, casual take. Nothing to vet by the comms director here, this is coming from the man himself.
Better still, he speaks explicitly to the members of his “online community” as though he knows them — as though he genuinely appreciates them.
I could be cynical and wonder how hard Edwards, the most talented politician in America, has to try not to sound like a politician. But I know from the Kerry campaign that both he and Elizabeth Edwards take this online stuff seriously. I’m convinced that this is a simple case of John Edwards understanding that there is an enthusiastic base out there who supports him and his anti-poverty fight. He seems to genuinely want to reach out, thank them, and let them in on what he’s up to.
It’s the perfect approach and one that his online base will very much appreciate.
My only criticism of this outreach is that perhaps the email should have simply been a transcript of this video. The fact of video in emails is that only a tiny fraction click to watch. Maybe they’d want to take out some of the aaaaaaah’s (which are what made the video perfect, by the way), but that’s it. They should have just sent it out as is.
Edwards is kicking ass online. His success isn’t coming from new technology. Or from courting bloggers. Or from buying email addresses.
Rather, he is succeeding because he is using this new medium to reach out and make a real personal connection with his supporters. After several years in this business, I still don’t know why it is so hard for these politicians, who rely on the votes of real people for their jobs, to simply reach out an connect with real people. But it is the most difficult thing in the world for them.
So there’s one an example of how to podcast well. Bravo.
And, just for balance, here’s an example of how to do it absolutely terribly:
http://www.forwardtogetherpac.com/…
(It’s a confusing page, but notice you can click on “Direct Download” to skip the podcasting subscription process. That’s another big difference to notice: Edwards’ video is so much more accessible, where Warner’s is blocked by cumbersome Podcast orthodoxy.)
To all the ’08 hopefuls, take your lesson.
And don’t forget, you can vote for your favorite next-president at RootsPrimary.org.
(Cross posted at HuffPo.)
Exit fake blog hype. Enter real blog power. 14 June, 2006
Posted by Zack in Online organizing.add a comment
The influence and impact of the political Blogosphere has only begun to take off. The Mainstream Media, however, is about to stop paying attention. From now on, bloggers will read less and less about themselves in the pages of Newsweek or the New York Times. CNN’s “Internet Reporter” will start reporting on something else (maybe podcasting!). It’s on to the next big fake thing. What will it be? Joe Trippi, the originator of the Mainstream Media-fed blogger bubble, says ’08 will be the year of the political SMS text message — so maybe that’s it.
Yes, all this buzz about the power of the Blogosphere has been fake. Fake, because it’s premature. The Blogosphere isn’t very powerful at all yet. The current buzz is about where the medium will be in five years or so, not where it is now. Kos, for example, reaches about as many people as the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s website (not even counting its print readership). Throw together a handful of smallish city papers and you’ve got a medium reaching as many people as the 100 top political blogs.
I’m not putting down the Blogosphere. Just wait a few years. Then Kos will be reaching as many people as the New York Times. Blogs, and other insurgent media, will have lapped the combined readership of all newspapers and magazines several times by then. But none of that’s happened yet.
You see, fellow bloggers, the Mainstream Media is the immune system of the status quo. The media frenzy over the Blogosphere that we just went through was actually a process of inoculation. Kos and Jerome “crashed the gate” alright — but they were immediately absorbed by two white blood cells of the establishment: Tim Russert and Mark Warner. They have been released back into the Blogosphere. But have they been handicapped by responsibility to a real live (compromising) politician, the desire to keep appearing on major news shows, and the inevitable brain damage that happens when one’s 15 minutes of fame runs a little over?
The truth is, the Establishment has been laughing at the Blogosphere this whole time. Now, in horrific disappointment, bloggers will see that the Mainstream Media was only teasing when it reported its own demise at the hands of the Blogosphere. Kos’s “now anyone can have your job” to Dowd, and her honest response, was the symbolic moment of reversal, where the patronizer lets the patronized know he’s been made a fool of. Actually, it was the first time the Mainstream Media has ever been honest to the Blogosphere. That signals two things: a new respect and the beginning of the permanent silent treatment.
The establishment has tasted the Blogosphere. Chewed it a little. And will now spit it out.
If the Blogosphere really has come into its own, then all will be well, and the breadth and depth of this new medium and new community will continue to increase — without needing to be fed by Mainstream Media frenzy. But if the Mainstream Media has timed its inoculation exactly right, then the Blogosphere could be left broken, with stars like Kos, Jerome and Stoller leaving the community behind (as others already have) for the mainstream before the greater Blogosphere has grown its own full set of teeth.
This happens with all innovations in politics. There was once a sexy new development called Direct Mail. It was going to let the grassroots “conservative majority” take back politics. The beltway press reported the rise of the medium with enormous hype…until it got bored and moved on to the next thing. Years after it was forgotten, direct mail did indeed raise enormous critical funds that made the conservative takeover possible. But that didn’t make headlines. That didn’t bother an early direct mail pioneer named Karl Rove — he was interested in building real power, not seeing his name in print.
Around 1990-92, a tiny start-up organization called EMILY’s List was getting so much buzz in the Mainstream Media that even I heard about it while in college and paying no attention at all to electoral politics. In 1992 EMILY’s List was widely acknowledged to help make possible the “Year of the Woman” and the buzz reached a deafening level. But right after that, EMILY’s List dropped from regular headlines. Nevertheless, they continued to build greater and greater power. Today, the group supports its largest crop of candidates ever, at every level of government. And it supports them not only in fundraising, but also training for staff and candidates and many other services. But when was the last time you saw a major piece about EMILY’s List in the Mainstream Media?
Working for MoveOn.org in 2003-04, I witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. Almost every week, one of us was on TV being asked what it was like to be “revolutionizing politics.” National political journalists were constantly writing major puff pieces (as though each were the first). Interviews were like feeding candy to babies. At the time, I thought they were doing something for us. But actually we were doing something for them: providing them with a simple, appealing storyline. Journalists — even really serious, respected, national journalists — only wanted to hear how cool we were: how a bunch of 20 somethings were turning politics on its head. Never mind that most of us were 30-, 40- or 50-somethings, and that we were mostly just getting people to sign petitions and call Congress. I remember snapping at our press guy (who was amazing) for setting up a 30-minute CNN mini-documentary on MoveOn because I was having trouble getting any real work done in between talking to journalists. At the peak of the absurdity, the three youngest of us were deemed the 14th “Most Powerful Man Under 38″ by Details Magazine — right above P-Diddy and right below Justin Timberlake. The Mainstream Media was laughing at us, having fun with us.
Today, MoveOn is many, many times larger and more powerful than it was at the height of its media coverage: it has a substantial staff (not the five people it had when I was there) running many programs simultaneously. Its ad campaigns are much larger, more effective and much better targeted now. It raises far more money. It mobilizes members in many more ways now. And today it has a real field program, which it didn’t have at all in 2003 and for most of 2004. MoveOn will have a much greater impact on this year’s elections than any in the past. But their coverage in the Mainstream Media has slowed to a crawl compared to what it was before. And, alas, no MoveOn staffers are on the Details Magazine power list this year.
So hang on to your hats, bloggers! If you thought the ride up the Mainstream Media roller coaster was fun, then just wait for that queasy feeling of the plunge down. Now is when the best bloggers — the most sincere, the most determined, the most strategic — will really shine, because now all glory will come from real work and real quality, and not from Mainstream Media headlines. Say goodbye to the fake blog bubble, and say hello to the real one. And remember, the revolution will not be televised.
STATS!The Atlanta Journal Constititution newspaper’s website alone get almost as many readers as Kos – perhaps Warner should invite them to a party? The conservative online community FreeRepublic.org is just as active as DailyKos – so why don’t most Repubican hopefuls even know it exists? |
The Blogosphere of today in perspective. (But just wait five years.) |
(Cross posted from HuffPo.)
Letter to the next DNC Chair Part 2: What to do with your email list 7 February, 2005
Posted by Zack in Online organizing, progressive strategy, The Big Stuff.2 comments
(This is Part 2 of a two-part letter written during the open Chair contest of 2005. See Part 1 here.)
Your first day on the job, this is the only thing you should do: throw everyone out of your new big office, take the phone off the hook, sit yourself down, and write a letter from your heart to the millions of supporters who desperately want to see you succeed.
When you’ve finished, walk down to the basement where the tech team sits, and have them email your letter to the one-point-something-million DNC online supporters who are waiting impatiently by their inboxes to hear from you. Ask John Kerry and MoveOn.org to pass it along to their memberships and you could reach another six million people whose hopes are, for the moment, all pinned on you. If the AFL-CIO does the same, you’ll be speaking to another 3.2 million supportive and enthusiastic union members. In one breath, you’re talking to more than ten million Americans who want to help you rebuild the party .
This first day at work will essentially be your only chance to establish a connection with this massive base. After that, their attention will fade; they’ll sense you’re not going to do or say anything spectacularly different after all; they’ll forget about you and wait for the next decade.
If you delegate the task of writing this letter to some committee of staffers, aides or friends, then you’ve blown it. Of course you should bounce drafts off of them — but why not write this letter yourself? You just became opposition leader of the world’s only superpower, and you don’t know what you want to say to ten million of your ardent supporters? I know that’s not true. So write the letter yourself!
I don’t have any suggestions about what you should say specifically. That must come from you. But I’ll say this: the people on your email list are talented and sophisticated political operatives — whether they’re governors, Town Committee people, or precinct-level volunteers. Do not underestimate what they are capable of making possible if you provide the right leadership. If you’re struggling to find the words to speak, then think what you’d say about your hopes and fears to your closest aides, closest confidante or even your wife in private. And then why not just say that to these 10 million amazing people who are yearning for an honest connection with you?
Maybe you’re a politician who’s known for “telling it straight.” But CNN and FOX only serve your straight talk in five-second slices, don’t they? And they choose which five-seconds. It’s impossible to establish real leadership through that media filter. I know you don’t need me to tell you that. But now you have the ability to write directly to perhaps 10 million activists and supporters. My bet is that this first email of yours will be the most closely-read mass communication in history. This is your way to circumvent that media filter.
But I can’t stress this enough: you only get one shot. Those 10 million people will pay close attention to what you’re saying only during that very brief moment when you’ve just begun the job and you are the top headline in the news.
I know the thought of writing to 10 million supporters (who are actually paying attention!) is daunting. So, if this is not speaking out of place, then let me say too: on a certain level, I think you should forget most of your career. This isn’t anything to do with you personally — any politician in your shoes should do the same. Forget policy. There’s no hope of good policy in the current intellectual environment — and anyway that’s not your job anymore. Forget ever running for anything again. Forget lobbyists and donors and all the rest of the special interests. You’ve got millions of politically passionate people out there who desperately want to end the utter corruption of American politics. They’ll donate more money together than all lobbyists combined; that was proven in 2004. But they’ll do much more than that. With four years to build and organize, they will actually succeed to “take back America ” in 2008. These people aren’t only Democrats, but millions of Independents and Republicans too. All of America , reasonable and moderate, is your constituency. Unite us. Lead us. It’s almost impossible to comprehend the magnitude of the historical possibilities that you face in your new position.
However, accomplishing all that’s possible will require you to step outside the bounds of what even our most offbeat politicians consider acceptable. There’s no way around it: you’ll have to take great risks. But what makes success possible are these 10 million amazing people whom you can call upon for help.
With 10 million supporters a click of the “send” button away, why not take the big risks? What really is there to lose anyway? Let’s say it all goes awry, and you wind up going out in an embarrassing blaze of screaming glory? We already know that’s not the end of the world, don’t we? Maybe in politician terms you’d be putting a lot on the line — but just think of the chances regular Americans are taking every day just to survive in their dangerous jobs, dangerous neighborhoods, dangerous schools, dangerous wars. Surely what you’re risking is nothing compared to that.
After you’ve sounded your call to arms and established your connection with this massive base, then you’ve got to keep the conversation going by supporting existing local organizing as well as providing the tools and structure for grassroots organizing on a massively increased scale (see Part 1 of this letter!).
In the same way that Roosevelt had all of America’s attention through his radio “Fireside Chats” in that time of crisis, you will have the same level of attention from millions of grassroots leaders who understand the crisis facing America today.
But think about this: the people who listened to Roosevelt could not respond to the speaker, and they could not reach out through the new medium of radio to connect with other local leaders. Yours will be able to do both through the new mediums of email and the web. In the email you send to those 10 million forward-looking Americans, you’ll give people a place to go begin organizing. Your ask could be “Volunteer now for 2006 & 2008″, “Endow a grassroots organizing program for the 21st Century” — it could even be “What the heck should I do now that I’m here?” The people receiving your email will click to sign up, contribute a few bucks for organizing, or give you a well-thought-out suggestion.
Those clicks are the beginnings of what will be a beautiful, two-way friendship between you, the Democratic party and these millions of grassroots leaders.
The important thing to grasp is that you’ve got the ability to engage these best-ten-million- people-in-America in a very, very concrete and productive way that did not even exist a few years ago. In an instant, millions opt in to the movement. It’s actually hard to fathom the power that could be unleashed by this one, first email you send. It might go practically unnoticed by the media, but this email will be the beginning of a whole new Democratic Party. (Though your press team should do their best to make it a big story!)
All the ingredients for a mass movement to clean up American politics are present for you — you’ve just got to pick them up and use them. So I’ll say it one more time. Your first day in office: shut the door to your office, take the phone off the hook, and just have them tell the reporters that you’re writing a letter to 10 million supporters. Many of us envy you for having that day all to yourself.
Letter to the next DNC Chair Part 1: Work with the New Grassroots to build a permanent field program 22 January, 2005
Posted by Zack in Online organizing, progressive strategy, The Big Stuff.add a comment
(I wrote this while working in London on the Labour Party re-election campaign and watching the DNC Chair contest from a far. I wrote both parts before Dean wrapped up the race. Part 2 is here.)
Introduction
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting an open letter to the DNC Chair candidates in two parts (the first is posted now below). I hope this will spark new discussion on blogs and other communities. Let me know where discussions are happening and I’ll respond throughout to questions and feedback.
I’m not laying out a full blueprint for the next party chair — my topic is the Internet and technology and how they can be used to dramatically improve field operations, fundraising and the relationship with the party’s base.
I’m limiting my topics to my experience: I worked on the Kerry campaign for the final eight months, with responsibility for building an email list and using it to mobilize volunteers, raise money and engage online activists to do things that would help elect John Kerry. During the final three months of the campaign, I worked closely with Tom Matzzie (who came from the AFL-CIO and is now at MoveOn.org) in the field directly with organizers and volunteers in 13 swing states to make sure that our online program was helping organizers in practice and not just in theory. Before Kerry, I helped the Dean campaign build its email list and installed their first version of “Get Local” tools (with Patrick Kane, MoveOn’s systems architect). I worked as Director of Organizing for MoveOn.org, and before that ran a series of my own experiments in online organizing as well as a few political parody sites (GWBush.com was the main one). Before getting involved with online organizing I was an old-fashioned grassroots organizer in the Labor Movement for five years all over the country. And I even spent a couple of years working as an IT hack inside corporations.
What I saw at MoveOn, Dean and Kerry was a totally new kind of politics emerging: new kinds of people getting involved, empowered by new tools and communications mediums. For tens of millions, the Internet has eliminated all barriers to entry for political action. Simple web tools are bringing mind-boggling efficiency gains to grassroots organizing. In the Kerry campaign alone, more than 100,000 people volunteered in response to emails and recruitment calls from an online “Phone Corps”. Nearly three quarters of a million people made online donations. Tens of thousands participated in our “special forces” such as the Phone and Media Corps. And that was just the Kerry campaign: millions more participated in other online communities, organizations and campaigns.
Technology in politics was not all roses in 2004, however. There were also ill-conceived and rushed IT projects that drove organizers crazy, left potentials untapped, and sometimes made things worse than they were before. Even hugely successful online projects had very jagged edges. Nevertheless, the overall picture in 2004 was of millions of people going farther than they’d ever gone before, in large part thanks to email, the web and technology.
For the good of the future, all of us who were involved would do well to admit that despite great achievements we only scratched the surface. In a sense, we failed horribly because the potential we left untapped was so great. Looking back, we can easily see all the things we could have done differently that would have made all the difference in the world. Therefore, we’ve got to look to the future with an eye on the past, not for the sake of recrimination, but for the sake of getting it right going forward.
Part 1: Work with the New Grassroots to build a permanent field program
The Democratic Party needs a permanent field program — a permanent grassroots structure broad enough, deep enough and efficient enough to win elections and empower the leaders we elect to make real change. Another way of saying this is: “The Democrats need to be a political party again.” Thanks to online assets created in the 2004 election, the party has a chance to engage the “New Grassroots” and build that structure at lightening speed with relatively few resources.
Who are the New Grassroots?
Several hundred thousand activists worked in some significant way to elect Democrats in 2004. For most, it was their first experience with political campaigns. They’re angry we lost, and they want to keep fighting now to win in 2006 and 2008. What is totally new is that the New Grassroots have a direct connection to organizations, parties and leaders through email and the web. In a much deeper way than ever before, the movement can continue even now that the election is past.
The online universe of New Grassroots activists consists of several overlapping email lists totaling perhaps 6,000,000 people: AFL-CIO and affiliates (3,200,000), JohnKerry.com (2,800,000), MoveOn.org (2,800,000 domestic), DNC (~1,000,000), Democracy For America (~600,000), TrueMajority.com (440,000) and other organizations and state Democratic parties. Add to that smaller, but disproportionately influential blogs and communities.
The question for the next DNC Chair is: what will the party offer these activists now? How can the party give them what they most want: a way to put responsible leadership in Congress and the White House in 2006, 2008 and beyond? The answer is to build a permanent field organization made up of hundreds of thousands of volunteers — a new kind of web-enabled organization built faster and stronger than anything anyone’s seen before.
Lessons from field in the 2004 cycle
There are two obvious lessons from the field programs of 2004. The first is that a truly enormous number of activists in every state and county want to shape their society and want to work on elections. The Internet didn’t change how many people wanted to participate, it just made it so much easier for them to find out where to show up to work.
The second lesson is that an effective national field program cannot be built in six — or even 18 — months.
There are many efforts underway to analyze the exact success or failure of various field organizations and specific strategies and tactics. The problem is that much of the data involved in those efforts are unreliable. Several well-known field and polling geniuses looking into this question disagree with each other — something that indicates data simply aren’t sufficient for a meaningful empirical answer. No one will ever know the true impact of the field programs run by the DNC, ACT or MoveOn.org. The organization that devotes the most PR resources to publicizing their success (probably ACT) will appear to be the one that made a difference.
But there are easy and obvious lessons to learn by talking to the organizers who participated in the field organizations of 2004. Former staff from all three major Democratic-side programs — at least in private conversations — will speak of the utter chaos that defined their experiences. They are proud of the organizations they helped to build and were deeply changed by the relationships they created with individual volunteers as well as whole communities. But they’ll tell you it was generally a madhouse.
However, if you talk to organizers from several state primary campaigns, you’ll hear about a different kind of experience. Dean/New Hampshire is a particularly interesting example because the person who built that program, Karen Hicks, went on to run field nationally for the Kerry campaign at the DNC.
People who were a part of Hicks’ New Hampshire organization glow as they recall their experience. There was structure, order, concrete goals. One young organizer told me that he had accomplished and learned more each day than he had in entire semesters. Dean’s post-scream recovery from disastrous polling levels to second place (in ten days!) was forced by the brute strength of the grassroots organization Karen Hicks and her organizers built. (That organization impressed Kerry’s field guru Michael Whouley enough that he hired Karen to direct field nationally for Kerry.)
I’ve literally seen tears well up in the eyes of organizers as they described their daily schedule in that organization. It wasn’t just the excitement of working for any primary campaign. It was the effect of being part of something that was really working. It was being a part of an organization that truly empowered people, perhaps the rarest thing in the world.
What was the difference between the organization Karen Hicks built in New Hampshire and the one she led nationally? The difference was the amount of time there was to build. Hicks spent one full year organizing in New Hampshire , one of the smallest states in the country. She meticulously developed talent and skills on her staff as well as in her volunteer base. She had time to continuously push responsibilities out onto volunteers. Volunteers had time to recruit wider and wider circles of their social networks. Eventually an enormous percentage of all Democratic voters in the state had attended an organizing meeting for Dean lead by Hicks’ staff or volunteers. The distance, measured in layers of bureaucracy, between a front line organizer or volunteer and an experienced and talented field leader was increadibly narrow. That kind of solid organization took a year to build in a tiny state. It would take much, much longer to build across the whole nation.
At the national level, Karen had six months to build a program that was to be 100 times bigger than her New Hampshire organization. Also, in New Hampshire, she had near complete autonomy, but in DC she faced inevitable bureaucracy from all directions inside the enormous Kerry-DNC operation.
A truly incredible organization takes time to build. Only with time, can new layers of genuinely experienced and talented field leaders be developed. If the DNC starts building a national grassroots network now, it will only just be ready in time for 2008. Traditionally, it would take decades to build such an organization. But in this letter, what I would like to suggest is that email, the web and a little bit of technology will make it possible to build in time for 2008.
Also, the Republicans are doing it
The cheap shot argument for building a permanent field operation is: “Because the Republican’s have one.” It’s not clear whether the GOP’s long-term field push had a huge effect on turnout. But it is clear that the Republicans are building a powerful, permanent field operation — and that, at the very least, it’s a powerful growing threat. We know that they started building years ago. We’ve seen their volunteer training materials, and have sat in on some of the trainings. They give volunteers formal roles, hold them accountable for results and continuously replace the ones who do not perform. What they’re doing is very advanced. If it wasn’t a major advantage in 2004, just give them another four years and see where they are.
But we shouldn’t need a Republican threat to motivate us to do the obvious. What is a political party without a strong, capable grassroots? Just a shell of a party — and that’s what both the Democratic and Republican parties were for a very long time. The 2004 election gives the Democrats a chance to leave that legacy behind.
That Democrats are stuck in a deep identity crisis is not a valid excuse for progressive organizers to pass by this opportunity. It cannot be said that activists won’t work in a protracted, difficult effort for today’s Democratic party. Grassroots activists at the county level are just as frustrated as we are with the party’s ideological paralysis. And they are just as capable as we are of thinking long term. They are perfectly willing to build the party in their communities both in anticipation of the day when the party gets back on it’s feet and as a way of making that happen. This movement will in fact be a movement to rebuild and reinvigorate the party itself. It’s got to happen from below — we know that, and here is a way to make it happen.
Ten steps to building a permanent field program with the New Grassroots
Here is one possible scenario the Democratic Party can use to build a vast, permanent field organization with the New Grassroots by leveraging email, the web and a little technology. Any number of variations on this basic plan would all work just fine — my purpose here is only to introduce the basic structure of such a plan:
- Propose the plan to the base. Ask the new grassroots to join and fund a permanent field program. A short email campaign to the JohnKerry.com and DNC email lists will probably raise $5,000,000 in repeated emails over several months. Probably 10,000 people in about 1,000 counties would sign up to participate. An email campaign to the DNC list alone will probably raise $1,000,000 and sign up 2,000 people. No doubt there are also major donors who will want to fund this.
- Hire field organizers for key states. (Or why not hire them for ALL states?) State field directors and organizers will report directly to a national DNC field director. These will have to be very experienced and talented as both organizers and managers. Ideally, they will be chosen from the best of the state and regional field directors from the 2004 cycle and have respect for, and a good relationship with, state parties.
- Sign up activists for kickoff meetings in every county. Setting up kickoff meetings in 1,000 counties will be as easy as sending out an email invitation with a link to a simple web signup tool. Data on all attendees, including personal statements and other application data, drops into organizers’ inboxes in advance of the meetings. There is even a way to have attendees agree on and book meeting locations without organizers’ intervention.The organizers’ goal in each county meeting will be to leave behind a volunteer team of dedicated and talented individuals. In densely populated counties, organizers’ jobs will be to pick the most promising volunteers out of a crowded field of applicants; in sparsely populated counties it will be to convince a few attendees to take on a bigger role than they were thinking of. In either case, the organizers’ goal is to build teams of natural, talented leaders. The teams will understand their responsibilities and know that if they don’t meet their goals they will eventually have to step down from the team.
- This step represents an enormous efficiency gain for organizers made possible by the email list and the web. Without the email list and the web, these thousands of meetings would have taken a year to pull together by the same staff (or would have taken a staff of thousands). This is one of the ways in which this plan shortens what would otherwise be a decade-long process of nationwide organizationbuilding to just a few years.
- Hold the volunteers accountable for results as they build out the organization. When the first month of organizing has passed, already thousands of counties will have volunteer teams in place. Their inaugural task will be simply to recruit identical leadership teams within their counties for every city and town.
- Two more big efficiency gains come in at this stage. First, in building town-level teams, the county-level teams will be assisted again by simple web tools that give access to lists of prospects (e.g. volunteers from 2004). This means teams will find, say, one new recruit per ten cold calls instead of one per hundred.
- Second, by requiring volunteer teams to report their progress using a simple web form that feeds into a database, organizers will spend more time fixing problems and less time hunting them down. Organizers will be able to easily see the exact current progress of all their counties just by looking at a web page. Normally it takes organizers in this situation hours and hours each week to get a true picture of where their volunteers are.
At this stage, the organizers’ job is to keep things moving: encouraging teams on conference calls and by visits. Organizers will shower praise on high performers and ask them to teach the secrets to their success to others. Even more important, organizers must begin weeding out non-performing volunteers, and reconstituting failed teams. Of course, there will be things to do for anyone who wants to help, but the formal positions on volunteer teams are privilegesto hold — they are leadership roles that come with real responsibilities.
- Gather volunteers for trainings. After a couple months of overseeing and pushing forward the county teams in their recruitment efforts, there will be something like 10,000 to 30,000 total volunteers filling formal leadership roles at the county and town levels. At this point, state directors will bring them together for state and regional trainings. The trainings should be held in rolling succession so that the national field director will be able to attend almost all of them. Trainings will be repeated inside states so that all volunteers will be able to attend regardless of their schedules.Training will be general as well as specialized — setting down the core values and expectations of the organization, but also teaching practical skills. Volunteers will pick areas in which to be “certified” — e.g. Phone Bank Leader, Canvass Director, Data Entry Officer, Organizer and County or Town Organizing Director. Training in these areas will be continuous, with regular conference calls and occasional meetings.
- Recruit precinct-level teams. As soon as town-level teams are born, they begin recruiting precinct-level teams — just as their county-level teams recruited them. They use the same prospecting tools and reporting tools that the county teams used. This time, it will be volunteer organizers who are encouraging and troubleshooting the recruitment process — in other words, members of the county- and town-level teams will be acting as full-fledged organizers, acting in the same capacity as staff, in the chain of command right alongside paid state-level organizers. A massive, structured network is coming into being.
- Constantly put more and more responsibility with volunteers. At this stage of the plan, only several months into the project, we’re dealing with an organization that has five layers: national field director, state and regional staff organizers, county-level volunteer organizers, town-level volunteer organizers and precinct-level volunteers organizers. Only the top two levels are full-time, paid staff — and there won’t be that many of them due to budget restraints. Therefore, we’ll be expecting our volunteers to do so much more than organizations typically do. It is important that volunteer organizers start taking paid staff positions. The organization will become much more solid as young paid staff go off to law school and The Hill and are replaced by retirees, housewives, and other adults with natural talent, life experience and deep roots in the community.This is really what this whole project is all about: giving real responsibility to grassroots leaders; and it’s the hardest thing in the world for paid organizers to allow themselves to do.
- Fill in the gaps. After several months of organizing, there will be huge gaps in sparsely populated areas, Republican areas, and anywhere else that the email lists are weak — particularly very low-income areas. Therefore, all volunteer teams will have to adopt weak precincts and go hunting for promising activists to fill positions in those. Again, web tools will assist in contacting leads more efficiently.
- Rehearse for the real thing. As soon as the precinct teams are in place, they should go to work doing things that mimic the work of a real election campaign. It’s impossible to say now what exactly that should be: registering voters; cleaning the voter file; a mix of many things? Whatever it is, it should mirror a real campaign in terms of the skills used: phone banking, canvassing, etc. Midterm elections in 2006 will provide a perfect dress rehearsal for 2008, but will also be an opportunity for the organization to make its first attempt at influencingthe outcome of an election.
- Train. Train. Train. Good training makes all the difference in activities such as phone banking and canvassing. If the phone bank supervisor has no training, he is likely to give people flat and boring preparation– if he gives them any preparation at all. Phone bankers will be flat and boring on the phone as a result. What’s needed to make a phone bank, or any other group campaign work, is a successful leader who inspires volunteers. That’s not to say the leaders need to be Martin Luther King. They just need to be able to explain how important the task of the evening is, make a personal connection with participants and create a good working environment. As Tom Matzzie says, “They need to remember to put on the coffee and bring the doughnuts.” A good phone bank supervisor gives great pep talks, keeps the energy level up throughout the night, makes absolutely sure there are snacks and drinks on hand, and wraps up the evening in a way that inspires volunteers to come back again.Some people make great trainers. Those people should be constantly identified in the organization and should become official trainers who go from county to county continuously improving the quality of operations. Training and retraining is what will make this volunteer organization great. It’s why it takes years, not months, to build this kind of organization. And again, web tools will help the process by making it easy to collect evaluations on every trainer from trainees — so that we’ll be truly training people and not just pretending to be training them.
We’re talking about a totally new form of organization.
In the same way that railroads, highways, the telegraph and the telephone all changed the maximum size and efficiency of national organizations, so does the Internet — “the Internet” being web tools and email.
Because of web tools and email, a new kind of massively volunteer-heavy organization is possible.
Consider one of many examples of how this works: a specially trained “Quality Corps” of volunteers will continuously call through members of the entire organization collecting anonymous feedback, exposing bogus reporting and providing a constant reality check from the bottom of the organization to the top. Collecting honest feedback from the front lines is an incredibly expensive and difficult thing for most organizations to do — but if it’s not done, state and national directors fall hopelessly out of touch with what’s really happening on the ground. Web tools and email make this easy and cheap. (An even cheaper solution is to email out simple web surveys — that will unearth problems, but not give a truly representative picture of the organization.)
The underlying technology that make these kinds of self-maintaining systems possible has already been proven by MoveOn.org, the Clark and Kerry campaigns and others. Quality Corps members would log into a web interface to get names of several volunteers to call with specific questions and forms to report responses. They’ll answer “customer service” questions from the volunteer leaders, thereby improving quality as well as reporting on it. When Corps members come across questions they can’t answer, they’ll be able to bounce them up to more experienced members. There is virtually no limit to the self-sustaining complexity of these kinds of web-enabled sub-organizations. For example, as the Quality Corps grows, it may need its own internal quality checking system which should be automated as well. These systems are “automated” in the sense that web tools and email can provide the structure in which people can be efficient and productive without hand-holding by paid staff or lots of time consuming and organizationally perilous meetings and intolerable conference calls.
These kinds of systems allow organizations to leverage huge numbers of talented, dedicated volunteers who have only an hour or two per week to give. Five hundred Corps members working two hours per week is the equivalent of 25 full-time staffers. For perspective, during the Kerry campaign, we had 5,000 “Phone Corps” members from the Kerry email list working regularly as volunteer recruiters using the same interface described above.
It is incredibly significant in this new form of web-enabled organization (A) that quality and performance can be measured for all participants and represented centrally in a database and (B) that an entrenched bureaucracy IS NOT necessary to have consistent communications to the base (because email and web tools give the top a direct connection to the bottom). These facts should make it possible to have a totally new form of huge but nimble organization.Bureaucracy always leads to ossification and degradation of skills. Bad people take over. The “tyranny of the annoying” asserts itself as it always does in grassroots organizations. Normally, nothing can be done, because the organization has no nervous system and no immune system — no capacity for regeneration. An email- and web-enabled organization has those new capabilities.Another area of huge gain for this kind of organization is in the flexibility with which individuals can float between positions. In fact constant rotation of volunteers between county, town and precinct levels must be institutionalized in the system. This will prevent “aristocracies of incompetence” and the “tyranny of the annoying” from slowing down the organization. Constant rotating will keep the organization fresh and limber. Normally, it’s incumbentupon entrenched individuals to maintain the structure and lines of communication of the organization. But in the web-enabled organization, continuity does not rely on entrenchment of individuals.This organization should be able to do something that almost no one has ever accomplished before: continuous reinvigoration and renewal. The beauty of this kind of organization is that it can (we hope) have all the benefits of democracy (intelligence and initiative at all levels, deep involvement and commitment by volunteers) along with all the benefits of hierarchy (coordination, efficiency) without the dangers (entrenched incompetence and avarice).
Reaping the benefits of a permanent field program
Assuming work begins in this summer (and not August 2008!), then just think of where we’ll be when the election is just a few months away:
- The voter file will have been made far more accurate (after millions of phone calls and door knocks to clean it up).
- The largest possible target voter universe will have been accurately ID’ed.
- Tens of thousands of volunteer leaders will have been trained to run effective phone banks and canvasses.
- Strong precinct, county and state organizations will be trained and ready to execute a campaign plan they’ve been practicing for a year.
- Solid precinct organizations will be ready to absorb and train the flood of new volunteers who step forward right before an election.
We could be half way there by the 2006 elections, and fully functioning by 2008. The 2006 election will serve as both a dress rehearsal and a recruitment and training ground for 2008.
Using the online assets that Democrats built in 2004, we should be able to jump light years ahead of the Republican field organization. If we do, it will not be thanks to Internet Magic, but rather thanks to mixing new online tools and resources with good old-fashioned grassroots organizing, focusing on results.
Response to Kos 21 December, 2004
Posted by Zack in Online organizing.add a comment
Shortly after the Kerry campaign ended, I spoke about the campaign at a conference at the Berkman Center in Boston. There were questions about all different aspects of the campaign — field, communications, Internet, fundraising, etc… — as well as about the different organizations involved on the Democratic side: the DNC, state parties, coordinated campaigns, ACT and the Kerry campaign organization. A journalist in the audience from the UK massively and carelessly misquoted me — just turning it all around 180 degrees in some cases. Markos at the DailyKos, in the style we all love him for, wrote a post called “Zack Exley is an idiot” based on what he read in that article. Then a couple hundred commentors piled on after him. Below is the response I posted, which was pretty well received.
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Markos and friends,
Don’t you know that journalists get it ALL wrong sometimes? You just spent two days hurling criticisms at me based on what a UK reporter wrote about me in The Register. He carelessly and radically misrepresented what I said while speaking on a recent panel at Harvard’s Berkman Center. He took things I said about the Bush Internet team and had me saying them about my own team; criticisms of the DNC program were reported as criticisms of the Kerry program or of ACT; criticisms of the Kerry/DNC field program were reported as criticisms of the Kerry Internet program; he flat out misquoted me inside of quotation marks and implied worse outside of quotation marks such as the “blog blather” and “goateed chinned web designers” comments.Then came 200 comments attacking me on Daily Kos based on that careless article. I’ve been publicly attacked by a lot of right wingers and it never bothered me much. Bush called me a “garbage man” on camera! I was sued and attacked publicly by AOL-TW-CNN lawyers once. I’ve had the honor of Hannity, Bill O’Rielly and many other nutcase pundits all taking shots. The GOP even put out a fake bio of me when I went to the Kerry campaign and asked supporters to write letters to the editor attacking me. They started popping up all over the country — giving me credit for, among other things, coming up with new ways to injure police at protests.
But the onslaught on Daily Kos has made me feel terrible because (A) you’re attacking me for things I never said; and (B) There’s something important at stake here concerning how Democratic campaigns can use the Internet to win elections, and so we need a clear discussion on this topic, not mud slinging.
What I really said:
I began my remarks at the Berkman conference by saying that the netroots — the hundreds of thousands of online communities thriving on blogs, forums, and other sites — are the Internet’s MOST IMPORTANT contribution to Democracy. I didn’t speak in opposition to blogs or any other kind of online community. My only comment on blogs was that they are not the be-all and end-all of online campaigns — something Kos has agreed with.
I do disagree with a lot of conventional wisdom of Internet politics. And I have been public about mistakes the Dean campaign made, and mistakes that a whole industry of Internet consultants continue to convince candidates to make. But that is not to say that I disagree with everything the Dean campaign did or that Internet consultants are pushing these days.
My main point was that the conventional wisdom of Internet politics mistakenly de-emphasizes list building, email communications from the campaign to supporters, doing tools right, and constantly evaluating every online endeavor that consumes resources INSIDE the campaign on the basis of measurable positive results for the campaign. None of this was a criticism in any way of the thriving blogs, forums and other online communities that I had already said were much MORE IMPORTANT for Democracy than anything a campaign could do on its own.
So most of the criticisms many of you have been hurling at me just don’t apply to anything I have ever actually said. I’d like to answer them and set the record straight — so that at least folks can attack me for things I really did do or failed to do.
(1) Zack hates “get local”.
No, actually Zack brought the “get local” tools to the Dean campaign. In May I took a leave from MoveOn, at Joe Trippi‘s request, to take MoveOn’s “meeting tool” to the Dean campaign. Within a few weeks, thousands of Dean supporters were planning all kinds of events in their homes and public places. Then we sent out emails to the Dean list showing people how they could put their zip code in and find events planned by Dean supporters in their communities, and thousands more took part. It was a beautiful thing. Zephyr Teachout got that it was beautiful, of course. Joe actually freaked out, bless his heart, when he first saw the thing taking off. “This is going to be a fucking disaster!” he yelled. Zephyr and I talked him through it. He calmed down and in a couple days loved what was happening.
The reason Trippi was worrying was that the custom meeting tool allowed supporters far more freedom than Meetup.com to plan events of any sort, on any date, in any location. Meetup.com limited Dean supporters to one set day a month, and a list of approved Meetup venues that paid Meetup.com $75/month. (Meetup has since relaxed that policy somewhat, but it far more restrictive than the custom tools.)
(The tools I brought to the Dean campaign were later re-done in php from perl, as I understand it, and folded into a larger suite of tools that included Deanlink and other stuff.)
MoveOn and Patrick Kane of We Also Walk Dogs developed the meeting tool as far back as early 2000. Meetup.com was a parallel development. Evite was another parallel phenomenon, as was the brief flashmobs craze. I played a very small role in the emergence of the Internet’s off-line organizing powers in 2000 around the election crisis. At MoveOn I was the lead organizer on the candlelight vigils before the Iraq war and other big steps toward using the Internet to get people together.
I love Get Local.
(2) Zack drowned Meetup.com in a bathtub in the basement of the Kerry campaign.
I love Meetup.com, and Scott Heiferman is a friend. I think that Meetup.com is perhaps the single best thing that has happened on the Internet. The newest big Meetup — stay-at-home moms — is the best example of what it’s making possible. For almost a century in atomized American suburbs mothers have felt as though they were loosing their minds, stuck at home, sometimes without a car (like my mom when I was growing up), isolated from everything and having no way to find other mothers in their areas. Now, by typing in a zip code and making a few clicks, mothers can find a few others right in their neighborhoods and begin recreating the natural, logical support networks that no mother ever should be without. And that’s just one example out of hundreds that make Meetup a force that is changing this world for good.
Meetup.com, however, had some limitations, which I mentioned above, that we could not live with. Before I came to the Kerry campaign Josh Ross had already begun building a set of get local tools for Kerry. When they became fully functional, then we drove people to them instead of to Meetup.com.
We dropped Meetup.com so that we could have MORE meet-ups (with a small m). Not only MORE meet-ups, but also meet-ups any day of the month, in any venue, with any structure, and so on.
Meetup.com didn’t even allow supporters to have meetings in their homes. We were just fighting to be able to give the netroots the maximum flexibility. And so it feels very wrong to be yelled at for not supporting the netroots because we gave people better tools and stopped promoting a private company, albeit a great company.
If I remember correctly, Kerry had a maximum of 1,600 Meetup.com meet-ups in a single month, and most were very small. When we switched to our own volunteer center, we immediately had TENS OF THOUSANDS of self-organized events taking place every month. Many of these were fundraisers, and we blew away the record set by Dean for simultaneous house party fundraisers. But the majority were organizing meetings.
Plus: the number of Meetup.com meetups barely decreased. We didn’t kill Kerry Meetup.com, we just linked to our more flexible tools and not to Meetup.com from our site.
Everyone was so used to reading and writing about the Dean meetups that they kept looking at Kerry’s Meetup.com numbers and saying “Kerry is giving up on the netroots!” Well, it’s true that most of the Kerry campaign and Democratic establishment could not have cared less about getting supporters together in their homes and public meeting places. But on the Internet team we desperately cared about that and that is why we switched to our own tools, and organized 100 times more meetups as a result, building a far bigger movement.
(3) Zack is a Stalinist.
I keep getting criticized by Internet thinkers for being all top-down. The reason: I keep telling them that when it comes to campaigns (and only campaigns) they need to stop focusing on communication among supporters TO THE EXCLUSION of communication from the center.
What many forget is that the Dean campaign was driven by communication among supporters — but also by communication from the campaign to supporters. Call it “top down” if you must. Joe Trippi posted on the blog right alongside other supporters. But he also sent emails to his growing email list. And those emails spawned much more organizing and raised much more money than the Dean blog did. That is not to denigrate the blog. It’s just a numbers thing: not all 600,000 Dean email subscribers visited the blog every day. But they did check their email everyday. So Joe could reach more people by posting to the blog AND sending an email than by ONLY posting to the blog. I know that no one is saying campaigns shouldn’t email their supporters. But conventional wisdom of the web devalues that communication from the center. And I just think that it’s important for Democratic campaigns to get good at that.
(4) All Zack wanted was your money.
Now we’re getting to the good stuff. It is a valid criticism of the Kerry campaign that it missed an opportunity to really connect with a whole new world of political activists and build an incredible movement. I agree with that criticism — and I made it every day internally when I was at the campaign, as many irritated Kerry communications and finance people would confirm.
Though Mary Beth Cahill did work very closely with us to produce those emails, it was not the same as when Joe Trippi used the campaign emails (early in the Dean campaign) to really speak from the heart to supporters. We were one tier down from the actual heartbeat of the campaign at Kerry. It was a real problem. (But by the way, this became a problem at the Dean campaign too as the Governor became the front runner.)
So I don’t defend what was a real shortcoming of the campaign. And I won’t bore you with stories of failed but noble attempts by Josh Ross, Ari Rabin-Havt, David Thorne, Peter Daou, Tom Matzzie, Dick Bell, myself and others to get key players throughout the campaign to understand the enormous potential that was there. I’m just as frustrated with the Democratic establishment and Democratic Party culture as anyone. But I think that the problem is really more fundamental to the left and progressive movement as a whole. The left doesn’t really trust people, doesn’t really respect them. On progressive blogs, people have faith in their own slice of the culture, but not — in general — in the vast American people. Trippi does have that faith in the people, and that’s why the Dean campaign got a few things right online that made all the difference. But he’s a rare bird. What I’m saying is that I came to think that the real problem isn’t making Dems understand the Internet, but rather it’s a tougher problem of getting them to understand the American people.
Having said “you’re right” about the Kerry campaign’s failure to do it completely right, I have to say you’re wrong about a few things:
A) We didn’t only send fundraising emails. In fact, I think that we sent a lot more non-fundraising emails than Burlington did during the Dean campaign. We sent tons of emails asking people to: write letters to the editor, volunteer to be spokespeople locally and to tell us their stories of life under Bush (we built a 100,000+ searchable database of those stories), hold house parties and organizing meetings, and more. We signed up tens of thousands of volunteers for special groups such as the Media Corps (run by Amanda Michel formerly of the Dean campaign) and the Phone Corps, who’s job it was to call through our entire volunteer list in swing states using special tools to get people who weren’t responding to emails off their asses.
B) Thanks in large part to Tom Matzzie, who we pulled over from the AFL-CIO, we built the biggest and best organized Internet-driven field program ever. And this is what I mean by that: in the swing states, local organizers posted canvasses, phone banks and whatever using our get local tools, and we’d send out tons of email to people with the locations of their nearest volunteer opportunities. We also built, thanks to Josh Hendler (formerly of the Clark campaign), a volunteer phone banking system that allowed volunteers in non-swing states to make a big impact by calling and recruiting volunteers in swing states. We turned out — from our email list — from 50% to 90% of the volunteers in different cities and towns in the swing states. (You’re right, we didn’t do enough in non-swing states.)
C) While you may have found the fundraising emails annoying, they did in fact close the gap in spending between the Democrat and Republican for the first time in who knows how long. Those outgoing emails raised the VAST majority of the $122 million that our email list donated to Kerry and the DNC. If we had cut the volume of those fundraising emails in two, you would still be complaining and we would have left $50m or $60m on the table. It was entirely reasonable to believe that $50m could have made the difference in this election. So I totally stand by the decision that I and others made to go full on with the fundraising.
One thing to consider is that most people saw donating as one of the only ways — along with door knocking — to make a difference in the race. We were not always able to give people a direct connection to the heartbeat of the real campaign — and that was bad. But at least we were able to offer people a sincere way to make a difference in the campaign, and we reported back to them every week about what a huge difference they were making.
(5) Zack was behind “the God awful Kerry blog”.
Unfortunately, I can’t claim credit for the Kerry blog. It was run by Dick Bell and Peter Daou. I think they did the best job they could considering the distance from the real heart of the campaign that we were all operating at (as explained above). Our blog had some great moments — especially when Ari Rabin-Havt was posting from the road with Kerry, a short period when the site was actually connected in some way to the real campaign.
In closing, thanks for letting me set the record straight. There are some misdirected criticisms that I still haven’t answered, but I’ve gone on way too long.
I think this stuff is extremely important for 2006 and 2008. My plea is just for the “thinkers of the Internet” to stop treating campaigns as though they were online communities. Online communities are beautiful. And campaigns have many lessons to learn from them. However there are additional and separate rules and principles that apply to campaigning. Because Dems are so weak in so many areas, this isn’t an area where we can afford to let automatic acceptance of conventional wisdom trip us up.
