The "Traditional Approach versus Organizing Approach" article below was on KERA "On The Media" article from Sunday evening 11/09/08 6:00-6:30pm describes precisely what we need to do to continue to organize after the election. To build a stronger voting community through the 2012 election. Interview with MARSHAL GANZ
My Observations
This On the Media, I'm Bob Garfield and I am Brooke Gladstone: (Interviewing Marshall Ganz) Gladstone This election also marks a breakthrough in the art of electioneering. Never before has a campaign so effectively merged old fashioned shoe leather politicking with the efficiency of web based social networking. It was, as Sara Lai Stirland wrote recently [Oct 29,2008] in Wired Magazine, the most sophisticated organizing apparatus of any presidential campaign in history. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/obamas-secret-w.html Take Florida, Obama's campaign far outspent McCain's in TV ads, Stirland noted, but equally important, it created 19,000 neighborhood teams directed by 500 paid organizers. That effort was replicated throughout the battle ground states with more than a million volunteers, according to the campaign. The hazard in fielding such a vast army is volunteer fatigue. But Marshall Ganz an experienced organizer, devised a way to combat that. He helped develop a website to recruit and share information. And a weekend training program called Camp Obama where volunteers created brief personal narratives to drive their message home. But Ganz says the real breakthrough wasn't in the tactics at all. It was in the whole approach to campaigning. The traditional marketing approach versus real organizing. Ganz. In the traditional approach to field work in a campaign, you hire a bunch of staff, you send them going door to door or you put them on telephones and you pay them to contact voters and identify who is for or who is against you. And you keep doing that over and over again until you turn them out on election day. The organizing approach, is that you hire full time people, train them to be organizers and their job is to recruit leaders from from local communities, bring them together and equip them and train them to work together to reach out to their neighbors the other people that live in the community, the voters themselves. Gladstone So describe how the internet gets brought into this process and supercharges it? Ganz. The way the internet facilitates this process. First, of all it makes it easier for people to let the campaign know they [the people] want to help. Secondly, it makes it easier for the campaign to communicate with them [the people] about opportunities for them to become involved. Thirdly, it allows local groups access to the kind of information (i.e. highly targeted voter lists) that they can use in their work so that their work becomes much more effective. Gladstone. In other words, they can learn which voters will be open to their message and which voters are basically lost? Ganz. Well eventually, but I mean initially, lets say I am in [a] precinct in Manhattan I would start with a list of Democrats and I would start contacting them. Now, the response to that would go into the voter file. And so gradually a profile would be developed on everyone. And who is for us and who is not and whose concerns are this and whose are that which then allows us to go back to them and persuade them in other ways and eventually identify who our people are. But what's different is; because its all a single database, people can coach these teams. They can see how well they are doing. They can see when they are not doing well. And it makes the whole operation transparent. So the transparency then, makes it possible to be much more effective. Gladstone. Haven't the Republicans been using voter list and this kind of data crunching for, you know, for many elections. How is this different? Ganz. Everybody has been using it. The difference here is that a whole tier of volunteer leadership were cut into the action in this campaign. No one has ever done that before. At our first training in Los Angeles where we said "look you are going to have access to all this stuff because you are part of the campaign". [This] blew people away. "What, we're actually going to be able to. . ." "Yes". So there was a level of empowerment of volunteer leadership at the local level that is a theme that has run all through this campaign. And that's why you see the responsibility, the enthusiasm the creativity. And that's why when the campaign is over, as it is now, this isn't going to go away. Gladstone. Tell us about Camp Obama. I know that rather than memorizing Obama talking points, people who went for training learned how to build personal narratives; the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now. Ganz. What we helped them understand is that the first thing they need to learn is how to articulate their own story. In other words, what is it that moved them to become involved and engaged? Because it is from their own story that they're going to be able to most effectively engage others. So when people leave, they leave equipped to do that. That's sort of the foundational piece. And in the initial series in California, we launched 200 teams in two weekends. That uh with the support of four staff people, built that operation out there that to the point where it could make 100,000 phone calls a day. This is like an investment in civic assets in local communities that no political campaign has done for years. The Right benefited from being rooted in social movements which do this because that's what social movements do. They translate values into action. They bring people in to work together. But on the Progressive side everybody had become marketeers. Everybody had been marketing their cause or marketing their candidate as if it was another bar of soap. Transforming people from citizens into customers. What we did was bring the citizenship back in and put the people back in charge. And then put the tools in their hands. Gladstone. Marshall thank you very much. Ganz. All right thanks very much, Gladstone. Marshall Ganz is a lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. And he helped design organizational systems for the Barack Obama campaign.
Thanks,
Jim Burke
This is so I won't forget. "Excuse Joey!" and "Excuse Colin!" Read the Washington Post story and see the picture. It brought tears of happy laughter to my eyes. I think you too would get smile from this.
Barack Obama is very clever and on top of things and an angel to respond in the way he did.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/23/AR2008042303679.html?hpid=topnews
We are hardworking Barack Obama volunteers for the states. Charged up and ready to go! Ready to change the United States of America. We work hard to convince our friends in each state to vote for Barack. Our tasks are many and are far from complete. We still have an opportunity to help these states and these territories to create a wonderful vision for our future. Hello; Pennsylvania, hello Guam, hello Indiana, hello North Carolina, hello West Virginia, hello Kentucky, hello Oregon, hello Puerto Rico, hello Montana, and hello South Dakota we care and we are calling!
State and National Conventionsn. Next we will work for delegates for our State and National Convention. To help Barack Obama become the nominee. We work now on building bridges with our honorable friends who currently support Hillary Clinton.
Longer bridges. Next we work to build even longer, even higher bridges with Republicans. For a better United States of America in November.
But after the election Tuesday November 4 and after Inauguration January 20, 2009; Quo Vadis? We will not and cannot fade away. The great and and wonderful team of Obama supporters are even more important. We worked for the election. Now we work for the change. Barack Obama will ask us to help him rebuild our country. We must be ready for that call. We will work to convince key people in each area of change to create new solutions that reinforce Barack Obama's plan for America: "The Blueprint for Change".
So all, myself included especially, work hard and happy. Its for a better United States Of America. And a little bit of a better world for all of us. Every day brings this closer.
Barack Rocks, Jim Burke
