Political Marketing
Civic Tech
Other Stuff
Sanders’ team has — honing a strategy of turning “slacktivists” who don’t normally engage in grass-roots politics into an advance team capable of doing everything from managing phone banks to planning high-level campaign events. As of early April, his tens of thousands of networked volunteers had made 47 million phone calls, putting them on track to surpass the calls made by Obama’s operation during the entire 2012 election cycle.
Source: Politico
The power of digital organizing can be seen in just a few short years. Mauree Turner, who led an inspiring campaign to become the first publicly non-binary elected official and Muslim member of Oklahoma's legislature.
The power of social media is undeniable. When Mauree Turner needed help with her campaign, she used a digital organising suite called Impactive and it proved instrumental in helping her win. The volunteers on this campaign sent peer-to-peer and friend-to-friend texts to 10,000+ people and it was these conversations that helped secure the victory for Turner.
Ed Markey (Democratic Party) ran for re-election to the U.S. Senate to represent Massachusetts. He won in the general election on November 3, 2020. His current term ends on January 3, 2027.
<aside> ⚡ The Ed Markey Political Campaign Check it out
</aside>
You can read the full article in The Atlantic here
Lessons Learned on Embracing the Chaos, Organizing to Win, and Building a Movement in this New Era
Read this inspiring and generous share from Emma Friend
Director of Distributed Campaigning for the Ed Markey Campaign
<aside> ⚡ Check out The Markey Organising Model 👉 Here
</aside>
Digital organizing is anything online that gets people to engage around a cause and, ideally, take an action. This can be as simple as getting someone to retweet in support of Ed, or for our purposes, using an online platform to get people signed up for offline action.
<aside> ⚡ What can we learn from this? Ed Markey’s 2020 Senate re-election campaign leaned into relational organizing from the start and found success under one key principle: Keep it simple, silly. Read Emma's generous share 👉 here
</aside>
This new image for Markey is the culmination of an unlikely alliance between a passionate, web-savvy group of young supporters and the official campaign. It’s a simple relationship in the internet age: Each helps the other go viral.
While the campaign amplifies the students’ memes, the Gen Z fans convert some of that online energy into real-world organizing, sending likers and retweeters links to campaign sign-up sheets. And the campaign leans into the groundswell of youth energy, crafting an image of Markey as a veteran radical in sneakers, somewhere between ironic and iconic.
Source: Politico
Start here: online community monitor/greeters, run by our Slack moderator Sam Delgado. Volunteers come for the cause, but stay for the people, so it’s imperative to create a strong sense of community online — especially in the isolation of a pandemic. It’s in your best interest to make your Slack an effective, joyful space that volunteers want to keep coming back to again and again. Under Sam’s leadership, our Slack grew to an active community of over 2,500 volunteers!
Relational chasers, established by Annie Horowitz and run by Katie Hayden. Responsible for following up with all the active users of our relational tool, and coaching them through continuing their outreach to their networks or following up with their networks to turn them out to vote. We recommend this tactic, and found much better engagement and conversion from this personal touch than from an email or text message reminder
<aside> ⚡ Check out the Markey Relational Chaser Guide 👉 Here
</aside>
****Meeting people where they are means finding ways to engage with them on every online platform and digital community possible.
Follow-up with our relational organizers is essential to making sure they are actually having those important conversations, and entering them into their supporter pages! By going through the steps on this document, you’ll ensure that as many of our volunteers as possible are reaching their outreach goals, and securing those votes for Ed!
The most important thing to remember is to thank your volunteers, and make sure they know how important their work is to our campaign. Volunteers are the ones who will push Ed to victory on September 1st; by making them feel valued and empowered, you’ll be making our campaign stronger than ever! And remember- just as they are responsible for their list, you are responsible for this person
<aside> ⚡ Checklist:
</aside>
You will get your list of relational volunteers from X person in our team.
You will be able to see their progress, including how many people they’ve signed up, the names of those people, and how many people strongly support/lean support markey.
Once on the phone, pull up your relational volunteer’s list and talk them through it, to make sure that, among the Ed supporters on their list, they have made sure everyone has either dropped off their mail-in-ballot or has a plan to early vote.
Second/final followup:
[If YES]:
[If Unsure]:
[If YES]:
[If YES]: