What's a Blog For?

I'm slowly coming back into the real world. I should be back to my normal schedule in the next day or two. Thanks so much to everyone who guest blogged for me. I've been reading the posts and they were fantastic. Here's my latest piece for MyDD. Also, a big welcome to Annie, our new intern.

Last weekend, I wrote about how the progressive youth movement – its organizations and its individual members – were disconnected from the progressive blogosphere. I got some pushback in the comments and elsewhere about that, with criticism generally raising two questions:

• Why do youth groups need to engage the blogosphere?
• How could existing youth org blogs change to make most effective use of the medium?

There’s no one answer to the first question. Not all youth orgs need to engage the blogs, and for different youth orgs, it would make sense to engage different types of blogs for different reasons. As Matt noted in the comments to my post last year, the blogosphere isn’t any one thing, and lumping all blogs in together and saying that “youth orgs need to know what’s going on” isn’t all that helpful. Reading the Daily Kos every day isn’t going to make our youth organizations or their members any more effective than they already are. There are many types of blogs written for a variety of purposes by a diverse range of people. Some of these will be helpful for youth orgs, some won’t.

The Young Democrats, for example, have chapters all over the country. Typically their work (canvassing and GOTVing young voters) is supportive of local candidacies, and often they work on local issues that can be aided by help from the broader progressive community in that area. It would make sense for local chapters to have their own blog (and in fairness, many of them do) that covered YDA Chapter X’s involvement in their local politics. It would make sense for that blog to be in dialogue with local blogs about local issues. There are partnerships to be formed there, local media narratives to change/establish, volunteers to be recruited, etc. And it’s a relationship that could go both ways, benefiting the local blogs, local progressives, and young progressives equally. Such a relationship would also help de-“ghettoize” youth politics, which is frequently siloed away from the activities of the "adults."

Another organization, The Roosevelt Institution, for instance, probably won’t care so much about what YDA is doing or about local candidates. But they’re probably very interested in what policy bloggers are talking about. Reading Ezra Klein, Max Sawicky, Brad DeLong, etc. would be instructional for a lot of RI’s aspiring policy wonks. In this case, the benefits are educational - reading the blogs and creating a forum for discussion on the organization’s own blog serves to educate all members about the intricacies of various policy issues. It will also probably increase their familiarity with the D.C. policy world.

I’m not going to run through each type of organization and what might work best, but there are clearly benefits to be gained for youth organizations to selectively engage the blogosphere based on their goals. The second question – how can existing blogs change to better serve their members and utilize the medium – is the more interesting one to me.

I see two ways that youth organizations can (more) effectively make use of their own blogs – by radically increasing the transparency of their organization and by creating connective tissue between the various bits and pieces of progressive youth organizing.

Transparency
Most nonprofit and political organizations are fairly opaque. Information about what is going on behind the scenes, what the national and/or paid staff actually does on a day to day basis, questions about the past, present, and future of the organization, details about long-term and short-term strategy: these are things that are not discussed on your average organizational website. That’s because we’re all trained to think that what we’re doing on a daily basis either isn’t news or is top secret and private. But radical transparency can offer organizations a number of benefits.

If the goal is to engage more young people in politics, transparency can give members greater feelings of ownership over the organization. It can help them understand what it takes to start/run/sustain a political or nonprofit organization. It can also protect against the potential fraud and abuse that Matt noted in his comments to my post last week. If an organization’s operations are out in the open – and everyone knows how and why you are pursuing certain projects or executing specific strategies – it is much more difficult to hide bad practices or “fake it.”

This applies to the membership as well. An excellent use of an organizational blog would be to highlight the best practices of your members (and on the flip side, deconstruct the failures, faux-pas and worst practices of the membership as well). If I’m thinking of starting a newspaper on campus, it would be great to go to Campus Progress and see folks who recently did so writing about the challenges they overcame, pitfalls they avoided (or stepped in), etc.

Breaking Silos
Another reason for youth organizations to maintain their own blog is to create a more self-aware, more connected progressive youth movement. Right now, I see very little connective tissue between the many different organizations that comprise progressive youth organizing. Don’t get me wrong – people link. There are innumerable “partner” pages filled with hyperlinks and some uninspiring language about leadership training or grassroots organizing. But let’s be honest – how many visitors to an organization’s website actually read those blurbs? Of that percentage, how many click through? Of that percentage how many actually become involved or take the time to learn and follow the workings of that “partner” organization? Probably not a lot.

Don't get me wrong, there are real partnerships. A number of organizations including Young People For, The League, USSA, Movement Strategies Center and the Center for Progressive Leadership participate in a partnership known as the Generational Alliance (not to be confused with the Next Generation Alliance). The alliance’s activities mainly consist of joint fundraising for each of their core competencies, but beyond that, it’s hard to know what they do. If you're a college student just signing up, you probably wouldn't know about them at all.

This isn’t to say that what they do is bad, it’s to say that their activities – their partnership and the movement they are building together – are not transparent. They’re not building a narrative together about the progressive youth movement, and they’re not presenting that larger narrative to their members. To be sure, there are overlaps in membership, and national staff move promising organizers between the various training programs and activities each group offers, but the lack of transparency means that new people coming in are de facto out of the loop. It’s not obvious how all the pieces are working together, or even what all the pieces are.

Creating transparency in the organization is the first step. The second step is to report on what other organizations are doing (which you will know because they will be reporting it on their blog) and how it fits with your own work. Build a larger narrative about how all the pieces of the progressive youth movement fit together, so that anyone – from newbie to veteran, Young Democrat to Young People For Fellow – can readily become aware of the diversity of organizations and opportunities available to them, and find the best place to learn and contribute.

For years now, Campus Progress has run a great series educating its members about the Right Wing. It should be just as easy to learn about the progressive (youth) movement. Blogs can help with that, and I think it'd be a worthwhile use of time and resources for our youth organizations.