Outreach

by Seth Pearce, Living Liberally

This week Living Liberally launched Praying Liberally, our new network of local liberal meetups of progressives from a wide range of faiths to talk politics, say a collective prayer for "the least of these" in our world, and build community to organize around our common causes.

Since Monday, when Praying Liberally launched over at Street Prophets and got some mention on Daily Kos and Hullabaloo, we've gotten several requests to start new chapters, many from Boomers, some who've said they felt too 'old' for the Drinking Liberally crowd, which is fine. Different Liberallies appeal different people. But we still haven't gotten any requests from millennials.

This leads us to ask: is Praying Liberally just for the Boomers? Will the religious left die out?

It doesn't have to.

With interest in religion and spirituality rising on college campuses, and the fact that the millennial generation is one of the most liberal ever, the community potential is there.

Plus, The fact is there are many progressive religious youth orgs, such as Mitzvah Corps, that get young people engaged in social justice and other progressive causes.

But unlike conservative religious youth groups, progressive ones don't usually self-identify in ways that would explicitly denote them as progressive organizations. Also, these groups haven't formed solid coalitions with the progressive movement, and in that they fail to act as a legitimate gateway for youth into the progressive movement. Introducing youth involved with religious programs into the greater movement was one of the Religious Right's key skills as they grew their power in the last decades of the 20th century.

The progressive movement needs to build connections with these progressive religious youth groups through more liberal faith communities such as the United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalist and Episcopalian churches, and the Reform and Reconstructionist Jewish movements. As well as the younger, more liberal generation of church-goers at traditionally conservative churches.

This relationship between "Church" and Progressive Movement could provide us with great new leaders, who like Barack Obama, would come to the progressive movement through their faith community. It could also infuse these religious organizations with new energy, connecting young people to faith in new ways and expanding the opportunities offered to them by their religious community as they see their church, synagogue, mosque or temple becoming more connected with their everyday lives.

But for now, while we try to convince the progressive movement to get involved with this kind of outreach, are there any millennials out there who want to start a Praying Liberally chapter?

Cross posted at MyDD and DailyKos. Recs. appreciated.

The Democratic Strategist has an interesting piece in this month's issue on how the Democrats can capture the partisanship of the "MySpace Generation."

From an historical standpoint, its a great article. Lots of information about partisan ID of young voters between 1976 and 2006. Watching the youth vote swing from Democrat, to heavy Republican, and back again is fascinating (yes - in the 1980's, the Republicans owned the youth vote). It also reiterates a few key points that have been made before on Future Majority:

• Most political activity by youth comes through contact with nonprofits, not the Democratic Party
• A lot of the progressive swing we are seeing among young voters is do to Bush and the war, and may evaporate post 2008. There is no Millennial Ideology with which Democrats can forge a longterm connection with young voters.
• We are approaching the first of many thirds, but partisanship is not yet a lock, even among this first wave of Millennials. This is a rolling process that must continue beyond any one election.

At the end of the article, the authors pose a series of questions asking how Democrats can reach out to and capture the partisanship of the Millennial Generation. Here are my answers to those questions, as well as a question of my own that I pose to the authors:

I've been skeptical of the value of Second Life - as both a type of social network and more particularly as a campaign resource - for quite a while. It's never struck me as a place that is highly populated by a desirable audience that isn't reachable as part of another, larger (or niche) audience. And I've never seen the real value in it as anything other than a novelty.

Social Web guru Clay Shirky is putting stats to that claim. Any campaign interested in pursuing a Second Life strategy should read his recent article dissecting the hype that surrounds Second Life.

If we think of a user as someone who has returned to a site after trying it once, I doubt that the number of simultaneous Second Life users breaks 10,000 regularly. If we raise the bar to people who come back for a second month, I wonder if the site breaks 10,000 simultaneous return visitors outside highly promoted events.

Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand. Were the press to shift to reporting Recently Logged In as their best approximation of the population, the number of reported users would shrink by an order of magnitude; were they to adopt industry-standard unique users reporting (assuming they could get those numbers), the reported population would probably drop by two orders. If the growth isn't as currently advertised (and it isn't), then the value from scarcity is overstated, and if the value of scarcity is overstated, at least one of the engines of growth will cool down.

If campaigns really want to get into this game, I'd suggest they figure out a way to into the other MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. The number of real users is astronomically higher, the bonds between users are knit into tighter communities, and there's probably a lot more fertile ground to be tilled.

Last week I wrote about a new study suggesting that social networking users were starting to skew much older and that this trend should be accounted for and studied when groups like NPI, CIRCLE, and Young Voter Strategies studied the uses of social networks in the 2006 campaign cycle.

That study is now being called into question.

ComScore’s methodology is also being questioned: they use software installed on computers to track usage, and it’s being suggested that teens won’t necessarily log out of their parent’s accounts before going to social networks. That could skew the data for all the sites: Friendster, Xanga, MySpace and Facebook.

Mostly the trends still hold - each of the Big 4 sites skew to a different demographic:

The general trend, however, seems to be that Xanga skews very young, Facebook is more popular with college students, Friendster is more of a grown up site (20 and 30 year olds) and lots of parents are visiting MySpace (although not necessarily signing up).

As I said in my original post, young people really are still the targets for campaigns, and the initial motivation for going on these sites. But it will be interesting to see if any of the research groups can figure out what the demographics look like for social networking users who actually did something for a campaign - whether that means inviting more friends, spreading the word on other networks, or something more traditional like volunteering or donating.

Last week Mike pointed to a new publication released by CIRCLE and Young Voter Strategies. The paper that they released, titled What Works: Getting Young Voters to the Polls (PDF). When I first read the study I was pretty focused on the parts having to do with the value of face-to-face/personalized contact, the cost effective nature of youth outreach, as well as the finding that when it comes to getting young people to the polls, the medium is more important then the message (in other words, contacting voters increases voting equally, no matter what the message is). Yesterday I was reading the blog of Peter Levine, Director of CIRCLE, and while reading his post which discusses the Young Voter Guide I found this passage:

3. Despite repeated efforts to find more effective messages, it appears that the medium matters, not the message. For example, if you organize a phone bank, it doesn't matter whether your callers use positive or negative scripts, simply provide information, or invoke civic duty. I find this a strange result, because calling someone is a communicative act, and I would think that what is communicated would matter. But perhaps the very fact that people are contacted makes them feel valued and encourages them to vote.

I asked Peter to clarify whether any of these studies also looked at how people vote, and he responded that the measure that these studies used was voting, and voting only. None of these studies looked at either how the message or messengers effected the way that the people who got to the polls voted. This has important implications for outreach campaigns, and may indicate why the efforts of America Coming Together and the other big outreach groups failed to lead to a Democratic victory in 2006. It also ads some ammunition to the controversy brewing over the horrendous behavior of PIRG clone Grassroots Campaign, Inc. and the other for-profit "progressive" human resource firms. How so? Find out after the jump...

A conversation began on this blog a few weeks ago about the effectiveness of Music for America's model for reaching and activating young voters. It started here, with a segment of Alex's thesis devoted to his experience volunteering with MFA in 2004. Both MFA's executive and communications directors posted replies to Alex. It continued here, in a response Alex wrote. In the comments section, a conversation evolved between Alex, myself, and Mark Ristaino, MFA's current communications director, about the problems with MFA's organizational model and execution (disclosure - I'm MFA's founding communications director but have not officially worked at the organization for over a year and a half, though I do give advice occasionally).

This is an important conversation. MFA has a list of 70,000 young voters. They've been present at over 4,000 music events since October 2003 and registered approximately 20,000 young voters. No other organization dedicated to engaging Millenials/"Echo-Boomers" is more integrated within the fabric of youth culture and touches so many people on a nightly basis.

Yet in many ways the organization is dysfunctional. There are problems with the volunteer process, little cohesion to MFA as a movement, and for many volunteers it is a dead-end, providing no way to move further into the ranks of the progressive movement. As a result, to quote Mark "employees and young activists and partner bands start to get disillusioned with politics due to MFA."

This post is an effort to keep this conversation going. As I noted above, MFA is uniquely positioned to reach young voters in the 2008 Presidential cycle. Parts of it are broken, but I hope that it is fixable. Below the jump I've summarized the conversation thus far, and I invite readers to contribute their own ideas. We have a rare chance here to openly discuss with the current leadership of MFA ways to correct the course of the organization well in advance of 2008, when once again MFA could have a significant impact on the outcome of the election.

As Alex noted in his thesis, this is not meant to as an attack on Music for America or any of the other groups that worked extremely hard during the election, but a critical critique of the problems people face when they attempt to become more involved. If we are to regain majority status in this nation we have to look at ourselves with extremely critical eyes.

Join the conversation.

An Op-Ed from Jane Eisner, "vice president for civic initiatives of the National Constitution Center, a Philadelphia museum, and the author of Taking Back the Vote: Getting American Youth Involved in Our Democracy," takes on the topic of turning out young voters. Eisner gets it right in some respects:

How many times did George W. Bush or John Kerry mention young people in accepting their parties' nomination for president? Bush twice briefly, Kerry not at all.

The electoral process doesn't outright exclude young voters anymore, though some structural obstacles do exist. Instead, the political process ignores them. And a well-documented, 30-year decline in civic education in and outside the classroom has left many in this generation ill-informed about the role and accomplishments of government, and ill-versed in the skills of citizenship.

Eisner is right that the major political parties and the candidates didn't talk to young voters. I remember at one point hearing about Kerry's "college tour." The topics of his speech were medicare and social security. His college appearances weren't about speaking to his audience or young voters nationally, they were short-sightedly about combating the current media cycle. And she's right that many young people don't know what government is good for or what it has done for them. Although I'd argue that this is true of most Americans, and is not so much due to the lack of civics classes as the work of 30 years of conservative framing and the failure of the mainstream media to properly report on the role of government.

As for the rest of her piece; it's terrible. The tone speaks down to her core audience - the young people she is looking to activate - and instead looks to score points with journalists or older activists by repeating old memes about the superficiality and fickleness of young voters. After throwing out the tired stat that more people voted for American Idol than the President (not true - American Idol only received 35 million viewers according to Nielson, and voters were allowed to vote repeatedly - can we please put this idea to rest?), her proposed solution neglects both political reality and the nature of the cultural touchstone around which her piece is based.

More after the jump.

Via Political Wire I find this Time Magazine blurb about FaceBook:

In the '90s, the message was "Rock the Vote." Now it's time to "Facebook" it. Starting in September, politicians will be able to buy profiles on networking site Facebook.com accessible to its 8 million members. That should help pols court a group of voters who are hard to reach. Facebookers will be able to "friend" any candidate they like--linking to a profile as they would a classmate's. Facebook says politicians won't pay anything near the tens of thousands of dollars that corporate advertisers do to set up on the site. Politicians should log on, says Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos politiblog, because young people "hang out in places like ... Facebook and MySpace," which plans a similar initiative. They're the new town square--great for any candidate who can figure out the online equivalent of a handshake.

This is a good thing. I'm sure there are positive effects of closing off some of these communities - limiting entry to those from select colleges makes FaceBook more intimate (and in some respects trustworthy). But I've been wondering - especially in light of all the talk about regulating access to online communities (the pedophile argument) - how (and if) politicians and well-meaning non profits will be able to gain access to the younger audiences who are a part of social networking communities.

The one potential downside I can see to FaceBook's anouncement is pricing. Despite their claim that politicians won't need to pay exorbitant sums, it may be that nonprofits with small budgets, or local candidates, will still be shut out due to the price of entry. That is, if non profits can get access at all. It's not clear if they can or will be let in on this deal at any point in the future.

But on the face of it, I like this. If I was a member/user of FaceBook, my main worry would be that this would clog the community with bad political spam. But most politicians won't take advantage of this opportunity, and an even greater amount won't do it right. And the whole point of these social networking sites is that you can choose who is in your network. So I don't see this as a huge problem. And anything that can get politicians and younger voters interact with each other outside conventional political vehicles is a good thing. More on this later.