Canvassing

Yoink. Stolen from Loaded Orygun. The Oregon Bus Project's innovative "Trick or Vote" canvassing program is going national this year:

While ghouls and goblins roam the streets, volunteers in 21 cities and 12 states will distribute voter guides and vote reminders in what will be the nation’s largest non-partisan get-out-the-vote canvass.

Trick-or-Vote is going nationwide this year with the help of youth advocacy partners like 18 in ’08, Rock the Vote, United States Student Association, League of Young Voters, Forward Montana, New Mexico Youth Organized, New Era Colorado, Washington Bus, Change the Game and Generation Vote. “What’s the one day of the year we culturally are ready for a knock on the door?” asks Trick-or-Vote National Coordinator, Alex Aronson. “Halloween conveniently falls a few days before the election every year. You may be too old to trick-or-treat, but you’re never too old to trick-or-vote.”

The Best Way on the Best Day: Studies show that face-to-face contact is the most effective method to boost voter turnout—increasing participation by as much as 8–12% (“Getting Out the Youth Vote: Results from Randomized Field Experiments,” by Donald Green & Alan Gerber, Yale University, 2001), and nonpartisan contacts further increase the likelihood of electoral participation. “It’s important that we engage young volunteers,” explains Bus Project Executive Director Jefferson Smith, “Not left, not right, but forward.”

That's awesome. It's so great to see a best practice like Trick or Vote move outside the organization that spawned it and become a nation-wide best practice for youth outreach. Halloween is the one day of the year that people expect to have strangers knocking on their door. And who can resist earnest young volunteers in costume encouraging you to go to the polls? If you and your organization aren't already using Trick or Vote in your neighborhood, it's time to hop on that bandwagon.

The author prepares for Trick or Vote in 2007

Pop Quiz Time:

1. What is the single most effective way to mobilize voters?
   a) Visibilities
   b) Sitting on a couch and bitching
   c) Talking to ‘em face-to-face
2. What holiday always immediately precedes Election Day and has a built-in tradition of door-knocking?
   a) Halloween
   b) The 4th of July
   c) Festivus
3. What does everyone love?
   a) Rick Rolling
   b) Costumes!
   c) Voting
   d) All of the above

All of us who work in the field of youth engagement face big competition. The biggest competition we face – for volunteers, for attention – is not from one another’s organizations either. It’s from the Wii (which is sweet) and the bar scene and friends and loved ones. Our biggest challenge is overcoming that noise and building a politics that is fun and exciting and relevant to people’s lives.

That’s what makes Trick or VoteTM so freaking sweet. It’s the Best Way on the Best Day.

It’s actually such a sweet idea it doesn’t even really need an explanation. But here it is in a nutshell: Get some people who are a bit too old to trick or treat (go as young as high school and as old as the retirement home for your recruitment), rally ‘em in costume, meet in a centralized location, train these folks to canvass effectively, and knock some doors.

In short, we combine a cultural more (knock doors on Halloween) with hard-minded political research (knocking doors is an effective voter mobilization tool).

The result?

• More volunteers. In Portland in 2004, 850 canvassers assembled for the largest mass canvass in the history of the state. By all accounts, this year will be even bigger.
• More virgin volunteers. Out of that same crowd in Portland, more than one-in-three were first-time political volunteers who came out of the woodwork for a program well-suited to help our fellow citizens lose their voter virginity.
• More conversations. On Halloween evening, people are home – either waiting for trick-or-treaters or getting ready for their parties. They’re even prepared to open the door. And they’re definitely ready to engage in a conversation. All of which means that we don’t just hit more doors, we hit more doors in a more effective manner.
• More voters. Do the math -- more canvassers, more conversations, and more doors? More people are hitting the polls.

The Bus Federation wants to take Trick or VoteTM national this year – and we can do it with your help. If you’re part of a local or national organization that is serious about doing Trick or VoteTM, get in touch soon so we can coordinate our efforts. Contact Alex Aronson at the Oregon Bus Project @ 503-233-3018.

Just looking for a project for the fall and think you could pull off a kick-ass Trick or Vote in your hometown? Or even just want to assemble 15 of your closest friends and friends-of-friends and friendly-friends-of-friends’-friends and go hit some doors? Drop us a line. I swear to you, you’ll be glad you did.

Major props, by the way, to our friends at the Bus for this innovative program -- Trick or Vote is their brainchild.

Answers to the pop quiz: 1-b, 2-c, 3-a

Matt Singer is the CEO of Forward Montana, dedicated to training, mobilizing, and electing a new generation of progressive leaders. Forward Montana is a charter (get it?) organization of the Bus Federation.

I'm still working on finishing UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity. It's a disorienting read. I expected it to be about how young evangelicals were transforming the political direction of the church with their focus on environmentalism and poverty. Instead, it's a full-throated study of Christianity's negative brand and proposals for fixing it. As such, there's a lot of information about what evangelicals "do wrong" in their attempt to bring new people to the faith, and there is a lot of discussion of new best practices that should be adopted to make Christianity more appealing to young people. Some of those new best practices can be transferred to our work in registering voters.

In a chapter entitled "Get Saved!," the authors note that many young people today view evangelism of the Christian faith as a transactional encounter, not a spiritual one. In other words, evangelists are only interested in the raw numbers - in getting as many converts as they can, not in the quality of the conversion or the concerns/experiences of the individual.

A lot of the times, this is the experience of young people with voter registration and issue-canvassing organizations. It is a transaction, not a conversation. We're interested in the numbers - voters registered, voters turned out. I know that I certainly feel that way when talking to street canvassers. Even if I do sign their petition, very rarely do I walk away with good feelings or any kind of connection to the organization or its cause.

This comes into sharp focus when we encounter someone who is already registered. If you are focused on the numbers, and registering the most new voters, the impulse is to move on and give them as little of your time as possible. This isn't necessarily wrong, but it does have it's own negative consequences.

I was discussing this with the folks at the Oregon Bus Project, who agreed that it was a problem. Because when you give that already registered person short shrift, or when you cut short a conversation with someone you do register, you are doing two things. First, you are devaluing that person's concerns and cutting off potential increased participation by that person. Second, you are sending the message that your organization doesn't really care about them beyond their role in meeting your voter registration goals.

The solution might be as simple as some rewarding those folks with swag, giving them an extra minute of your time, or invitations to a local event like Drinking Liberally where they can have that more substantive conversation (and hopefully become a member of your org). It might even be as simple as something cheesy like a "gold star" rewarding them for already being registered.

We're in the midst of the planning season for the 2008 General Election. It would be good for all progressive organizations to think not only of how they can contact and register the most voters, but how they can make those contacts of a higher quality.

It has been more than six months since I last wrote about this subject. Recent events warrant an epilogue of sorts.

The Fund for Public Interest Research (FFPIR, or 'the Fund,' as it is commonly known) deploys thousands of canvassers each year onto streets and at doors to raise money for dozens of liberal non-profit organizations. Its 'sister' company, Grassroots Campaigns Inc (GCI), has major contracts with the DNC, the ACLU, MoveOn, and the League of Conservation Voters.

The Fund is also being sued by a class of its former employees for systemic labor infractions.

Now before we really dive in here, it's important to establish two more facts.

1. FFPIR has already been found in violation of labor law by the California State Labor Commission. You can find the Commission's ruling here (in PDF).

2. Soon after the canvasser class action suit was filed, the Fund changed its labor policies. Reportedly, the policies now ensure that all canvassers get paid at least minimum wage, plus overtime for all hours of work over 40 a week. The policies now ensure its employees have a half hour lunch break, and short breaks during the day. All additional "campaign work" is now made explicitly clear to be volunteer. (Maggie Mead broke this news yesterday, but as they say, she buried the lede.)

It is good to know that the largest direct fundraising apparatus on the Left now adheres to fundamental labor laws. Of course, the sudden and explicit establishment of these policies is also a tacit admission that for many years--up to two decades or more--the largest employer on the Left has been breaking these laws.

How could this have happened for so long?

What does it mean for the future of these organizations?

In this piece, I am going to posit some answers to those questions. If you want to learn more about the Fund's operation, about the story of the canvassers who demanded change to it and ultimately filed suit, or about the for-profit sister Grassroots Campaigns Inc, please look to the reporting I did last year on MyDD and DailyKos.

It took me a while to pick up on this whole Facebook business, but when I finally did... WOO what a blast! While it lasted anyway.

See, not so long after I logged on for the first time, Facebook shut down my account.
But I don't hold it against them. I wasn't playing by their rules -- it's fair, and it's square.
So I got some explaining to do.

Now, I was virtually dragged into Facebook--and when I finally joined it, it wasn't just to post silly pictures and update my status. I joined to organize.

I was organizing a group of people who have been institutionally exploited for years, but who have not previously had any viable way to speak up for themselves. This group is comprised of young, progressive activists--fellow veterans of the Fund for Public Interest Research, Public Interest Research Groups, and Grassroots Campaigns Incorporated.

SOME BACKGROUND!

The Fund, PIRGs, and GCI are interconnected organizations that run fundraising canvasses for a huge chunk of the progressive world. Veterans of these organizations have taken to the internet before to call for change to their notorious labor conditions, and there were a number of groups on Facebook that had already been started in protest of their policies. But these were just scattered outbursts of frutration leading nowhere. The organizers needed organizing.

If I may say so myself, I was good at organizing my fellow veterans. I have many years of experience as an "organizer" for the Fund and GCI; I'd worked in every town, I'd worked on every campaign. I'd trained hundreds of people and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, lied to my staff about how our campaigns worked, fired people for any old reason just to get rid of them, and taught young idealists to think about grassroots activism in terms of cold, inhuman numbers. And when the situations arose, I busted up the early formations of what could have become a...shhh...union. Eventually it all reached a certain point when I stopped to think about it all and decided that no, this isn't how a progressive movement is built, and yes, I was finally pissed off.

Yes, I announced on my new Facebook profile, I am still pissed off. There's a lot to be pissed off about.

See, over the course of the second half of 2006, I'd watched with budding interest as some of these GCI and Fund veterans turned to the blogosphere to expose these practices and explain how they are harmful to the progressive movement. I'd watched with even more interest as they were dismissed, derided, and demeaned by defenders of the Fund and GCI. But the defenders always lost the argument. Many of them even ended up agreeing with the protesters in the end. I did as well. The point was very much made: these organizations, the ones I'd sacrificed years of my life for, were hurting the progressive grassroots. Not because they were staffed by bad people; but because they were being led by a handful of prideful, fearful, haughty leaders who retain power under the dangerous condition of being simultaneously out of touch and wholly unaccountable.

Almost every single person I knew, inside the organization and out, had been personally burned by this crisis of leadership - whether they were willing to admit to it or not. Now that it was all being blogged about in public, people openly wondered whether anything could ever be done to fix the system.

Eventually, the blog posts died down. My friends in PIRG and GCI pretended they didn't exist any more. If the posts were ever brought up, they were quickly dismissed as the delusional rantings of a rabid few losers in pajamas.

And yet, the unrest continued to brew. People kept reading the blog posts and spreading the word among themselves. This year, a group of canvassers from the Fund filed a class action lawsuit seeking to recover unpaid wages. A group from GCI sought to do the same thing. They needed to spread the word and recruit others.

And so I was selected to go to the place where the people were: Facebook.

Tired of discussions about whether progressive campaigns are "working" or not? Worn out from the protests of would-be progressive activists who feel like their commitment has been disrespected and soured? Exhausted by the effort of having to respond to each new argument carefully and with consideration for what could be done better?

We can help!

We'll teach you how to suppress discussion of campaign mismanagement in eight easy steps. Soon suppressing discussion will be so easy, you'll never again have to actually think about the way your campaigns are run!

Especially designed for your online needs!

Maybe you're experienced in this sort of thing through face-to-face arguments. (You probably know, then, how easy it is to deal with such a situation: question your opponent's commitment to the cause, say "I just don't think you're a good fit for this campaign," and get them outta there!) Maybe you're new to the online world, and baffled by this chaotic new medium. This guide is just for you! Whether you're a baby troll or an experienced flame warrior, we can teach the best way to make your online environment a safe, friendly, hierarchically-stable place. Soon the World Wide Web will be your home away from home — and like your home, the people who run your campaigns will be totally unaccountable for their actions!

It's easy!

Just follow the steps below in order.

After a successful day of canvassing, a group of idealistic young progressives gather together and cheer their hard day's labor in service to The Movement. "This is what democracy looks like!" they cheer before heading off to their mandatory socialization period.

The chant reeks of pure earnestness and energy, both of which I, too, possessed during my brief stint as a canvasser for NYPIRG the summer after college, but in Dana Fisher's new book, the scene is tragically ironic. If Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns is Strangling Progressive Politics in America tells us anything, it is that this is not what democracy looks like. And it is not what progressive politics should look like either.

I sat down with Dana Fisher for a Podcast a few weeks ago to talk about the book and her findings.

Click to download the complete podcast (35 minutes)

Part I - History of Canvassing
Part II - Young People: Cogs in the Machine
Part III - 2004, A Post-Mortem
Part IV - Solutions, The Field Infrastructure of Life

Dr. Fisher has agreed to come on the website and respond to your comments, so please leave any questions or observations you have in the comments section. If this works out, our future podcasts will have a "call for questions" beforehand to incorporate into the Podcast Q&A. I'll apologize upfront for my lack of interviewing skills. If you think I missed something, or didn't drill down enough . . . well . . . you know what to do.

A review (and a handy chart) after the jump.

I came onto Music for America’s forums to tell their Communications Director, Mike Connery, about the research that I had done, and to try and see if they’d be willing to help me apply it.

My idea was to create a multi-media CD that would replicate the agenda-setting and priming effects that Iyengar had demonstrated. I thought that if we could convince, trick, or bribe young people to take a look at a CD that contained multimedia relevant to the campaign, that we could have a huge effect on youth turnout. MfA had a huge outreach operation, was extremely well funded, and I thought that it had the ability, if it desired, to get such CDs into the hands of tens of thousands of young people.

Mike wasn’t convinced. He challenged me to justify a project on the scale I was talking about, forced me to consider production time and cost, and pushed me to solidify my ideas on how something like this could work. He did not dismiss me, even though he had never met me and didn’t know me at all. He engaged me, he challenged me, and he encouraged me to continue on, which I did.

Mike had two main criticisms of my ideas.