communications

I'm still decompressing from my wedding/honeymoon and getting my house (figurative and literal) in order. It will probably take me a couple days to fully get back in to the swing of things after two weeks off the grid. In the meantime, here' a Quick Hits(ish) post. Expect a lot of these for the next couple of days as I get back on my feet.

• Here's an interesting chart delineating the proper uses of twitter in a variety of business/activist settings. Colin Delaney of ePolitics also has some interesting things to say about the proper uses of Twitter.

• Erica Williams deftly explains the power of good messaging in a policy fight.
• At Mother Jones, Michael Silberman offers yet another look at how online tools helped put Obama over the top.
• 5 elements of a successful Facebook fan page.
• Front Line Leaders Academy, a project of PFAW and the Young Elected Officials Network, is accepting applications for their 2009 class.
• Secretary Clinton has announced plans for a second Alliance of Youth Movements Summit. The goals of the summit are to help youth use online tools to fight oppression, and win over hearts and minds around the world.
• CIRCLE has released a slide show of data about non-college youth:

• Open Left and Daily Kos' microgrants program is up and running. Go read the rules and submit your idea.
• For those looking for summer opportunities in politics, check out the New Organizing Institute's Summer Boot Camp.

Following up further on establishing a better communications apparatus for youth organizers, I wanted to point everyone to this article in the New York Times:

Television Starts to Court Young Voters:

With polls showing a surge in primary-season ballots cast by voters under 30, media outlets are out to convert the newly energized voters into viewers. On cable news, CNN promotes a “League of First Time Voters” and the Fox News Channel is covering what it calls the Y Factor with a full-time correspondent. On broadcast, NBC has assigned Luke Russert, the son of the late anchor Tim Russert, to the youth vote beat and ABC, CBS and PBS are all running stories by student journalists.

It's not just about trying to revive their business model by drawing in more, and younger, eyeballs. The networks genuinely seem to get that they are missing out on the youth vote story:

Heather Nauert, a Fox News Channel correspondent, started covering the youth vote in February, one month after exit polls started showing significant spikes in turnout rates. “We basically said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a big story and we’ve got to cover it,’ ” she said. On Fox, Ms. Nauert’s reports have appeared on the network’s nightly news program “The Fox Report” and were compiled for an hourlong special report, “The Y Factor,” last month.
...
About 6.5 million people under 30 participated in the primaries and caucuses this year, almost double the number that turned out in 2000. Mr. Todd said that he believed the surge in youth interest had not been sufficiently captured by media organizations.

“It’s because of something I call the ‘been there, done that’ disease,” he said. “We hear about the young vote all the time, and at the end of the day, does it show up?” It did in 2004, he said, answering his own question, “but everybody showed up in 2004.”

Since then, the demographics have shifted. “We are seeing a partisan divide between young and old like we haven’t seen before,” Mr. Todd said. “This is a big part of this election.”

In response, the major cable and network news channels are all staffing up to cover the youth vote this cycle. This presents us with an opportunity that we didn't have in 2004. In '04, everyone was a skeptic and few outlets wanted to do more than cover major celebrity efforts like Vote or Die when writing their token youth vote article.

This year, we may actually have a corps of reporters who are open to learning about what's really going on in youth organizing when you look behind Christina Aguilera, TI or other celebrity spokespersons. Young viewers - more in tune with getting their news online - may not watch the segments produced by this new campaign corps, but other journalists - editors, reporters, print, online, TV - do watch their coverage. While I would never advocate for a solely top-down communications strategy, these jouralists represent a good chance to "influence the influencers," and make sure that the correct story about youth participation is getting told.

Here's how the article lays them out:

Fox News - Heather Nauert
CNN - League of First Time Voters; lead reporter: ???????
MSNBC - Luke Russert
NBC News - Luke Russert
ABC News - Student Journalists. Schools TBD?
CBS News - ???????

Hopefully these people or representatives of these projects will all attend the Youth Press Conference at the DNC so we can put faces, emails, and phone number to names. These reporters need to look past the celebrities and examine the grass roots organizing. They need to understand the value of peer to peer organizing and the proper role of the internet. Above all, they need to understand that increased youth turnout is a trend, not a fluke. We don't want anymore major media stories like this one.

In keeping with my post earlier this week about the need for more investment in communications work within youth organizing, I want to point you all to a 1170 word profile of Television producer/major donor Norman Lear and his youth vote organization Declare Yourself.

Here are the main messages coming out of the piece:

Declare Yourself, which Mr. Lear founded in 2003 to spur 18- to 29-year-olds to vote, strives to register more than two million people by Election Day. A nonprofit organization, it registered about a million voters in the months leading up to the 2004 election, most of them that October, said Aviva Rosenthal, the organization’s director of partnerships.

...

Four years ago Declare Yourself was simply one of many voter-registration efforts, admirable but probably without huge impact.

Message: 1 million voters is "not a significant impact" and by implication, youth in general did not have a huge impact in 2004.

Young people could be more crucial in the presidential race this time around — they played a bigger role than normal in many primary contests, and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has the trappings of a youth crusade. Thus organizations like Declare Yourself are taking on extra weight.

Message: Youth organizations weren't important until Barack Obama showed up. We didn't make him, he made us.

Rival registration efforts abound, but Declare Yourself is perhaps alone in using big media (anything controlled by the five largest media conglomerates) as its primary sales tool. Rock the Vote, which rose to prominence in the 1992 election by teaming up with MTV, comes close with its emphasis on musicians, but it has started relying more heavily on Internet outreach than on television.

This is bizarrely wrong. I would say that Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself are equally partnering with major media corporations. Both organization's biggest program this year involves online voter registration. If anything, Rock the Vote is the more innovative of the two organizations with new ways to using it's corporate and celebrity partnerships to increase registration. In reading the piece, however, the implication is that Declare Yourself's strategy is in some way superior.

Message: Corporate partnerships and Media are more important than internet outreach.

Mr. Lear toils to line up celebrities who have cachet among young adults. Through his wide-ranging contacts, he has corralled a roster of stars popular with young people to plug the cause, including America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty”), Hayden Panettiere (“Heroes”) and Tyra Banks (“America’s Next Top Model”). He said that he was trying to sign up the Jonas Brothers.

One of Declare Yourself’s biggest coups involved the MTV reality series “The Hills.” Mr. Lear and Ms. Rosenthal arranged for a star of that show to mention the registration effort during filming. As it turned out, producers liked the story line so much that they devoted the bulk of an episode to registering to vote.
...
Citing internal research, Marc Morgenstern, executive director of Declare Yourself, said 83 percent of the people the organization registered in 2004 voted. “Yes, young people are assaulted with messages,” Mr. Morgenstern said. “That is why we have an overlapping approach. The cumulative impact gets them to the tipping point.”

Message: Celebrities and media campaigns are the best way to reach young voters.

At the moment, though, he is most focused on Declare Yourself. Whether registration efforts reap votes is a question that the organization cannot answer with precision. And as excited as registration groups, campaigns and others get about supposedly surging interest among younger voters every four years, the gains rarely prove to be substantial. The turnout rate in the last presidential election among voters 18 to 25 was 47 percent, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 64 percent for the overall population.

Message: Young people don't vote and we have no idea how to make them vote in bigger numbers.

This piece is a disaster. It flies in the face of everything we know:

• Young Voters have turned out in larger and larger numbers for the past 3 election cycles, and we were the only age demographic to vote in favor of John Kerry.
• Peer to peer outreach is the gold standard for moving young voters to the polls and it's effectiveness has been proven.
• Celebrity campaigns in and of themselves do not increase youth turnout.
• The internet is a huge and important tool for reaching out and engaging young voters.
• Youth organizations engaged in peer to peer outreach pioneered the tactics and laid the groundwork for Obama's successful youth operation.

This New York Times profile may serve the purpose of raising the profile of Declare Yourself and Norman Lear, but it does very little to advance the goals of the growing progressive youth movement. In fact, it is actively working at cross-purposes to that movement and teaching journalists and anyone who reads it precisely the wrong lessons about youth vote outreach.

Earlier this week I wrote a post called "If the Youth Vote, Obama Wins" - Yes, But It's More Complicated, in which I tried to walk back some potentially outlandish claims about just how high youth turnout will be in November. I imagine that for a lot of you it was weird to see me, one of the biggest youth vote cheerleaders, disagreeing with such a positive description of youth potential. As I stated at the time, my purpose wasn't to say that youth wouldn't vote or turnout in record numbers, rather it was to manage expectations about what that record turnout might look like.

In 2004, youth turnout increased dramatically, but you wouldn't know it by reading the papers or watching the news. Turnout jumped by 4.3 million, from 40 to 49%. So what happened? Two things. First, the press confused "share of the electorate" with "turnout." Youth turnout rose, but share of the electorate remained steady as all age groups increased their turnout. More significantly, after months of hype about the power of the youth vote, John Kerry didn't win.

The bad youth vote narrative that emerged on November 3rd, 2004 was not just a consequence of bad reporting, it was a consequence of the failure of youth organizations to adequately manage expectations. It was P. Diddy completely dominating the political media and pumping up the youth vote without a real field operation to back up his words. It was the over-the-top rhetoric employed by so many youth organizations (myself included) about how youth would be the difference for John Kerry. In short - it was a communications failure.

Over the past 5 years, we have invested a lot of money in building leadership capacity/training programs, and field programs to engage young voters through peer-to-peer outreach. During that same time, little to no money was invested in expanding the communications capacity of partisan youth organizations. Is it any wonder it took over three years and multiple wins at the federal level (2006 midterms, 2008 primaries) to achieve even the adequate youth vote narrative currently in the media?

I subscribe to about 20 Google Alerts every day that track youth vote stories in the media. It is not a comprehensive tracking system by any means, but it gives me a good idea about what is getting discussed. Most recently, there seem to be two major storylines about young voters:

• Registration in state X are up due to increased youth registration
• Generation Gap stories, usually a variation on "will youth burn Obama at the polls" or "Obama need to focus more on older people."

Almost none of these stories mentions a progressive or non partisan youth organization as a cause of increased youth engagement, or uses a staffer from one of our organizations as a source. Of the youth vote stories that do quote an organization or use one of our people as a source, I would say that the top two stories are:

• Blurbs about Rock the Vote's Stila Lipstick
• Bits about Christina Aguilera's Rock the Vote PSA

These are not substantive stories. I don't mean to hit on Rock the Vote here - they've had some great press hits this year including a whole hour on the Larry King Live show. And bear in mind that this is a completely unscientific study, but it would seem that youth vote organizations and the progressive youth movement are not in any significant way driving the youth vote narrative during an election that may see the most significant youth participation since the passage of the 26th Amendment.

That's a problem.

The long and short is, it's time to invest in partisan communications work, not just field work, within the youth infrastructure we created these last five years. I know money is tight this cycle, but with the Obama campaign implicitly lifting the ban on independent expenditures, perhaps we'll start to see more money flow into our work. If so, it's time to invest in real media monitoring and rapid response, a larger effort to place our staffers in print and on the air, and the proper training to make sure they do a good job when they do get in the media.

It's time to take control of the story that the media and the public tell about our work.