Here Comes Everybody!

One of the numerous fields where French campaign technics lay way behind the US are new media. The new generation of ministers has now its Facebook page and for some of them a Twitter account. But it is often more a way to say “Young people, like me, vote for me, I’m modern” that a real tool they leverage during campaigns.

My internship this summer on Senator Gillibrand’s campaign in New York had given me already some good insights on how to use these tools better in France. And now the new class I am taking in my second year of MPA, called “Media, Politics and Power in the Digital Age” enlightened me even more after barely 2 weeks of classes. This week, we had to read the famous bookf of Clay Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody – The Power of Organizing without Organizations”

Even if I was a little bit overwhelmed by the numerous examples he gives, Shirky shows very well how a real revolution is happening: as Internet is changing the way we communicate and interact with each other, it impacts every layer of the Society. For me it is particularly important given my professional goals to work on campaigns which are by definition community organizing.

He shows how we no longer need the framework of traditional institution or hierarchical organization to come together and act toward common goals. Indeed, thanks to Internet, barriers to creating a group have collapsed. Certain groups could not exist because of high transactions costs (too much paperwork, too much decision time, too many layers of approvals induced by the increased number of people involved in a task) leading, as Ronald Coase developed in 1937 in “The nature of the Firm”, to institutional dilemma where institutions could not support the creation of those groups. Those groups had motivation, energy and talent for action but what they did not have was the ability to coordinate easily. Internet has made it possible. This is indeed a very important step for society as a whole as the belonging to a group is intrinsically part of human nature. The success of Meetup is a telling example. This basic human need was until now constrained. Now these groups can be created without spending a penny, they can develop faster and faster and all of this without necessary management.

Indeed, social tools make groups “ridiculously easy group-forming”

• First, their creation and development can reach unseen speed. For instance, Flickr was the first there during the London bombing of 2005 to post pictures of the events Shirky gives other examples such as the creation of VOTF (Voice of the Faithful) after the 2002 Geoghan scandal about a priest having raped dozens of children. The organization grew from 30 people to 25000 in one year. The “flash mobs“ group category is also representative of the ease and rapidity characterizing the creation of social groups. The case of Belarus in 2006 to protest against a contested election is presented in the book.
• Second, failure is free and therefore risk is minimized and experimentation is fostered. For instance Linux would certainly not have been tempted as part of Microsoft because it would have been too risky and too costly for the institution. Moreover, as Shirky shows and contrary to usual critics of amateurization encouraged by new media, quality can also be ensured thanks to the editing process of “publish then filter” peculiar to user-generated content.
•  Third, the Power law of distribution (similar to the concept of Chris Anderson’s long tail) inherent to most social systems allows for very different levels of contributions. For instance, fewer than 2% of Wikipedia users ever contribute to the creation of articles whereas it benefits to several millions of users a day. Also, the examples of Kate Hanni managing to change the legislative agenda after her bad experience with American Airlines or british students making HSBC change back its policy on student loans show that many groups like that can work by having some highly motivated people and a mass of barely motivated ones. In the case of American Airlines, Kate Hanni led all the legislative part whereas all passengers only filled a petition.  This is very useful for political campaigns too. You need to lower the entering cost by offering people the possibility to participate a little (so that they come to your campaign not afraid by the amount of work you will give them) while being as a group effective. This is what I also noticed this summer during my internship: we were 25 interns, 2 years before the election, on a Senatorial campaign. You would never see that in the Presidential party in France 6 months before the election. I was impressed. But Shirky’s analysis makes sense here. By asking a little but not too much to volunteers (making calls, posting things on their Facebook page…), you manage to bring them to you and as a whole do some piece of work that the permanent staff would never have time to do and that can be critical for the campaign. As Shirky says, “now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activists themselves.”

That does not mean that new media are magical tools.

• First their qualities can turn into nightmares in certain cases. Take the case of Anthony Wiener and his resignation this summer because of pictures of him posted on Twitter. Those tools can be dangerous especially for politicians. They must be used carefully. Internet makes it also easier for all kind of groups to form, not only the one with social approval (Ex: pro-ana, terrorists, paedophiles….)
• Second, Shirky insists on the fact that digital tools “don’t create collective action – they remove the obstacles to it”. I wonder what he would have said if he had written his book 2 years later after the events of the Arab Spring.  At the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) I went a few weeks ago in New York, Dr. Rasha Abdulla - Associate Professor at the American University in Cairo and author of several books on the new media and the Internet as it relates to political activism - said that the Arab Spring was not an Internet’s revolution, it was the people’s revolution even If it was mainly based on social media. Shirky would have probably agree as he insists in his book on the power of these new tools but at the same time highlighting that social media don’t replace real life action, they help it.
• Third, online movements need strong links to real life in order to achieve concrete results. It’s not how many people you know but how many kinds. You need for instance to be careful, especially in politics to the difference between bonding and bridging capital in the context of small world network. Bonding capital is the “increase in the depth of connections within a relatively homogeneous group” whereas Bridging is the “increase in connections among relatively heterogeneous groups. “Bonding happen within clusters whereas bridging happens between clusters. Getting people to vote for you requires bridging capital. Howard Dean did not understand that and lost the Presidential campaign he was supposed to win easily.

In conclusion, an interesting book even if I would have loved more political examples at times. I would also be interested to know why Facebook is quoted only once or twice? Am I missing something? Anyway, in a world where new media and forms of communication can push a piece of news from not worth covering to breaking news, politicians must be even more careful than before with their relation to the media. Even if these new ways to communicate can be a wonderful tool in organizing and mobilizing people toward noble causes.

Getting Women Off The Sidelines

As I wrote some weeks ago, Senator Gillibrand launched a major initiative to get women Off The Sidelines (www.offthesidelines.org).

As the campaign staff new about the Oval Office program I was part of this year and my specific interest to women issues, they trusted me with a project for the Off The Sidelines initiative. Indeed, this is a very new project and everything needs yet to be developed. Therefore I was made responsible for researching all (or a large part as there are thousands of them) women's advocacy and women's empowerment websites and to draw some insights and best practices from my analysis in order to develop the Off The Sidelines Website and Project in general.

I know that this subject is of major interest for many readers of this blog so I want to share the report I gave to the campaign staff. Some information may be very specific to the campaign and Senator Gillibrand but most information are, I think, valuable for any women's organization that wants to stand out on the web. An excel file of 100 organizations was given to the campaign staff, for technical reasons I cannot attach it here. For those interested, please contact me via email.

The staff was very happy with this and already started to implement one of the recommendation: mentoring. I will continue to work on this subject in the next weeks and will of course keep you posted!

Lessons from the field

Still as part of our Brown bag lunches, It was Sean’s turn, the campaign’s political director, to talk to us about his experience in Field. He talked a lot about his own experience and how he got there after managing several positions in the Senator’s various campaigns.

If Field is sometimes undervalued comparing to other departments such as Finance or Media, it is however very important in close races. Therefore you need to be very careful. Sean gave us some basic but essential advice about field operations:

1.     It’s a small world, always be nice! Indeed, the political world and especially the campaign world is very small. I experienced it in my former job as adviser to the French Government Spokesperson. Everybody knows everyone and rumors spread easily and quickly. So you should always be nice to people and remember that one day you may run into them again, sometimes for instance as your boss! It is also important to create a good atmosphere for volunteers as it is not always them then that you get in but their friends, families to whom they will talk about the campaign and how it is to work for the candidate. The volunteers give you access to a much larger pool of voters that you should not forget. Therefore you need to treat them well, make sure they always have something to do, that this is interesting, that they are motivated. Then they will talk nicely about the campaign and above all about the candidate and your job is done! There is nothing worse than volunteers coming and complaining they have nothing to do. Because if they have nothing to do, they won’t come back and they will talk badly about you, that you are not organized, which is not good! To keep your volunteers motivated, share information with them, send them metrics (we made 3800 calls yesterday) and statistics to keep them engaged. Make the candidate call the volunteers once in a while.

2.     Be creative! You need sometimes to find way to stretch a dollar, to get your volunteers do the work as Field is often not the priority for resources comparing to TV for instance.

3.     Be able to adapt! In the field department you will have to deal with almost all aspects of the campaign, from building crowds for various events, putting up signs, putting together campaign committees, conducting literature drops, door-to-door campaigning, and phone canvassing. The field director will also be responsible for get-out-the-vote activities, including creating and staffing election day phone banks, recruiting poll watchers, drivers, and door-to- door personnel to get voters out in the last days before the election. You need to be able to adapt and deal with several things at a time. You need also to be polite and diplomatic as you will be the one people will be mad at when you tell them that the candidate has no time for them and take the full responsibility for it to protect the candidate.

The Field Operation Department will be responsible for organizing all of the campaign’s voter contact activities. As a result, it should be the largest department in the campaign in terms of staffers. The operation should be divided into sub- departments with the following responsibilities:

The field director is basically the person in contact with the public and the activists. He is responsible for the largest number of staff, most of whom are volunteers. The following criteria are therefore important when hiring him:

• Significant previous campaign experience
• Good organizational skills
• Ability to motivate others
• Enthusiastic and energetic
• Creative
• Ability to work well with others and be a team player
• Experienced user of social media (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn)

VOTER CANVASS

Of all the sub-departments within the Field Operation Department, Voter Canvass is arguably the most important. Ascertaining which voters are supporters, which are opponents, and which are undecided is critical for three key reasons:

• First, it is important to identify the candidate’s supporters to make sure the campaign turns them out on Election Day. 
• Second, it is essential to identify which voters will likely vote against the candidate, in order to prevent the campaign from needlessly wasting money on persuasion materials for these voters. 
• Finally, it is integral to the success of the campaign to identify leaning and undecided voters, as they will inarguably decide the election. Once identified, the campaign can target these voters heavily with persuasion materials to convince these voters to support the candidate on Election Day.

GOTV PLAN

The campaign’s GOTV Plan should entail each of the following activities:

• Recruiting and training Poll Watchers
• Recruiting and training individuals for Election Day phone banking
• Recruiting and training “Flushers” to go door to door and make sure supporters and persuadable voters have gone to the polls
• Recruit a Legal Committee to have in place on Election Day to address voter disenfranchisement issues, voting irregularities, contesting malfunctioning voting machines, and challenging election officials who refuse to let voters vote for technical reasons
• Recruit individuals to drive voters to the polls
• Recruit volunteers to provide for day care needs on Election Day
• Recruit individuals for Election Night set up and logistics
• Prepare Election day materials, including:
• Door hangers
• Sample ballots for the polls
• Voter lists and walking lists
• Taped GOTV calls
• Strategic visibility on election day

AGAIN, MANY INSIGHTS FOR FRENCH CAMPAIGNS!

Of course there are, again many restrictions:

• Voter registration drives or voter drive on the day of the election is forbidden because seen as propaganda and influence on the vote. 
• In the same way, the Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) activities are extremely limited by the law as almost everything is forbidden on the day of the election: all polls (not only those done by the candidates but all polls in the country) are forbidden on the day before and the day of the election, intervention in any media as well, mailing (even by email and the website must be closed for the day of the election), calling voters, knocking on doors, signage and visibility on election day and at the polling places or delivering coffee and food to voters standing in lines at the polls.

But many things can still be dine. Remember that Field is the department that normally deals with most “voter contact” activities in a campaign so this is one of the most critical one. There is a huge potential for improvement and modernization in France. This is something we must work on and that can make the difference in any race. Indeed, this is so poorly done in France that if you start doing even a small part of it, it can have a huge impact on the votes.

What France can learn from the US fundraising techniques

French are not used to fundraising and think this is absolutely not in the French culture for politicians to ask for money. Also, French think that people don’t give for campaign as they give in the United States for instance. But let’s talk numbers and take the example of the Presidential elections in 2007: even if donations from private individuals are culturally much lower in France, the 2007 campaigns showed that President Sarkozy was able to attract €7 millions, 70 times more than the left candidate, Ségolène Royal. So people give if you use the right fundraising methods.

This is why I wanted to describe in details this information because I think that this is a something, again, where France should learn from the US. Ok, the campaign financing legislation is very restrictive in France with a system based mainly on public funding and strict expenses limitations. But this does not mean that parties cannot receive private donations. Moreover, fundraising is a useful tool that goes beyond the only objective of raising money: it shows people that you have people’s trust, it helps you gain credibility. Finally, studies show that if so gives you even a very low amount, they will vote for you for sure. The act of giving links you to the person you give to. So doing fundraising will get you the long-term buy-in of the people that give you money and they will talk about you. This is why the small donor’s programs are very important in a campaign.

Also, if you really have a cultural problem in doing this, just you stop thinking that you raise for yourself but realize that you are raising this money for people, that this is about your constituents, about being elected to change their lives, then it will become less difficult to do. If you stop thinking about you and think about your constituents and that you want to bring change to them, then you will have fewer difficulties to raise money. Because you will raise funds for a cause and not for you.

A fundraising lesson

At my initiative, we decided with the campaign team to organize brown-bag lunches where we can learn more about the team members, their career, what brought them here and also their day-to-day job. Indeed, even one yea and a half before, the rhythm of a campaign is so intense that we don’t really have the time to chat with our neighbor.

So we did our first lunch on Fundraising with Ross and Emily as special guests. They are the fundraising directors of the Gillibrand campaign.

I’d like to share a few insights and best practices they shared with us, some of them I had already heard in Professor Jarding’s classes or Oval Office training sessions.

The fundraiser is the first person you hire in a US campaign.  The 5 most important tools are:

1.     Call-time: every day, the candidate makes phone calls to supporters and donors. She is provided with a call sheet containing the bio, the occupation and as many information available on the donor/supporter (when was the last time she met him/her, how much this person already gave and when, which advocacy group she/he is part of…). The more the better. The candidate starts to call personal relations: family, friends, persons she knew from college, from work. Then the list is extended to influential persons of the district with in priority people who already gave to any cause (not necessarily politics)

2.     Events: call time is also used for event solicitation. The candidate will call people that she wants to host an event for her. Most of the money generally comes from events with a large host committee who will become your ambassador and help you engage other persons. A famous name is always useful as part of the host committee, just as Donna Karan and the Off the Sidelines event. Having a large hosting committee is very important as one person can only give $5 000 per election cycle so you want to increase the number of person present at the event. So you will ask the committee to reach out to their network and ask them for money. Moreover, having a large host committee allows you to divide the responsibilities so that at the end people have reasonable objectives. For instance, at the Off The Sidelines launching event, each member of the host committee had to raise $10 000 each in every form they wanted (2x$5000 or 5x$2000…).  For an event it is very important to set a goal. You do it thanks to the previous history.

These 2 first tools are traditional tools targeted rather at big donors. Some other tools include:

3.     Internet: this was the most effective tool for the thousands of low-dollar contributors in the Obama campaign. This was a unique organization relying on inspired people and a strong Internet team to motivate people to give. This was a very aggressive online program. Generally, online contributions are around $35. To get new emails, petitions are a good way: you can partner with other organizations (for instance petition on women’s choice together with women organizations) and then you ask people to sign the petition and give you their contact information including their email. It increases your list of potential donors and you will then be able to email them with a targeted message. Ex: Kirsten is doing X, Y, Z for you and would like your support. If KG supports your values… we ask you for $25”. You want to build a relationship online. A good way to raise funds online is to create a sense of urgency by highlighting the goals and the fact that some more needs to be done to reach it. Ex: “Republicans need just four seats to take over the Senate. Will you help me make sure that mine is not one of them? June 30 is a major filing deadline, so we must act now to show the Republicans that we are strong and ready to fight. Click here to make a contribution to my campaign today and help me reach my goal of raising $100,000 by June 30. I need your support to keep my seat and protect our majority in the Senate.”

4.     Direct Mail: it is more expensive but you need it to reach people who are not online (old, rural, poor people). Republicans are better on this tool because of the characteristics of their base.

Other tips:

-       Fundraising is political relationship. You need to make sure the relationship is maintained: stay in touch with people when you also don’t need anything (send poll numbers, press releases…)

-       Look on FB for birthdays of donors and make the Senator call them on their birthday – This is something they will remember…)

A good way to motivate volunteers!

Every field director will tell you that it is important to take good care of your volunteers. You need to make them happy, proud, appeal to their sense of duty and keep them motivated.

A good way to do that is to bring President Obama in a call with Summer Organizers or also, and this was our lucky day, to bring the DNC Chair in the campaign office of Obama for America!

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz indeed did us the honor of coming to for a few minutes to thank us for our job, explain how our role in the campaign is and will be important and answers some questions.

Elected on November 2, 2004, as a member of the United States House of Representatives, she was nominated, on April 6, 2011, by President Obama to serve as chair of the Democratic National Committee. Her role includes working every day to advance President Obama's agenda and ensure his re-election, electing Democratic candidates across the country, and promoting Democratic values. A close friend to Senator Gillibrand, she is known for her tenacity and hard work on many priority issues, including education, health care, children's issues, and Social Security, to name a few. She introduced and helped pass the PROTECT Our Children Act, which creates the largest law enforcement effort ever formed for the protection of children.

In March 2009, after she announced her own battle with breast cancer, Rep. Wasserman Schultz introduced the Education and Awareness Requires Learning Young Act, or EARLY Act that directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop and implement a national education campaign about the threat breast cancer poses to all young women, and the particular heightened risks of certain ethnic, cultural and racial groups. This bill became law as part of the Affordable Health Care for America Act in March 2010.

Another great woman in American politics that I had the chance to greet!

One day at Obama for America’s New York Office

Grassroots campaigning. Again something France needs to learn from. But I wonder if there is here a real cultural barrier: indeed, when I see that every day there are 3 new interns on Senator Gillibrand’s campaign, two years before Election Day, I realize the difference between France and the United States on this level. I remember as I was applying for HKS that people were telling me to put absolutely some non-profit or social activity in my resume if I wanted to be considered. Indeed, volunteering is part of the American culture. 

When I talk to some high-school students interning on the campaign and ask them why they are doing this internship, they just tell me “I could not do nothing for the whole summer. I had to be useful in any way”. Perhaps New York is apart and not representative of the United States, perhaps these interns are very special in the sense that they all have the same profile – and when I say “all”, I really mean “all” (Upper-Eastsiders with the House in the Hamptons, going to private schools with parents having graduated from the Ivy League universities) but I think that this is something cultural in the US to give one’s time for a cause.

And unfortunately for my French campaign’s ambitions, this is not the case in France. I can’t imagine a House Representative in Paris having over 15 interns 2 summers before the election. And I know it for sure as my father is one of them and Paris may be the French city the most similar to New York on a French scale...

But one would say that there was a real revolution with the Obama campaign which was the first to really manage to engage volunteers around the United States and that once you have a good candidate that revolutionizes the vision citizens have about politics and really gives hope to people, things can change and this is not as difficult anymore to engage people.

Moreover, just as with everything I have said by now about campaigns in France, given the fact that we are so behind on every campaign tool, the Political Party that manages to gather a few hundreds volunteers, will still make a difference comparing to the opponent. So again, this is something we should focus on because people on a campaign are EVERYTHING.

I had the chance as part of my internship to go and learn from the best: indeed, we were invited to spend a day in the New York Office of Organizing for America, President Obama’s grassroots organization working toward its reelection. 

We met with the team and were quickly paired with one OFA summer organizer. The Summer Organizers Program is a 8-weeks program, starting the first week of June where the summer organizers help build the campaign team within communities and neighborhoods. Indeed, as Battleground States Director Mitch Stewart explains, while we are still 531 days before the election, there is a lot of work that has to be done. Organization building takes a long time, relationship building takes a long time. Also, in September and October 2012, “a sea of volunteers” will come to the campaign offices and this requires a structure in place, an organization in place to channel that energy. The best way to do that is to have a team model where they empower local volunteers to take leadership roles within the campaign, make decisions for the campaign, in their neighborhood and in their community.

“My” Summer Organizer Andrew, a young college student at Cornell explained to me that he was in charge of a part of the Brooklyn borough and that I was going to help him. The goal was to contact every person who volunteered or made a donation in 2008 but had not been very active since then. The idea was to test their feeling about the President, see if they were still “in” and then try to convince them to come to the Manhattan Office for a one-on-one meeting to reconnect and sit down with them, talk through what the campaign should look like in their local communities and have a real conversation about what they want to hear, what they want to see to finally recruit them as field organizer for the campaign.

So the staff started making calls and meeting with people one-on-one in April. And then those people started having their own one-on-ones with others. So far more than 75,000 individual conversations have happened across the country. The results are a massive army of newly energized volunteers, plus thousands of pages of ideas and feedback that will inform how to shape the campaign organization nationally.

So each of us with a call script and 50 names in front of us, we started to call.

Here is how a Call Script looks like (please ignore the messiness of my handwriting all over the page):

And the Call Sheet:

Again, these documents show how well the volunteer is guided and supervised. No mistake is possible if the volunteer follows the guidelines. Of course some improvisation is sometimes needed when the voter asks a question but these forms ensure professionalism and unity of message.

I managed to set up 5 meetings which was a good result given the fact that we were calling people at home during the afternoon and not so many people could be reached. And the 25 people in the office doing exactly the same as me, we got 5+5+5+…. Meetings. This is how you build your army of volunteers!