How we built a relational network of 160k voters in less than a month
Relational Organizing on the Jon Ossoff for Senate Campaign
By Davis Leonard, Zoë Stein, and Joshua Kravitz
The Jon Ossoff for Senate runoff campaign ran a massive relational voter contact program, building and mobilizing a relational network of over 160,000 voters in less than a month. It worked— an analysis of our program found that it improved turnout by an estimated 3.8 percentage points for voters in the relational network.
We ran a data- and tech-forward relational program, using data to guide programmatic decisions and innovative technology like our in-house relational phonebank tool, OutReach, to drive engagement at scale.
We ran both volunteer and paid programs, which operated independently but in close collaboration. Our Deputy Data Director (who worked exclusively on relational) served as a linchpin between the paid and volunteer programs and connected them to the larger data infrastructure of the campaign.
In these posts, we talk specifically about the relational voter contact program our teams ran on this campaign. We want to explicitly acknowledge that the Ossoff program amounted essentially to a cherry on top of years of of hard-fought progressive organizing in Georgia on the part of Black organizers and Georgia-based organizations like New Georgia Project and Fair Fight; and that our relational voter contact program sits firmly on the shoulders of the union organizers and communities of color who pioneered relational organizing as a means to build power and drive movements for social, economic and racial justice. We are grateful to have been able to learn and draw from this history, and to build on the work of organizers on recent Democratic campaigns as well, namely those of Sri Kulkarni, Ed Markey, Mondaire Jones, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg, who were able to apply these tactics to electoral voter contact and who generously shared their lessons learned and resources with us.
This post is an introduction to the library of resources our teams have put together, including three deep-dive guides into each prong of our broader program: the volunteer program, the paid Community Mobilizers program, and the data and tech that powered it all. Read them here:
- Tips and Tactics: Running a Relational Volunteer Program by Davis Leonard (Digital Organizing Director) and Annie Horowitz (Digital Organizing Manager — Relational)
- The Jon Ossoff for Senate Community Mobilizers Program: A Guide to Paid Relational at Scale by Zoe Stein (Community Mobilizer Program Director), Rachel Pinto (Deputy Program Director), and Megan Pappalardo (Program Training Director)
- Using Tech and Data to Supercharge Relational: Principles, Highlights and Challenges by Joshua Kravitz (Deputy Data Director — Relational)
Valuable, visible, and critical: Making relational the centerpiece of our volunteer digital organizing program
The volunteer program was the centerpiece of our campaign’s in-state digital organizing program. Its goal was to leverage every volunteer’s contacts into a robust relational universe, systematically activate those people to vote, and grow our network exponentially as our volunteers recruited their networks not only to vote but to volunteer themselves. We integrated recruitment into every program our team ran, from peer-to-peer texts to Instagram DMs to Facebook group organizing, bringing volunteers to nightly virtual “Friendbanks,” relational training and action nights in which volunteers would build and contact their networks. We write in depth about the nuts and bolts of designing, recruiting for, and running our program here — but here are some of our key takeaways.
How you talk about relational organizing matters.
We communicated transparently about relational’s role in our strategy to win, and the unique and powerful role each volunteer has to play. Here’s how we laid it out:
Structure programs to reflect and reinforce the campaign’s high valuation of relational
Not only was it important to talk transparently and consistently about the central role relational played in our strategy to win — it was important, too, to make sure relational outreach felt important, achievable, and seen by the campaign just like other forms of voter contact.
Voter contact activities like cold phone banking and peer-to-peer texting are structured in ways that reflect the progress a volunteer is making every step of the way: completing a list feels satisfying and demonstrably impactful. Often, relational outreach can feel relatively invisible, occurring in unstructured interactions not seen by the campaign — and as a result, it can feel like a less meaningful contribution.
We actively fought against this misconception by structuring our programming and building tools to bring relational out of the invisible space between campaign events and into the light, in ways that allowed volunteers to see their progress in real time and receive reinforcement for conducting this incredibly important work.
This meant investing in a dedicated volunteer team of “relational chasers” who followed up with volunteers to provide individualized encouragement and support; building custom tools like daily “Reach Early Vote Report” emails and OutReach, our in-house relational phone bank tool; and empowering volunteers with voter data in the form of Reach custom tags that indicated voters’ early vote status and pointed out the most critical “Only Reachable by You” voters to contact.
Want to learn more about the volunteer program? Read our deep-dive here.
Changing the electorate with paid relational
For Jon Ossoff to win the runoff election, we needed to expand the electorate in a significant way — in addition to turning out everyone who voted for him in the general election.
So under the direction and support of Jon Ossoff, we launched the Community Mobilizers program alongside the volunteer program. It was an ambitious program that hired over 2,800 Georgians to relationally turn out their communities to vote.
We designed this program to target “low propensity” voters (voters with lean or nonexistent voting histories), who are often considered less effective targets for campaigns to spend time and resources contacting. We conducted 11,000 unique interviews with prospective community mobilizers, actively seeking politically unengaged individuals. We hypothesized that they would be connected to other low-propensity voters, which our analysis on the Analyst Institute confirmed to be true.
Community Mobilizers were paid $500 a week for two to three weeks, generally speaking. They were required to attend an introductory training, meet with their direct supervisor — what we called a “Regional Mobilization Manager” (RMM) — for ten minutes each week, share two social media posts on their platform of choice, and hit goals to mobilize their own networks.
Key to the program’s success was the CM Dashboard, a custom tracking and management tool built on Google Data Studio. The dashboard enabled us to scale the program efficiently and effectively, allowing program staff to prioritize conversations with Community Mobilizers, to frame those conversations, and to track overall program progress.
Relational tactics are worth including as part of any robust voter contact program and we recognize that implementing a paid program at scale is not a small decision: paying and managing 100s or 1000s of individuals is work and not possible for every campaign. Read our deep dive for some guiding thoughts on deciding if paid relational is right for your campaign, a full program outline, some brass tacks tips, and more.
Data and tools can supercharge a relational program
Good data — that was accessible and actionable — was essential to effectively scaling both the volunteer and paid relational programs: with it, we could identify the Reach users that needed a helping hand and the ones that were exceeding expectations; we could create friendly competition amongst managers; and we could track the demographics of the relational network. Thoughtful metrics guided prioritization and decision-making across the program at every level. We have made two components of our reporting — for our volunteer and paid programs — available as public demos here and here.
Custom tags for targeted outreach
We also helped Reach users prioritize their efforts by sharing with them relevant data about their networks, in the form of Reach custom tags (Reach has an excellent API, which let us tag voters arbitrarily).
Notably, users could see up-to-date vote statuses of voters in their network during the early voting period — “Needs to Vote”, “Needs to Return Ballot”, or “Has Voted!” — allowing them to easily sift through their networks and identify the people they needed to talk to that day.
They could also identify voters they were uniquely suited to contact — i.e., voters without a phone number in the voter file. We tagged these voters as “Only Reachable By You.”
Early Vote Reports
We built two custom tools to reinforce and amplify the power of this information for our users: Early Vote Reports and Outreach. During the early vote period, we sent daily “Reach Early Vote Report” emails to our users that summarized what percentage of their network still needed to vote and provided them with an easy, actionable list of their highest priority voters to contact that day — along with some key voter information to share and a bit of encouragement. Early Vote Reports took relational outreach out of the silo of the campaign and right where individuals were for much of the day — in their email inbox and on their phones.
Outreach
As we approached Election Day, we also wanted a way to facilitate users powering through contacting their networks (many of which were 100s of voters in size), in a way that felt reinforcing and both valuable and visible to the campaign. We built a relational phonebank tool, OutReach, that did just that — it took users’ relational networks from Reach and created a personalized, game-ified virtual phonebank just for them. (Candy Crush was a particular inspiration.)
The interface was simple, actionable, and reinforcing. Users would see only those in their network who had not yet voted, as well as household members who likewise had not voted. We also surfaced each contact’s polling place so users could easily tell voters where to go.
We knew that our callers would know better how to communicate with their friends and family than we could ever dictate. In lieu of a script, the app offered a bullet point list of the most critical info our callers needed to convey, as well as a voting FAQ representing the most frequent voter education and voter protection questions we had seen over the course of the campaign.
Intermittent reinforcement is one of the most powerful ways of encouraging an individual to continue a behavior. When users clicked “Next Call”, confetti covered the screen. At unpredictable intervals, videos of Jon Ossoff and staffers encouraged callers to keep going.
OutReach facilitated warm, personal contact with over 17,000 voters in the final two days of the campaign. OutReach is open-source: we hope to see additional campaigns and organizations utilize and build upon our work.
Peach Progress
To help visualize the powerful impact relational voter contact was having on Election Day, we borrowed the concept of a progressively-filling thermometer often seen in digital fundraising — this time, in the form of a peach that our staff filled as callers communicated that they had gotten their networks to vote. This kept callers excited, motivated, and laughing as they powered through Election Day.
You can read more about the technical infrastructure that powered these tools, including the challenges we encountered along the way, in a follow-up post here.
Where we go next
We hope that these guides can serve as a helpful example of how future campaigns might build relational programs at scale. We know that relational is the most effective form of voter contact, and believe that the future of progressive campaigning has relational organizing at its core. To the campaigns this cycle that are running relational-first programs — we’re cheering you on, and so excited to see what you do.
As for us, we also want to underscore the old adage — no [relational program] is an island. These programs were built with many, many hands, and we are so grateful for the collaboration and contributions of every single person who was part of it. Below is a full breakdown of that incredible crew.
We’re also here to help however we can. Feel free to reach out to any of us. Happy organizing!
Davis Leonard — @davisjohanna
Joshua Kravitz — @_joshuakravitz
Zoe Stein — @zoe_hugs_trees
