Organizing for change in Idaho

How to build large, skilled, powerful teams of volunteers for political change

Idaho’s government is not working for everyone.

Instead, it’s focused on helping the rich and well-connected at the expense of working families and communities. It’s obvious that’s true when the Legislature resists healthcare for working families, provides the lowest education funding per student in the country, revokes ballot initiative rights, and uses historic budget surpluses for tax cuts and further defunds essential services that people rely on.

This won’t change without a real shift in the balance of power.

Power means you can get people to do what you want, even if they don’t want to. For the people of Idaho, that means holding enough sway over our elected officials that they’re forced to pay more attention to us than to the special interest lobbyists and wealthy donors they focus on today. That will happen when they fear that they will lose credibility and re-election if they don’t do what the people want.

Political organizing is the way.

Organizing means bringing together teams of volunteers to work on a common cause. If done right, these teams last longer than a single campaign. Team members learn skills, build relationships, and adopt an identity as someone who regularly acts to improve the lives of people in their communities. Volunteer teams are the essential units of change that can be tapped into by campaigns to challenge the status quo.

We know how.

Reclaim Idaho has been doing this important work since 2016, when we spearheaded the campaign to expand Medicaid by ballot initiative when the Legislature ignored the healthcare gap for 6 years. By building volunteer teams all over the state, we overcame Idaho’s extremely difficult ballot initiative rules and 61% voted Yes in 2018, bringing healthcare to over 100,000 Idahoans. It was the greatest political achievement in a generation.

Since then, Reclaim Idaho has refined it’s strategies and tactics and has organized volunteer teams all over the state in our quest to address the next biggest crisis in our state — public education funding. Ultimately, Reclaim Idaho considers political organizing our main goal, and we do ballot initiatives because they’re the easiest way to do large-scale political organizing.

This post shares my lessons learned.

Reclaim Idaho wants to provide our local leaders with as many insights, tools, and techniques as possible to help them build their teams. As a local team leader myself, I’ve learned a lot of these lessons personally. I hope they can inspire other local leaders as they build their teams.

Note: The lessons below are written in the context of ballot initiative campaigns. Many concepts will apply to candidate campaigns as well, but less directly.

Planning Events

People need motivation to regularly work towards a goal. Solo work doesn’t cut it. Team events provide the connection, camaraderie, and accountability to keep team members excited and engaged over the long run.

1. What’s the most productive thing your team can do? As a team leader, the worst thing you can do is to demotivate your members by making them feel like they didn’t really need to show up to your event. So, when you’re choosing your signature collection tactic, keep that in mind. It all depends on your context, but for me, instead of sending 10 people to a farmers market where each person can get 3 signatures, I send them to knock doors, where each person can get 10 signatures.
2. What skills do you want your team to learn? They’ll learn different skills depending on the tactic — door knocking, event canvasing, site canvassing, tabling, etc. Though potentially more intimidating, door knocking teaches the most skills and makes collecting signatures in other contexts much easier. It’s also the most flexible tactic and most applicable in other contexts as well (like candidate campaigns). When we think about building teams for long term change, that’s important to keep in mind.
3. When to schedule? You want to get as many people to your event as possible. Get to know your team so you can anticipate what will be best attended. Lots of parents? Maybe not on weeknights. Lots of working folks? Maybe not during business hours. Eventually, you’ll develop a sense of which volunteers are the most important to integrate into your team. Consider asking them ahead of time to make sure your time slot works for them.
4. Build familiarity / tradition. Routine brings people comfort. As much as it’s practical, plan events that are repeatable. Choose an event basecamp that you’ll be able to use over the next several months. Try to keep your agenda similar each time. Knowing what to expect will help your volunteers feel more relaxed as a part of the team.
5. If you can, always have a notary present. Petition signatures need to be notarized before they can be turned in. This is a colossal pain the ass for a volunteer to figure out themselves. If you run a successful event, but don’t have a notary on hand to finalize the petitions, you’ll need to send them home with your volunteers to handle that, and you may never get them back. By having a notary at your event, you can handle all of this on the spot and take the petitions home because they’re ready to go. I thought it was worthwhile to become a notary myself to ensure there’s always one available. (I got set up on this site.)

Recruiting

This is your most important role as a team leader. You should be spending at least half of your effort on this and always be looking for opportunities to add new people to your team.

1. 1:1 outreach is essential. Group emails spread information but they don’t get signups. You need to individually contact each volunteer or potential volunteer for each event if you want the best results. And you should start recruiting for events over a week in advance ideally.
2. If you don’t know them, call+voicemail+text. For volunteers that I know, a text message will often suffice. But for someone I don’t have a relationship with already, they need a little different touch. I give them a phone call, introducing myself and inviting them to our next event. Most won’t answer, so I leave a voicemail and mention I’ll text them a link to our event. I immediately follow-up with the text message and link.
3. If you don’t feel annoying, you’re not doing it right. Most people won’t respond to your texts. Don’t misinterpret that to mean “No.” You need to keep following up until you get an explicit answer. I send follow-ups every 2–3 days with questions like “What do you think?” “Will you join us?” or “Can you come?” Believe it or not, but I routinely get signups from people I’ve pestered without reply for over a week.
4. Can’t come? No problem. How about our next event? When people say they can’t come to your next event, ask them if they can come to the one after that. Or the one after that. They’re instinctively more likely to say yes because they often feel a twinge of guilt for not being able to attend the next one. For this tactic, have multiple events on the calendar, ideally a month or more in advance.
5. You must get the signup. When someone says they’ll come, don’t just take their word for it; get their signup. Jumping through the psychological hurdle of submitting your name into a form increases the likelihood that they’ll show up. I don’t stop recruiting follow-ups until the signup has come through. I ask like this — “Please sign up today at the link to help me keep track of your RSVP. Thanks!”
6. Ask your regulars to bring someone with them. A wise team leader is always looking for ways to develop leadership skills in their volunteers. Once a team member becomes a regular, start asking them if they know anyone that would want to join your next team event. See if they’ll invite them. You’ll quickly exhaust your own network, so you’ll need to find new potentials in your teammates’ networks.
7. [Advanced] Recruit “friend blocks.” Do you know people that have a lot of friends? They might be regularly referred to as “ringleaders,” “socialites,” or “queen pins.” If you can get them on your team, chances are good that you can get a lot of “their people” on your team too. From my experience, large teams are usually a result of finding 1 or more of these people and getting them on board.

Team Culture

Don’t get distracted by the short game. Build a team that people will want to be a part of for years. For that, you’ll need to think carefully about how you do things.

1. Priority 1 — Fun. How many people do you know that love unnecessary chores and keep doing them over long periods of time? I don’t know many. Without making your events fun, that’s what volunteering on your team will feel like. Making your events enjoyable is at least as important as making them productive, if you want people to come back. I have a saying — every signature collection event needs an afterparty. I always make sure there’s time after collecting signatures to hang out, tell stories about the shift, and get to know each other.
2. Take the pressure off. If you’re doing recruiting well, you’ll have new people at almost all of your events. They’ll surely feel a little apprehensive about political volunteering and maybe downright nervous. Make special efforts to make them feel welcome, put their involvement in perspective, and explain that mistakes are inevitable and no big deal.
3. Training is critical. Pairing up works best. Every event needs a training that doesn’t assume any prior knowledge. Start with the big picture, why we’re doing what we’re doing, and then how to do it. Provide the overview and point everyone to any helpful resources, and then pair up newbies with people that have done it before. The pairing up is the more important thing that will develop the newb into a fully-fledged, confident volunteer. Have a sense of who your best people are to pair up with new folks, and ask them to do that ahead of time so they’re ready for it.
4. Rookies get special treatment. It’s the opposite of hazing. Bend over backwards to acknowledge new people, welcome them, and thank them for coming. At the afterparty, spend some time to get to know them. You want everyone feeling like they’ve been “seen” at your event and hopefully they want to come back again.
5. Congratulate progress, at every level. When your “star players” get record numbers of signatures, get psyched! When your rookies get a handful, throw a party! In terms of team impact, having more people hitting their first few milestones and building confidence is even better than your best volunteers getting a new record. You never want to demotivate new people by making them feel like they’ll never be as good as the veterans.
6. Look for and share best practices. Your teammates are always trying different things, and some things will work better than others. When a volunteer does especially well, ask them what they did. If you think they’re onto something, share it with the team. You want everyone privy to the best practices all the time.
7. Set goals you’ll hit. Celebrate every victory. If you’re going to share a goal with your team, be sure they can hit it, and set everyone up to blow past it. Winning begets winning, and your team will be thrilled by over-achieving. If you think your team will collect 90 signatures at an event, set a goal of 60. When you get more than that, make a big deal about it. Never take a victory for granted.
8. Introduce a sense of ownership. From a volunteer’s very first event, try to make them feel like they’re a permanent part of the team. One thing I always do is give them their own clipboard — “This is your clipboard, and you can take it home with you.” If you have swag to give out, do that too — “Want a t-shirt? Feel free to grab one out of this bag!”
9. Experiment with introducing competition. Competition can be fun and motivate people to give 110%. Be extremely careful with competition between team members because this can be demotivating and mess up your culture (I don’t recommend it), but it can really help to compare your team to other teams. Even consider developing a rival ry— “Guess what?! We passed the North Boise Team today! 😎"
10. Recruit a co-leader. Being a team leader is a lot of work, especially when it comes to recruiting. If you have a regular on your team that’s highly motivated, you get along well with them, and they have leadership potential, consider asking them to join you as a co-leader. Not only will it make your life a lot easier, but you’ll be making your team more resilient and sustainable. No one’s a leader forever, so it’s always a good idea to have a transition plan in place if/when you need to downshift or step back, and a co-leader is an ideal option for that.