Invest in Digital Organizing
To say that we had an uphill battle incorporating digital organizing into Hillary for America would be an understatement. By the end of 2016, we had built a juggernaut of a program that has lots of lessons for a path forward for Democrats who want to use digital on their campaigns. I’ll never forget learning that our campaign manager really didn’t even think “digital organizing” was real.
Our goal was extremely different than either Bernie Sanders in the primary or Trump in the general — their programs were all about big. Big crowds, big Reddit threads, big organizing. We took the complete opposite strategy and built something that mirrored old fashioned community organizing as closely as possible, and always prioritized the one to one interaction. Hillary was the candidate for an intimate backstage meet and greet or a small coffee meeting, so we were the program that prioritized peer to peer conversations.
Our team believed deeply in the power of combining our digital prowess not just to make it easier for organizers and volunteers to complete tasks, but to make it easier for them to connect and have the conversations that win elections. And this informed every level of our program — from our first-ever digital voter hotline that answered 600,000 voters questions in real time on social platforms to the 40 million peer to peer text messages that we sent for every piece of our program.
It would be hard for me to highlight the full scope of our work, but here’s some major highlights so you can get a small inkling:
- Hired a diverse team of 99 in HQ and 14 battleground states
- Recruited over 1 million volunteers
- Sent 40 million peer-to-peer text messages in a first of its kind voter engagement program
- Grew a 1.2 million subscriber SMS list, raising $9 million and announcing Hillary’s vice presidential pick
- Generated 5.8 million phone calls via our online call tool
- Generated hundreds of millions of social media impressions for National Voter Registration Day
- Registered over 200,00 voters online in key battleground states
- Built battleground state digital programs in 14 states
- Recruited over 250,000 grassroots social media volunteers to drive our message on social
- Trained over 50,000 new volunteers, most of whom receiving their first campaign interaction through our program
- Answered 600,000 questions through our digital voter protection hotline
If you’re running a campaign in 2018 or beyond, invest in digital organizing.
Campaigns are always ready to hire an email firm that raises money, and many are moving in peer to peer texting because it’s a quick way to reach voters, but these aren’t digital organizing programs. A digital organizing programs is infused into every part of your program: recruiting social media volunteers to authentically communicate your message to their friends, a mobile program that combines broadcast and peer to peer SMS to meet voters where they are, technology that makes it easy for people to find their polling place and make a plan to vote. It requires an early investment, like any good comms or field program, and it requires a commitment to creativity and flexibility.
We had to reach millions of voters, so our program was well-resourced and had almost 100 people. But one of the reasons I know this can work at any level of campaign or organization is that we didn’t start out that way. From the campaign manager on down, we had to convince people that digital organizing deserved time, money, and people. When we started our SMS program, which eventually created an entirely new campaign spokesperson in “Jess from HFA,” we had zero subscribers, no full-time staff dedicated to the program, and had spent most of our political capital to even get the program started.
That’s an expensive risk that we had the resources to take, so let me talk about one that is less expensive. Tens of thousands of people signed up every week to volunteer for the campaign, and our team couldn’t follow up with them in enough time to keep our hot leads warm. So we started a weekly new volunteer call that we invited anyone who had signed up on our email list in the last seven days, and we faithfully did it every single week until the end of the election. We answered every single question, followed up with every single email, and gave people actionable they could take the very next day. This didn’t require a huge resource investment — we made a deck, we scheduled it on our calendars, we worked with the email team to send it, and we held that time faithfully every week. We trained at least 50,000 volunteers this way, which is a conservative estimation.
One of the major reasons we were able to do this work is that we focused on hiring. By any measure, this was a tough sell — we hired approximately 50 people around the country in less than two months. Our team was incredibly diverse, because we put a stake in the ground and we didn’t hire unless we had a diverse pool of applicants. We sent to every listserv we could, we looked at the roster of every firm to poach people, and we sent emails to every single friend we could think of. And then my team spent hundreds of hours looking through the tens of thousands of resumes and looked especially for people who had “nontraditional” resumes and a passion for Hillary Clinton.
Lots of folks in progressive politics wring their hands about diverse hiring, but the real secret is: Hire diverse leadership. Generate a pool of resumes as big and far-reaching as possible. Prioritize hiring passionate hustlers who have the experiences of the voters you want to reach. Be willing to train people who are almost there with just a little push. And trust their instincts and expertise when they raise creative, exciting ideas that scare you a little.
In 2018, invest in digital organizing. We need it, and the results speak for themselves.
