Relational Digital Organizing — The Next Political Campaign Battleground
Every single political campaign and organization put out a predictable press release during an election cycle. Here’s how it typically goes…
RNC:
DNC:
Those numbers don’t mean much. What’s the ID rate on those contacts? Are they on the phone… at the door? Were texts included in that number? Door-to-door applications count gated communities or individuals not home as a contact. Most phone calls end in a voicemail, especially in our text-friendly society. 50 million sounds way more impressive than saying your volunteers, staff, and candidates spoke to 3–4 million voters.
The real goal should be building relationships with voters in the community through people they trust; engaging potential swing voters through friends and family. Thanks to new technologies, we’re finally moving towards that reality.
The Future of Organizing
The year is 2022, and you’re the Field Organizer for a local victory office. A technologically savvy volunteer calls in and says they cannot knock on doors, but they would like to help the cause. You tell them to log in to an app on their phone to support the campaign. The app shows them how to sync their address book with the app to help them contact voters. The app then informs them of all their friends and family who can vote in the competitive Congressional District you’re fighting to win. It provides a templated text message that they can send their friends and family. All of the data collected, including addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and survey responses are instantly synced into the voter database and treated like a door knock. The database then uses advanced algorithms to create relationship heatmaps to better understand influencers within communities. After enough volunteers use the app, the algorithm calculates an influencer score for every voter in the database. Door knockers are then sent to the voters with the highest influencer score to encourage them to help feed more data back into the app.
Think this is science fiction? Think again. There are already companies in the early stages of building this out.
Democrats Are in the Lead Right Now in 2019
Right now, left-leaning organizations are substantially ahead of right-leaning organizations in building tools for this new kind of organizing. They are likely to continue to improve rapidly in this area too as a result of Higher Ground Labs, a start-up incubator that is building an ecosystem for progressive political technology. Higher Ground Labs is armed with $5.5 million in funds, and their portfolio companies are a who’s who of the top political technology companies on the left.
In 2014, I served as the Head of Growth for an educational technology company in the Techstars Chicago summer class. I learned first-hand that these incubators create an environment of rapid product growth for companies. The right will need an answer to this development quickly. Here are a few of Higher Ground Labs portfolio companies who are developing technology for this new campaign battleground.
The Tuesday Company — Team App
The Tuesday Company has developed “Team,” which has already been endorsed by the DCCC. The Team app is pretty straightforward in that it allows volunteers to share campaign content on Facebook, text voters in their personal network, and tracks metrics on volunteer and staff performance.
VoteWithMe & OutVote
VoteWithMe and OutVote attacked relational organizing with a specific goal: flipping Congress from Republican to Democrat majority in 2018. The app asks progressive volunteers to see which of their friends vote, which don’t, and who lives in a swing district.
Both make the argument that 10 texts can replace 1 hour of door knocking. They may not be wrong. In tests I have done, we have seen click-through-rates (CTR’s) of 10% on GOTV texts. That suggests open rates of 80+%, which is a much higher rate of message penetration than you would see through other contact methods. More importantly, they are hearing from someone they trust and not a random stranger who bothered them at their door.
VoterCircle
VoterCircle has been at it for a while now and has been in development since 2015. The tool is designed more for general digital organizing than a focus on only winning swing seats. VoterCircle poses the question: “What if you could reach every voter friend to friend?” Their entire platform is built around that premise where volunteers match their email contact
VoterCircle is probably the furthest along in their development of the features mentioned above. VoterCircle is very particular on their Privacy Policy not to share a significant amount of data, but it’s easy to see other companies adhering to a policy that allows a little more data sharing from contact books. A compromise may be where all data isn’t entered into the database, but where some of it is used to improve influencer scores.
Reach — Relational Organizing in Person
Reach is a little different from the companies mentioned above. Reach allows voters to search an app to log voter contacts. This functionality can be useful for in-person parties or rallies where someone speaks to a friend and realizes they support their candidate of choice. This is particularly useful in urban areas where it’s challenging to knock on doors, but you’re likely to run into thousands of people at a local bar or event.
Where is the Right on This?
From a Republican’s perspective, sadly way behind. The problem is a lack of investment and usage. The left has been much more successful in organizing since 2005 due to a combination of ideology, generally younger volunteers, and investment in technology. The DNC is still trying to grapple with their data issues while the RNC’s partnership with The Data Trust continues to prove successful. Moving forward, the RNC and others will need to encourage and support companies that help combat the many options on the left. As of now, there’s perhaps only one company on the right who’s properly positioned to take this on.
uCampaign/RumbleUp
uCampaign/RumbleUp is an interesting company as they’ve been in the conservative app business for a while. Their technology served as the backbone for the RNC as well as the Ted Cruz and Donald Trump for President campaigns in 2016. They have also developed apps for the NRA and many statewide campaigns. Their app already has many features mentioned above including addressbook matching, gamification, P2P texting, canvassing, and more. They also have integrations built out with many well-known companies on the right.
What Does the Future Look Like?
The Democratic nominee will likely play a significant role in how quickly the left adopts these new tactics. If the nominee is Bernie Sanders or Beto O’Rourke emerge, then they will probably be fully embraced. The Sanders 2016 Presidential campaign and O’Rourke 2018 Senate campaign both embraced P2P texting and are built on massive volume organizing. It’s less likely that these would be adopted as quickly for a nominee like Joe Biden.
On the right, the Trump campaign will fuel how quickly the right catches up. They will have more money than any other campaign and have built an impressive data infrastructure. Will the Trump campaign develop their own technology? Will they lean on an outside company like uCampaign? The RNC is highly integrated with the Trump campaign, so where goes the Trump campaign goes the party at-large. To build what I’ve outlined earlier, it will take substantial cooperation from The Data Trust and RNC.
Patrick O’Keefe is the Program Director, Chairman of the Advisory Council, and Adjunct Lecturer for the Master’s in Political Communication at the University of Florida; the first fully online program in the country focused exclusively on “digital in politics.”
Patrick is also the Executive Director for the Maryland Republican Party, leading state party operations.
He previously worked at the Maryland State House and as a digital marketing consultant for more than three dozen companies.
If you want to partner on a project, feel free to email at patrick.okeefe3 [at] gmail.com
