A Long Way From Pen and Paper and Flip Phones
How IUPAT used Action Builder to win victories for working families in 2020
The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) represents over 160,000 men and women in the United States and Canada who work as industrial and commercial painters, drywall finishers, glass workers, sign makers, and more. In short, IUPAT members’ skills are in high demand at every construction project in North America, and their impact extends far beyond the workplace. Members fight for workers’ rights and undertake effective political mobilization to benefit their communities.
In the leadup to the 2020 election, the IUPAT Political Department was focused on activating members in key cities and states that might play an outsized role in winning victories for working families. They turned to Action Builder to help support the Labor 2020 project.
Just before the election, I chatted with Chad Smith, Assistant to the General President, and Phil Lindquist, Director of Governmental Affairs, who were charged with leading political campaigns in Houston, in support of Joe Biden, and in Alaska, in support of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House races. Faced with such important races that were over 3,000 miles (and a 7-hour flight) apart, they knew that a tool like Action Builder could go a long way in keeping both projects on track.
Action Builder is an organizing tool that takes the tried-and-true tactics organizers have used for centuries to build power — including one-on-ones, assessments, wall charts, and more — and puts them in the palm of your hand in a powerful, easy to use tool. Chad and Phil rolled out Action Builder to the Politics and Organizing Departments for the Labor 2020 program, and they quickly noticed how valuable it could be in future work the two departments undertake hand-in-hand.
“Being able to track who knows who creates not just a thread, but a tapestry.”
“The potential in it is amazing,” Phil told me. “I was looking at how you can tie the political piece into organizing and start targeting based on where we have members in purple districts. We can connect with members and do some of the explanation, the groundwork that needs to be done [in a political campaign], so you don’t have to wait until a month before an election to try to convince them. You’ve already inoculated them and educated them, so you’re more of a trusted source than before.”
Just two minutes into our conversation, Chad and Phil were already thinking about how they could use Action Builder in the next cycle.
“I could see us using this in Colorado, where a year ago we flew people in to help us for the Denver City Council races,” added Chad. “If we had used Action Builder, we could have kept all that data about our membership, which would have been a lot easier. It’s exciting to see the potential.”
With all of that member data at their fingertips, organizers could quickly and easily use Action Builder at the local level for both organizing and campaigning. The data collected during political campaigns could be enormously helpful in enhancing organizing campaigns, and vice versa.
“Being able to track who knows who creates not just a thread, but a tapestry,” Phil explained. “You’ve got all those intersections with people: Whose kids are going to what school, and is someone on the school board? How does that translate into getting a Project Labor Agreement for that school? When you look at corporate types, they know if someone sits on the Seattle Opera board, then they also sit on the Symphony, and then they also sit on the school board, they can use all those intersections to their advantage. If we can do that with our members, say, ‘I need to get people to a meeting tomorrow night, and I know that Joe knows Sally who knows Beth,’ now I know how to get Beth to that meeting.”
“If you get enough data, you can see what’s going on, and you can be a little predictive about what’s going to happen. And that’s the only way we can stay ahead of things.”
It comes down to ensuring that organizers have complete and accurate data they can access in Action Builder at a glance to build power and plan their next strategic moves.
“If you get enough data, you can see what’s going on, and you can be a little predictive about what’s going to happen,” Phil added. “And that’s the only way we can stay ahead of things.”
The potential for getting extra help on the political side is another important benefit of Action Builder in Chad and Phil’s minds.
“I like that Action Builder is a tool for the Organizing Department, so since the organizers are used to it, there’s no transition using it for the political season, and the organizers don’t have to get retrained on anything,” said Phil. “It’s a simple system that organizers are used to using, so when you try to translate them into the political season, they’re comfortable with it.”
That dynamic empowers organizers to do that work in the field as well, ensuring a constant stream of trusted, complete information about members.
“Membership information has been really helpful: Do they vote, how often do they vote, how active are they, do they help us? Are they registered to vote?” Chad explained. “That’s really important — why do all the work if your members aren’t registered to vote? So in the off-season, we can utilize this, we can register folks to vote. Organizers can do that when they’re out on the job sites.”
And to keep an eye on the topline goals needed in order to win victories for working families, the ability to use Action Builder’s Tasks feature is crucial.
“You can assign folks to certain tasks, and it’s not so much, ‘You need to do this,’ it’s more about goal-setting,” Phil added. “It’s ‘I have a goal for you, let’s see if we can accomplish it.’ We like to compete, so I think you can really build off of that.”
Finally, and perhaps most importantly to two time-tested organizers like Chad and Phil, Action Builder is a big step up from the old systems they used to do their work.
“Phil and I have been doing this a long time, not to date ourselves,” Chad added. “But to have this technology and a lot of new folks coming in… we didn’t have that when we started, it was pen and paper with the staff printed off, and you’d grab a phone [Phil, laughing: “A flip phone”]. So we’ve seen it from beginning to end, and it’s exciting to see this new technology.”
