Y’all. We did it!
And by “we” I mean you and me and all the folks in Ragtag, and all the folks organizing on the ground in Virginia and other states, and all the folks supporting them from afar with calls, money, time, and effort.
We did it.
Ragtag’s extremely awesome volunteer energy empowered over 100 campaigns in 2017. We worked with Resurgent Left to support their candidates, Jennifer Carroll Foy, Schuyler VanValkenburg, Donte Tanner, and Vi Lyles, who (almost?) all won.* We built websites for Schuyler VanValkenburg and Kelly Fowler, who both won, and for Sheila Bynum Coleman who didn’t quite win, but who gave the 20-odd year incumbent a run for his money. I think we’ll be seeing her again soon. :)
Ragtag’s volunteer energy empowered over 100 campaigns in 2017. We’re gearing up to support ten times that in 2018.
We built and released Nomad, our carpool-to-canvass tool, and made it available for races in Virginia. The demand for rides into Virginia to canvass was so high that campaigns and outside groups even chartered busses to get volunteers in! Having Nomad in place and ready to go meant that field organizers were ready for any overflow, and knew they would still be in good shape if there was a problem with the busses.
We also provided emergency tech services to fix carpoolvote.com in time for an NAACP radio ad push to get folks in Virginia to use it to schedule rides to the polls.
Some of the most important work that we’ve done is much more behind the scenes than any of the projects I’ve mentioned so far. As you may have heard, Run for Something’s candidates did incredibly well — 40% of their candidates won. That’s an amazing win rate for first time candidates. Ragtag helped them do that. One of our earliest projects was helping Run for Something assess their use of technology, choose the right tools to use, and building some custom integrations to make them as efficient as they could be. That efficiency has turned into wins.
Ragtag partner Sister District Project also did well in Virginia and Washington state. Their candidates won in 13 out of their 14 target districts. Their volunteers raised more than $700,000 for Virginia and Washington candidates, and hit 100k dials and doors, wrote 30,000 postcards, and sent 185,000 text messages. Ragtag volunteers built tools for Sister District’s website to help them connect with potential activists.
Ragtag’s tech expertise and volunteers’ skills — plus volunteer time and dedication — empowered the work of Indivisible Guide as well. Ragtag’s volunteers built and maintain the map of Indivisible’s chapters, so that budding activists can find where to plug in to the movement. We’ve also helped Indivisible scale up by streamlining their contact and chapter management process through consulting on tool selection, and building custom integrations.
We did it.
And yeah, this blog post acknowledgement of the doing of it is a tad late, but that’s largely because I’ve been a) still reeling, and b) still working. We’ve proven that we CAN do it. Now’s let’s keep doing it. :)
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Let’s keep on winning.
