Session 2- Build Your Team.mp3

[00:00:00] Hi, guys, welcome to any of Action Academy this session. We're going to be talking about how to staff up and build your team. And we have Kate Carol from the Arena Summit here to talk to us about that.

[00:00:14] Everybody glad to be with you.

[00:00:16] As Morgan mentioned, my name is Kate, Im a co-founder and partner at the arena and we convene, connect and support the next generation of civic leaders. Mainly our work focuses on supporting first time candidates. So excited to be with all of you today. So building your team, we are going to cover a few things today. Three main goals for this session. The first is covering campaign roles. So what are the typical roles that you would see on a campaign and what should you be looking for and prioritizing when you first get started? Where to cover hiring best practices? So we'll talk about process for making sure that you get rock stars on your team and secure the best talent out there. And then we can talk a little bit about culture and leading and managing for performance. So with that, let's talk about campaign roles. There is no one size fits all model when it comes to campaigns, and the roles on a campaign are incredibly different depending on what size of a race you're running and what your budget looks like. If we were to look at a presidential campaign or a statewide campaign, we would see way more staff. So we're not going to talk about every role that could exist today. We're going to talk about some of the key leadership roles in an ideal scenario. I want to give a disclaimer that if you were working on a local race or you're running for state legislature and your race is more localized in general, you very likely will not hire for all of these roles. But they're good to know about because even if you don't have a staffer stepping into this role, identifying somebody who can kind of take point on the responsibilities that a staffer might otherwise fill is a really good way to start growing your capacity and sort of professionalize your campaign. So let's look at the ideal leadership roles on a campaign that you might be running. So the first role and the most important role in your entire campaign is that if a campaign manager, when you think about a campaign manager's role versus maybe the role of a candidate. There's there's some key distinctions. If you were running a company, the candidate would be the CEO and the campaign manager would be like your managing director. They're the person who maybe they're a little bit more behind the scenes, but they are writing the strategy. They're hiring the team. They're really leading on culture and setting the tone. They're overseeing the budget and really keeping the trains running. They also are somebody who will be occasionally external facing. So you want your manager to be somebody who can take meetings on your behalf and represent you with top stakeholders in your district. Political influencers, people who are influential within the party, folks who can help your campaign in a big way. So looking for somebody who not only has the strategic chops and the management skills, but who also has the people skills to represent you in high stakes scenarios are three key things that you're looking for in a campaign manager. And the last thing I'll say about this role, because you could talk about it all day, is that you want somebody with whom you have chemistry and you can really trust the candidate. At the end of the day, is the approval in chief as a candidate, you should be signing off on all major decisions. But the campaign manager needs to be empowered in the day to day to make the decisions that aren't quite as important. So taking a lot of time upfront to align with your campaign manager and then really empowering them to lead and drive the strategy and make decisions when you have to act fast is super, super important. So make sure that when you're interviewing people for this role, you're choosing somebody who you really gel with. Finance director. So this is probably going to be your second higher for some of you will be for the more local races, it may be the only other higher that you make. But obviously you can't run an organization, you can't run a campaign without resources. And running a fundraising program is not a joke. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of research and it takes a lot of strategic chops. So finding somebody who will write a finance plan for you that has goals and strategies to meet those goals, whether it's through events or a grassroots fundraising or bundling or setting up a finance committee or all of the above, really, really important. Your finance director is going to be charged with running the entire finance operation. So, again, for some smaller races, this person is doing everything from writing the plan to staffing you during call time when you're reaching out to donors and asking them to give to planning events, to liaising with other groups that may be interested in contributing to your campaign. You name it. In other cases, your finance director, if you're on a larger race, may be managing a team with finance assistance with a call team manager. So this again, is a really important hire, really important. This is somebody that you'd like spending time with because unfortunately you're probably going to be spending a significant chunk of your time dialing for dollars. You're going to pull up that list of everybody who you've ever met, who is a part of your personal network. And they're going to get a phone call from you at some point in the first few months of your campaign asking them to give and contribute. So making sure that this is somebody who, you know, not only has the chops to do the job, fulfill their responsibilities, but also somebody who you like spending time with actually really important to look for when you're hiring a finance director excuse me, organizing director. So this is a role that often gets overlooked on smaller races, because while people know that it's important to do voter contact and to get out there and have conversations in their communities, they don't always know that a lot of work goes into building the capacity and the volunteer teams to do that at scale. But this is an incredibly important position that I recommend every campaign hire for, even if you are a small local race. If the other side has a lot more money than you do, then your ground game is even more important. And we know that at the very end of the day, personalized contact and face to face conversations are the most effective way to move voters and put them in your column by Election Day. So a couple key responsibilities for the organizing director. One, they write your organizing plan. That means doing the electoral math. In a best case scenario, they may have a data director to work with. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But they're writing your organizing plan. They're figuring out your voter targeting code. You need to persuade, you need to turn out who might. You need to register if that's part of your pathway to victory. And then they build a plan. Day by day, week by week, that allows you to recruit volunteers and put structures in place to make all that voter contact happen. They in many cases, if you're on a larger race, are also going to be a big manager in your race in terms of actually hiring and training and coaching staff. So that's another skill set that you want to interview for when you're looking for organizing directors. And in the best case scenario, this is also somebody who's digitally savvy and knows how to integrate online organizing into your programs. So someone who can be thoughtful about what you're doing on social media, how you're using email, how you might use as a mass or peer to peer, which has sort of been one of the greatest innovations of the last couple campaign cycles and really integrating that into the organizing work that you're doing on the ground with volunteers, phone banking, canvasing house meetings, all the things that you do to build capacity and then make personalized touches with voters.

[00:07:27] Communications director.

[00:07:28] This is something that, again, depends on the size of your race, if you will, have the budget to hire for. But if you can't, I highly recommend it. Your communications director is your storyteller in chief. They are responsible for making sure that you develop a message that is consistent and clear and crisp and can be easily retold by supporters of your campaign. That will be amplified not just in the press, but online and on the ground. So this is sort of the keeper of your message and the person who ensures that everybody else on your team has what they need to amplify that message in an effective way. When it comes to the day to day responsibilities beyond the sort of core message development the communications director does up front. This person might do everything from pitching reporters to get stories and interviews, earning media for the campaign to advising on the narrative for any media that you're producing. So like video ads or any other digital ads that you might run the the collateral materials or the literature that you're passing out at people's doors. This person may also be charged with writing speeches and press releases and press advisories. That's a lot for one person. So I want to be clear that our larger campaigns, you would have press assistance to help as part of a larger communications team. You might have speechwriters, but on those smaller campaigns, the more local races, you may have one person who really is a one stop shop. When it comes to comms, if you don't have the budget to hire somebody for this, I would look out there for professionals who are willing to help you in either a little bottle capacity really thinks about your personal network, but this is a very specialized skill set and so it's not always easy to come by. And if you do have the budget to hire for it, I highly recommend finding somebody to play this role on your team. And finally, data director. So for some folks think this is a luxury, but more and more, I think it's becoming a mission critical hire. So what does a data director do? Data director does a lot of things. The first thing they do is they help you determine your pathway to victory. So I mentioned that in a best case scenario, with a campaign with a large budget, you're organizing director works with a data director to determine this. But the data director in that process would actually take a look at all the prior election results for your district, look at similar years to try to suss out what you think turnout is going to be. It's a lot of guesswork. It's really part art, part science. Look at the electorate and sort of the key attributes of voters in your district. So demographics, age, race, ethnicity, income and education levels and really help you figure out where you want to concentrate your resources on persuading and turning out voters. This is not a perfect science, but it is how we stay focused and intentional and strategic when we are developing our programs and developing our messages to reach our target audiences. So this is really, really important upfront on your campaign. Going through this process and in a best case scenario, your data director leads it after you've got that pathway to victory and that voter targeting figured out. There are a couple other really important sort of infrastructure tasks for the data director. One is establish early establishing metrics. So on any given day, what are the three to six things that you're going to measure as a campaign to know that you're making progress toward your overarching goals and those metrics may have to do with output. So you often hear campaigns talking about the number of doors they knocked or the number of phone calls they made, a number of conversations they had. They might also have to do with capacity. How you're growing your team and your resources. So dollars raised one on one meetings, house meetings held, things like that. Your data director will work with you and your team to figure out what are the things that are the biggest signals of success for us and how are we going to hold ourselves accountable and really think critically about measuring those things along the way. And then finally, they're overseeing data collection and management. Most of you are probably using a CRM or spreadsheets to figure out how you track engagement with both volunteers and voters. The larger your campaign, the more sophisticated and complex this becomes. Having somebody who's in charge of managing that database and making sure that all of the protocols are in place for people to collect and enter data in an easy and accessible way. Super, super important. So I highly recommend getting a data director on your team if it's within your budget. So as you just mentioned, these are the leadership roles on a campaign. These are obviously not all the roles. There are others that get layered on. The larger the campaigns get, the more you can sort of specialize and divide responsibilities. But these are key lead leadership roles to think about whether you are staffing and putting these out as paid positions or just recruiting volunteers with specialized skill sets who can really be leaders and multipliers for your campaign. And finally, don't forget about legal and compliance. So most of the time you don't have an in-house lawyer or compliance expert on your campaign, but these are things to take care of early. So after you've set up your bank account, you file to run, maybe even before you've hired your leadership team. Making sure that you are saying legal and staying compliant with finance laws. Super, super important. Typically, this is something that you would outsource to a firm or a contractor. So don't forget about this. Prioritize it very early on.

[00:12:48] OK, so those are the general leadership roles that we look for on campaigns, things to prioritize upfront when you're building your team. Let's talk about how to find those people and actually bring them on board. So how are we going to hire rock stars? We're going to run through four steps that you shouldn't skip. I'm going to I must say that again. You shouldn't skip these steps. It's going to be tempting, because when you're working on a campaign, the stakes are really high. The resources are scarce. And you have a very limited timeline. Right. Everything needs to happen yesterday. And so a lot of the time when people are hiring on a campaign, the process is really like, hey, do you know anybody who might be willing to do this thing for not very much money for the next six months and then their job ends after Election Day. And people quivers around and get the warm bodies in the room. We don't want that to happen when you are building your team, especially your leadership team. They are the keys to your success. Right. The best tools and the best strategy and the best plan will fail if you don't have good people driving that work forward. So I really recommend investing in this, especially when it comes to your campaign manager and the folks who are really leading the work on your campaign. So first things first, do not skip this step. Write a job description. A lot of folks will write a paragraph and put in an email and send it to friends. Don't do that right. A real job description that talks about what the roles and responsibilities and qualifications are that you're looking for in this role. Now, keep in mind that campaigns are weird. It's a smaller industry, so to speak. There are less campaign professionals in America than a lot of the other industries out there. And so the pool is not always the biggest. That means that the qualifications and responsibilities should be flexible, but you should be ambitious. Right. So if you're looking for somebody with two cycles of experience, say that you'll still get people applying will only have one cycle of experience. If you're looking for somebody who has experience managing a budget, say that. But really the most important thing here is to think about the skill sets in the job description. So what are the things that this person is going to be doing on a daily basis and what are the skills that they need to have develop to do those things well? So think about things for leadership roles like strategy, managing staff, dealing with vendors and consultants, you know, taking meetings with top stakeholders. Really think concretely about what the things are that go into that role. Write it out. Make a formal job description. After you've got that done, don't just think that you can post it on jobs boards or put it on your Facebook wall and step back and watch the resonates flow in. You've got to build a team of recruiters who are going to go out there and have their eyes peeled, ready to find those rock stars for you. So that is not to say you shouldn't post on the jobs boards. You absolutely should. But your best chance at getting good talent on your race is to find people in your network who are invested in your success, who are going to help you go out and really headhunters to find the best people for the roles. So once you got that job description, I like to think of like a whole list of people that I know have a good eye for talent who I trust, who may be either one degree removed or two degrees, degrees removed from people who fit the profile that I'm looking for. And I send them a one to one email with a link to the job description and say, hey, really important role we're trying to fill in our campaign. We'd love to talk to you about it and think of any folks that I that you know, who I should talk to. So even if they might not be directly connected to people who fit the profile, they may have a network of people who are so really invest in this step. Think of who your recruiters can be before you just start going out and having conversations. Once you've got resonate is flowing in and people to talk to you. Interview with purpose interviewing is a skill we act like it's not. We actually get to just be easy. And there's a set set of questions that you always ask. But it really is a skill because when you're interviewing somebody, you're looking to get the real answers right. And you want to get a sense of their experience and what they're like when they're not in an interview setting. So don't ask. Yes, no questions. Don't ask the typical questions that folks always get about. Like, what are your top three strengths and what are your top three weaknesses? You can ask them, but you're not going to get to the core of who they are and what their strengths and weaknesses are with that question, because they are filtering it for you. So instead, we recommend asking probing questions, ask for examples of specific times when X, Y, C fill in the blank. Ask folks to walk you through their thought process. How would you deal with this situation that I'm going to describe? You would give them a scenario that they might encounter in the job that you're about to hire them for. If you're looking for resources on interviewing and interview questions, I highly recommend checking out the management center. They have a whole bunch of inner of sorry of resources just for hiring and interviewing and they do a really fantastic job. So that's the management center. Check them out when you're interviewing. I was just set up a tracker and I usually just do this in a Google doc or you see sort of the name, the phone number, the link to the resumé of the person who we're talking to. And then there are places to the right columns to the right for red flags, yellow flags and green flags. So you obviously don't want to take notes at every single answer that this person gives you, because then you just have a novel to read at the end of the interview. But actually keeping an eye out for the things that make you go, oh, yeah, that person could be great or oh, that's maybe a red flag. I'm not sure how I feel about that. You know, this isn't like a horrible thing, but it's something to maybe dig into later and to come back to. It goes in the yellow flag category and this will help you really organize your thinking and remember what your impressions were after the interview. It's also a really good idea. This isn't on a slide, but it's a really good idea to have multiple people interview for the really important roles. So if you are the candidate, you should not be the only person talking to your campaign manager prospects. Make sure that you get somebody else to also do an interview or two. It is normal for folks applying for the campaign manager role to go through three rounds of interviews and have them take notes as well. If you don't want to use a Google doc and you're not a spreadsheet person, you can also create a web form that has questions on the skills that you're looking for and ask people to kind of score the candidate and then also give you their red flags. Green flags, yellow flags. Really good way to just make sure that you're accounting for your own bias, that you're getting another perspective, and that if you have an awkward interview and you don't really get to the questions you want to, that somebody else can kind of follow up. Finally, if you can't do in-person interviews, I highly recommend using video. If you don't have a zoom account or a bluejeans account, you can use Google Hangouts or face time. It's just more personal and I think you're more likely to get a sense of who this person is. And again, if you're interviewing a campaign manager, the chemistry is really important. So after you've gotten through the interview process and you have some finalists identified, hopefully you've got two or three people for each role and a best case scenario, don't just interview, assess for skills, give them a test. Now, again, testing is something that you can go overboard with. So I recommend thinking of an exercise that won't take your prospect more than a couple of hours. You're not asking for like free work product or something that's going to take them days to complete, but something that takes it, you know, maybe a couple hours to sit down and have them write or complete some sort of project that shows you how their skills translate. There are some things that we just can't interview for or we can't interview for well, with campaign managers, for example. Sometimes it can be difficult to interview for their plan writing skills. Right. Even though writing the campaign plan is like one of the most important things that they will do for you. So asking them to write a memo that kind of outlines their thinking and what it would go into their campaign plan and the questions that they would ask, asking them to show you a sample budget that they're going to create for, you know, maybe a shorter, shorter span of time is the first three months of the campaign, something like that. Think of things that they would do in real life, but that you don't want them to spend quite as much time on and get just a sample of what that looks like. This is a really good way for you to just see if somebody can walk the talk that they gave you in the interview. And finally, you want to be really clear about defining success and parameters. I once applied for an internship that involved working with state boards of elections to get all of the data from them that we would need for knowing the election ministrations process. So when people could register and how and when the deadlines were and all of those things and collecting all that information. And I was given a scenario by the hiring manager to go to a specific Web site and track down all this information. And if I couldn't find on the Web site, it was I was directed in the skill test to do whatever I need to do to get him to get that information that was within legal bounds. So I actually had to call the county board of Elections and get somebody on the phone and ask questions in order to kind of complete the checklist that I needed to to get that research done. And they told me that I could do that. Right. So being clear about what the parameters are and what you're looking for without being prescriptive, right. They didn't say, hey, call the county board of Elections. Important to actually accurately assess your skills. And don't forget to check references. So we took you through the four steps, but really there's a fifth one before you bring anybody on, you want to make sure that you talk to people who they have worked with in the past. Most of the time when we check references, we talked to two managers, people who who were their boss in a previous role. I also like to talk to folks who worked horizontally with them or for them. So, again, the more important the role. If this is your campaign manager hire, I would check more than one reference. I might check two or three again, not just looking for folks who manage them in their capacity, in their previous position, but also their peers and folks who maybe worked on their teams. OK, so we've covered the rolls on a campaign, some hiring, best practices and process. Now we're going to talk about a subject that we could probably talk about for days, but we don't have that kind of time to talk about leading on culture and how we create the conditions for a team to succeed and perform in a very high stakes, fast paced environment. So we're just going to cover a few things here and I won't go into too much detail. But one of the most important things you can do when you are creating culture on your campaign is to take the time to align and set norms. That may sound cheesy, that may sound basic, but when you are working in a setting that involves long hours and a lot of grunt work and little pay. In most cases, morale matters a whole lot. And so does clarity of expectation. People are not the best versions of themselves when they are fatigued and they're not doing this for the money, right. Nobody signs up to be a staffer on a campaign because they want to get rich. They're there because they care and they feel called to serve in some way. So taking some time in the beginning to make sure that people bring that enthusiasm and that sense of mission orientation to the work all the way through the campaign, really, really important. So I recommend getting everybody together in a room once you've got your team in place and actually going through the things that we will do and we won't do. We will treat each other with respect. We will include people. Here's how we'll communicate, talking about what your collective and individual goals are. So, you know, for organizers, this is easy because they have quantitative goals to hit. Right. You have to hit X number of doors or phone calls or text messages, sent you a Y number of volunteers recruited for going through this process with really every staffer. How will I know if I'm successful? That's really important when I'm working crazy hours and, you know, pouring my heart and soul into a campaign. So talking about goals. Talk about how you're going to communicate. So how are we going to check in? What is the meeting schedule look like? What are we doing to report our progress toward goals, having to hold each other accountable? What does that look like? If something's urgent, are you going to email me or am I going to get a text message or is it better to just jump on the phone? What is the expectation around being available outside of working hours? This is something that we deal with, unfortunately, a lot on campaigns because they move so fast.

[00:25:24] All of these things are important to be explicit about upfront. And another thing to align on that often gets skipped on campaign is campaigns is core values. And this is something that I think really distinguishes the great campaigns from the campaigns that are just OK. What are the values that unite us that we want to live every day? So it's not just about naming what those values are, but then saying and how does that affect how we work together? How does that affect how we talk to voters and how we talk to donors and how we talk to volunteers taking some time to really hash at least these three things out and get them aligned, get some alignment on these things when you begin the work together. Position you for success later.

[00:26:03] Be a coach. So this is another one that I think sets the good campaigns apart. The best campaigns that I ever worked for were campaigns where I had a mentor who never called herself a mentor, and usually that person was my manager. If you are somebody who is in a leadership role in a campaign, then the most important mindset that you can take to the work is that your success depends on the success of your team and your failure. Their failures and vise versa. So your job as a leader on your campaign is to unlock the potential of the individuals on your team in pursuit of a common goal. It's to help them ask the right questions. It's to nurture them. It's to help them build muscles and skills, not to focus on what they're doing wrong, but to help them build on what's going well and what they're doing right and to give them feedback on a regular basis in a way that is respectful but direct. So when I think of what it means to be an organizing director or a campaign manager, a lot of it is about figuring out how you empower others and how you give them an opportunity to grow and succeed. And your job is really like creating conditions and support systems and helping guide them in that direction. So coaching is a lot more asking and guiding than it is telling. Sometimes it's showing in modeling, too. We'll talk about that next. So last thing that I want to talk about for leaders on a campaign in creating culture is delegation. Those of us who work on campaigns tend to be workhorses, just a fact of the matter, and a lot of the time that means that if something lands on your desk and it's not expected, you just say, well, through hands up, it's gonna be a late night for me. But you have a team and it's actually incredibly important that your team works together and that you are looking for the best use of every single person on your team to maximize your capacity. So if you are in a leadership role in a campaign and really if you're in any role as a staffer on a campaign, you're constantly gonna be looking for the multipliers. Right. And how you grow and how you make use of all the great people that you're working with. You should be asking yourself all the time. Can anyone else do this as well as I can? And if the answer is yes, they probably should be. This is the law of comparative advantage, right? If you have reservations about whether or not somebody can do something as well as you can model it for them, do it together. There is a phrase for this. That's a very simple mnemonic, which is I do. We do. You do. I may do something on my own. Then we're gonna do it together and then I'm going to take a step back. And you're going to do it solo. I'm going to be there to give you feedback, debrief the experience and prepare for the next time if it doesn't go so well. This is like a very important mantra to guide your work, especially if you're an organizer and you're working with volunteers, because on election day, your goal is to organize yourself out of the job. Right, to have volunteers owning all of the campaign activities, running the show. And you're there to troubleshoot and put out fires and make sure that they have what they need to be successful. So modeling and training and showing people what success looks like and then helping them learn how to take over responsibilities gradually over time to eventually fly solo is really, really important really for any role on the campaign. So be a master delegator. Be a coach. Take the time to align on values and norms and how you're going to work together and communicate. These are just some fundamental things really worth investing your time in upfront to create a good culture on a campaign. The last thing I will say here, and this is the thing that I speak from experience on, is that if you are a manager, it is really important that you are also taking good care of yourself. One very common and unfortunate thing we see on campaigns is burnout and we see a lot of work cultures that are not sustainable, where people are sleeping for hours a night and they're drinking twelve cups of coffee and they're not exercising and are not keeping their laundry done because the work comes first and there are endless amounts of work to do in a day. If you are a manager on a team and you are not modeling what it means to take care of yourself so that you can do your best work, then your team members are going to pick up on that. They're going to see you setting the tone and they're going to do the same thing. So if we want to break this toxic culture in which people who work campaigns don't take care of themselves and then function at 50 percent instead of 100 percent, which is where we need them to be. We have to start with leadership. So put your own mask on first before assisting others. Take care of yourself. You got to be more productive when you are sleeping and eating well and exercising and doing all the things that normal humans who don't work campaigns do. This is actually really important when it comes to creating an empowering culture that sets your team up to succeed.

[00:30:58] So that's it for me. Closing thoughts. The best tools alone cannot win an election. It takes people so invest in them. Thanks for having me. And Trevor and Morgan, I'll turn over to you for any questions.

[00:31:15] All right. So what's a more effective management strategy for a candidate?

[00:31:19] Their delegation with less interaction with staff and volunteers, i.e. an empowered campaign manager or something. That's a lot more hands on.

[00:31:28] That's a great question and it's something that we deal with in our work all the time. I think you don't really want to be on either end of the spectrum. You want to strike a balance. So like I was saying earlier in the session, it's really important that you are, if you're the candidate, are empowering your campaign manager and that's someone who you trust to make the decisions that need to be made quickly. But the campaign manager should also be surfacing the really important stuff to the candidate with sort of the yes, no. Let's discuss notes. Right. And thinking about how you can create habits that allow for that communication to happen in a way where both people feel like they're getting what they need out of the conversation and you're staying aligned is really important. I have worked with candidates who felt really uncomfortable handing over the campaign credit card to their campaign manager. That's a problem because it means that there's not trust there. And your campaign manager should actually be running the budget. You should sign off on it, but they should be running it and making the day to day approvals on basic expenditures that fall within that overarching budget. So that's just one example. At the same time, you don't want to be a candidate who is like totally out of the picture, who doesn't need the volunteers, who doesn't know your staffers names. You know, again, being a candidate is a lot like being being an effective candidate is like being an effective CEO. You want to know the people who are working on your team and show them that you appreciate them and know that they're supported and also have an eye on what the culture is in your offices in the event that something isn't working well, the leadership level. So it's a balance. You want to empower your team. Think about that rule of comparative advantage and really thinking about what anyone else can do as well as I can. They should. That's part of why it's so important to hire people that you trust at the same time. You shouldn't be disengaged. You should be spending time in the office from now and then with your volunteers, with your staff. You should be present and around to engage and take questions and be a part of this movement that you're creating.

[00:33:30] Awesome. That's really, really helpful.

[00:33:33] What kinds of jobs would you say are the best to use volunteer for? Use a consultant for?

[00:33:39] And where do you want to have paid staff and interchangeable?

[00:33:44] Yeah. So I think you definitely want a campaign manager. Well, let's say you're running like a very local level. You need a manager. You need at least one person who is focused on your race full time, who can drive things forward while you are the face and the voice and the fundraiser in chief as the candidate. That's like a no brainer. Got to have that. I think that in the best case scenarios, you also the finance director and an organizing director, because that's just a very heavy lift no matter how you slice it. All other things. Again, thinking about the most low budget version of a campaign, you can find volunteers to to take on aspects of those roles. So there are a lot of people out there who work in data and technology who, if they were trained, could probably do a great job helping you set up your CRM. Right. They may not have the time that a data director would have every day, day in and day out to manage that data and run a really tight program. But they could be your data lead. The same is true for digital, right? There are a lot of people who work in marketing for big companies who might be able to help you. Depending on how much time they have and how invested they are in your campaign with running your social media accounts or helping you write your emails. If your calendar, your e-mails from the next month and if you're a larger campaign like a progression all, you'll probably have a staffer or a firm doing something like that. There's a lot of pro bono legal help out there. So that's a good place to look for volunteers to get you started. But over the longer term, I do recommend hiring somebody who is has a fiduciary responsibility to pick up the phone call and answer your e-mails and help you stay compliant and legal. Definitely worth hiring somebody and paying for the compliance services when it comes to like typical volunteer duties. That's stuff like knocking on doors, making phone calls, running canvasses, sending text messages and going out and talking to other voters in their neighborhoods. And that's really where volunteers are the best equipped to make an impact on behalf of your campaign because they already have relationships with their neighbors. So that's a place to start. If you're looking for ways to get creative about filling in the rules on your leadership team and you have a small budget, that's still something that you can do. Just make sure that you're investing in that campaign manager and that you're paying somebody to help with legal compliance.

[00:36:03] OK, so when you're building a campaign staff, how much of a priority should finding local talent be?

[00:36:10] It's a really good question and you will get different answers on this from different people. I think if you can find people who have the skills and the mindsets and the experience that you are looking for at the local level, you should always do that. If you can find folks who have the mindsets and the skills, but maybe not the experience at the local level, and you have somebody who can train and provide coaching to get them there. I think you should do that, too. I would take aptitude over experience any day of the week for most roles on a campaign. That being said, because the campaign world of professionals is relatively small compared to other industries in America, you will often see that the people who do this professionally kind of bounce around the country, community, community working on different races. I started with Barack Obama's campaign in 2008 in Colorado. Then I was in Virginia in 2009 than I was in Illinois in 2010. I was in Florida in 2012. And that's just very common among people who do this once, fall in love with it and decide that this is what they want to do for a living. Right. It's relatively small subset of people in America. So sometimes the person who is best fit for the job might not come from your community. I would try to find those people in your community first because they have all this knowledge and all these relationships that are really, really beneficial to you. But don't discount somebody just because they're not from where you're from and where you're running, because those might actually be the people who are going to be just as committed and well equipped to do the job.

[00:37:45] So when you're building your when you're looking for your campaign staff and looking to post job descriptions, where do you suggest posing this job descriptions you suggest. Just go into your personal network. How do you go about looking for the tour, especially those leadership jobs?

[00:38:03] I would take a leave no stone unturned approach, like cast the widest net you can when looking for talent. So definitely posted job boards. The arena has one. You can check it out on our Web site. A lot of jobs on there right now. Jobs that are left in town. Manitoba used to be listservs that people subscribe to. I'm not sure how popular they are these days, but they're worth posting to. Idealist is a good place to fine sort of people who are really mission oriented. Inclusive is a really fantastic organization that is looking to bring a more diverse pool of campaign professionals onto campaigns. Getting in touch with them is always a really great idea as well. And then posting to communities that you're a part of online. So Facebook groups, campaign alumni almost always have Facebook groups or list serves. So if you know somebody who worked on a campaign last cycle asking them, hey, can you share this with your network? And then also going through your personal network and your LinkedIn and your own Facebook and all that kind of stuff is worth it. So I would just like you're making that list of the people who can be recruiters for you. I would make a list of all the places you could possibly post and all the people who could maybe even post on your behalf and then kind of go through that list one by one and post everywhere.

[00:39:19] And in kind of on the flip side, if you're a person who's looking to find a job on a campaign, what he does is you have to proactively seeking out and reaching out to candidates that you're excited to work for.

[00:39:32] Yeah.

[00:39:33] So in this climate, there are actually like more candidates, more first time candidates certainly running than I have seen in all my years doing this work. Which means that if you are somebody looking to get into staffing on campaigns, there are a lot of opportunities and a lot of different races that are looking for help. And so I would look at the races out there that you're excited about and find candidates who really resonate with you, who inspire you and reach out to roughly to their their campaigns. Most of them will have a way to get in touch on the Web site. There's almost always an info ad account. People actually check those. So if you don't know somebody who can connect you and make a warm introduction to the campaign manager or the candidate, just reach out cold and tell them that you're interested in helping. Let them know they're interested in a job. If there's a specific skill set or a specific role you're interested in. Don't be shy about letting them know.

[00:40:31] And I think my last question is, I know that the Morgan Trust question you talked about kind of re staffing, and I know that's an unfortunate part of campaigns, but how should a candidate approach the decision to adjust staff midway through the race if that's necessary?

[00:40:48] Yeah, this is really hard, but it's unfortunately very common. I think the best advice I can give here is that it's better to let people go quickly. Once you notice there is a real problem than it is to keep them on and and keep them on and give them a second and third and fourth and fifth chance. If you are letting somebody go, they should know that it is coming. It should not be a surprise. There should be many feedback points before the conversation happens of parting ways. And there's probably a performance improvement plan that you want to put somebody on and actually give them a chance to to succeed before you after getting feedback, before letting them go. But it's better to, as the management center would say, press that red button up front than to keep a low performer on your campaign for months and months, especially when you have really limited time. So if that happens, you know, don't beat yourself up about it. Be kind and respectful and direct respect there for that person's privacy. Have the conversation and then begin looking as aggressively as you can. You're basically to be starting with the same process that you had when you were doing the search the first time, except that you should now also get your staffers to help you. So if you are firing a finance director, your campaign manager is number one priority, should be replacing that person. And chances are they're closer to the pool of likely applicants than you are asking them to really own it and say, hey, we got to find somebody in the next two weeks or the next three weeks. Can you set up a plan for hiring someone to fill this position? And delegating that to that person is something that you should absolutely do.

[00:42:32] I think we've got it. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, guys. We're very excited about you. Thank you so much, everybody. Bye forever. By.