Session 7- Reaching Voters Offline.mp3

[00:00:00] Hi, guys. Welcome to Earth Action Academy. This is our session on offline voter contact and it's going to be conducted by Jeremy Bird, who is a founding partner of 270 Strategies and a veteran of many, many Democratic campaigns. With that, Jeremy.

[00:00:16] Thank you, Morgan. Thank you all for for tuning in. I first I just I'm really excited at the opportunity to talk to you all today. I'm going to talk for a little bit about organizing about my experience and just to give you a little bit more background on me. I've been organizing in the political world for both electoral campaigns as well as non-profits for about the last 18 years. Most recently in 2012, I was the national field director for Barack Obama's campaign and had been running a company called 270 for the last five years. And I've had the opportunity to work with our company has had the opportunity work with about 300 different campaigns all across the world. And so much excited to be able to share a little bit about organizing with you.

[00:01:08] I just want a little bit about what? We're talking about here and to explain it, that's for all of you that we're talking about something that a lot of people call field. Some people call grass roots.

[00:01:25] Some people call voter contact.

[00:01:31] And other people call it a bunch of different things. It's not in some cases that ground game or off line. It's called often, which is but nothing goes for a while. A very new term as it used to be. There was no difference from offline, online. And then what I prefer to use is, is really the term organizing. And the reason I prefer this term, when we're talking about voter contact and essentially talking to people through other people.

[00:02:07] And it sort of is the simple nature, nature of what we're talking about. You've had a lot of curriculum about messaging and there's been a lot about it. People often talk about and know about television and other forms of communication. But what we're talking about is really person to person.

[00:02:26] And so I call it organizing because particularly in the year 2018, people are kind of going on and off line.

[00:02:35] And essentially what we're trying to do is figure out in my mind, how do we how do you build the ability in an organization has the ability to communicate with people. And some of that will happen using digital tools. And a lot of that will happen. Door to door on the phones, etc. And so I don't talk about organizing. And I particularly want to talk about the highest level of organizing, which is how do you actually build relational really organized. I just use this as a little bit of that kind of. This is what we're talking about. But the real the first question I think in building a campaign and thinking about organizing is why?

[00:03:09] Why not just spend all of your resources on television?

[00:03:13] Why not just go to local events and it doesn't work and therefore, should I invest in it? And actually, I really want to understand how the first question is the why.

[00:03:26] Typically, when I grew up and in campaigns and in the early 2000s, this stuff that we're talking about now was a little bit kind of like the icing on the cake. People talked about volunteers, they talked about field as kind of having very, very limited impact on campaigns.

[00:03:44] And so there wasn't a ton of investment in that. We've seen that change with Republican campaigns, with Democratic campaigns, with non-profits, etc. as people have I think learned a lot more through that and analytics about the power of organizing.

[00:03:57] And so I just want to give you a couple of stats that I'm drawing, both of these from the research that's done by a group called the Analysts Institute. But they looked at particularly turnout and the ability of a face to face conversation to get somebody to vote.

[00:04:11] And in 2008, a lot of research showed that you can have a four to seven percent increase in turnout per conversation.

[00:04:23] So, I mean, I talked to a hundred people. I could have as many as seven people who otherwise weren't going to vote, turn out to vote and then have another hundred conversations.

[00:04:29] And the question is, how can you do that to scale in 2016? They did a similar study and found within that same range about a 5 percent turnout through through conversations in our research that we did on the 2012 campaign.

[00:04:49] We found that we could have between a 7 and 10 percent increase in turnout and persuade ability, meaning moving somebody to vote for us who was already going to vote. If we were using the right kind of data and talking to the right folks. So I think there's a lot of evidence out there that that shows that talking to people can have an increase in their turnout and especially in close races.

[00:05:14] This could be the determining factor.

[00:05:16] I think what's not talked about is the research enough is the ability to these face to face conversations, particularly in local races, to have an impact on the overall narrative and to get people to really start talking to their neighbors and their friends and their coworkers because they got to go to church with about a certain candidate or about their issues and their ideas.

[00:05:35] So the why is because it works and you're trying to win. Do you believe in what you're fighting for? And we believe it actually hasn't. I believe that it has a more powerful impact in terms of the ability to spread through social networks and particularly on campuses where there's a lot of television or a lot of mail or a lot of noise. It's also, especially in a day and age where people are getting a ton of information sent to them one way, not getting a lot of ability to interact and have a real conversation. So I think that's where over time I feel really has added and added benefit. I want to talk a little bit about Howard. What do we mean when we talk it off? You mean you talk about building relations, but we talk about voter contact?

[00:06:21] I think about it in three ways. Or maybe a framework for you to think about what we're talking about. The first is really the WHO.

[00:06:30] Who are we actually trying to talk to? And you know what that is? One word used often in. In danger, jargon is the universe. Who are the voters that you actually need to talk to?

[00:06:45] What? Is your message.

[00:06:51] And you've had a lot of folks talk to you about message. What are you actually saying to those people and then how? How are you actually mobilizing them? We're activating them. Or moving them and mobilizing them towards voting first and then voting for your candidacy second. I want to talk about these three things. I'm not going to talk much about the second one. We've had other other conversations there. But I just want to talk as I think about field organizing and how I think about why these three pockets matter and why you really have to know the first one before you can do the third piece here. First and second, first two searches. Everybody talks about field organizing, jumps automatically into tactics and they say field is knocking on doors or field is making phone calls or a field.

[00:07:38] These are tactics that are a huge part of organizing, but they have to be within the context of your overall strategy and you have to be thinking about how that overall strategy works in tandem with all the other lessons that you had. But the root question is who are you actually trying to talk to? And that will change a lot of your tactics and a lot of those organizing. There's only two things you're you're looking at. One is trapped.

[00:08:02] And to support.

[00:08:06] Essentially, you want to know who are the people that would vote for me and my candidacy if they actually voted, and then who are those people that are going to vote? And I need to work on them actually supporting my candidacy. It's really. That's what it's about. It's it's figuring out where you actually trying to talk to. And then the real the real first step here is getting a voter file.

[00:08:33] And. Understanding who is and who is your constituency.

[00:08:41] And both parties have national voter files through their actual party. Even then, there's other resources to find. But the voter file essentially where it comes from is from every state and every state has a secretary of state or an elected election administration that has every registered voter who's registered in that state on a file of which you can get public information. So what you need is the registered voters in your jurisdiction, wherever you're running, and you want to know who those folks are. Those are people who are registered to vote. Then what's not on there? People who are not registered to vote. And that's where you have to build. You don't go out and do voter registration, actually add people to the board file. The big thing about voter files and what you're what you need to know is every state different.

[00:09:28] And the big question is. Jobs. Your voter registration.

[00:09:35] Because party registration in molten glass seats, it's actually on the ballot, some say it's not. That's going to tell you a lot about some of these previous voting. If you're a Republican candidate or Democratic candidate or running in a primary and so getting that information is kind of where you start. And the big thing on a voter file, I will tell you some people's first name, last name. Typically their gender. In some states, they will tell you their ethnicity and they'll tell you obviously their address where they registered to vote. In some cases, you'll have additional information like phone number. So what I will tell you is what previous elections they have voted him. I mean, that's really important. As you think about who's likely to vote. Somebody that always votes in municipal elections is likely to vote in the next miss for election.

[00:10:19] It will not tell you who they are, but it will tell you typically if they voted in a Democratic primary or Republican primary. Again, very important information for you to know. I don't. This is really in a data mentality. But I say this because it really important that I think every campaign and when you think about organizing, it has to be about the people. It's not. Rosen in an Excel file with people, the actual people, you really want your voters. That's that's what matters most, your constituency. And so you'll want to come up with what a lot of people have historically called a winner.

[00:10:52] No.

[00:10:54] Which is how many voters there in my district. Do I need to win? And basically you get that by looking at who do we think is going to turn out to vote? And then if there are multiple candidates, for example, in a primary. How many do I need to win? If there are if it's a general election and it's just two candidates, I need 50 plus one percent of that. That thing gives you a sense of how many people do I need to get to vote for me? And then you can set everything from that. And that's where you really get to. You had a session from Mark Batey in the curriculum about getting to goals and really figuring out how to get there. So I'm not going to get too much into that, but I think it all starts with that, because then you think about voters as that's what you're trying to do with organizing is you're trying to get your campaign one on one and aid groups to those voters and then get those people to vote for you. That's really what this is all about. Another way to think about this, though, the last thing we want to say before I get into the how the organizing is, you can really put people you can kind of. This is a traditional way of thinking about voters and a little bit of pockets. And again, you'll want to get down to the actual individual vote with these three groups of voters.

[00:12:05] There's always voters. There's sometimes lawyers. And there's never voters.

[00:12:13] Or maybe at least not yet. So people who are always going to go back and since they turned 18, they voted in every single election. You've got people who vote maybe just in presidential clothes and haven't voted in state legislative races. And then have people who have had the opportunity to vote for a number of years and haven't voted.

[00:12:31] This group, in my mind, really depends on their age because there's some people they just weren't able to vote last time.

[00:12:38] You got to think about people that some people like. It's not about giving up on these people. I think you're really talking about people in kind of these categories. And there's way to this in ways that like group people, but people definitely are going to be here. And then you have kind of how they voted. And we don't know who they voted for in the past. I mean, these I thought would you know, they always vote Democratic.

[00:13:01] Or did they always.

[00:13:07] Always go Republican. And then you have swing voters or persuadable voters, etc.. There really are different buckets. You can say things about, you know, nine buckets here, people. It depends on what race you're running is how you're gonna be thinking about these folks. Right. So if I'm running in a Republican primary, this this group of people always voting Republican, always voters and always voting Republican primaries. These voters really matter a lot over here. They're always referred to publish, but not in a Democratic primary. Voters here really matter a lot. Right.

[00:13:42] And if I'm running in the general election as a Republican candidate, you care a lot about these people.

[00:13:47] These people are probably going to be the most likely to be donors and volunteers because they're always these folks down here. But when you geo TV, get out the vote, work here for a second because they're always voting Republican. But when they turn up the vote and then I was in a lot of time on these swing voters here, depending upon my word, no.

[00:14:05] And so that's what it looked like. Similarly, the challenge for the Democratic candidate. So the first thing I would just say is it doesn't really matter the details here that the real most important thing is that you have your constituency. You know, how many people are there? How many people are registered to vote or not registered? And of those people that you think that your campaign thinks are going to turn out to vote based on history. How many of them do you meet? And then you have a number. Many need to actually figure out how to get that many people to support me. And obviously, you're going to do a ton of stuff with your messaging. But you talked about in previous sessions and and with TV and other forms of mass communication to get you to that window of what I would say about the non asked communication from the actual interaction, the field organizing piece of that. And that's what we want been kind of the rest of the time talking about the way that I think about it is basically this. You have a bunch of voters here.

[00:14:59] Well, we just talked about.

[00:15:01] You've got a bunch of people living in your district. You need to talk to the diverse and interesting and got a job. Look at kids that got a lot on. And this is the universe of voters over here that you're trying to talk to funded by your campaign over here. You got your candidate. You've got whatever resources you have to hire, you know, organizers to hire the communications staff that you need. Or maybe you have buried their little resources. And it's just a couple of people here on the campaign side. You're going to be doing a ton of stuff. Do mass communicate to these folks? Right. One way communication. Right. You're going to have mail. You'll be seeing people now. Right.

[00:15:45] And that's very hard to make interactive that want to push arguments. You know, you're going to be sending these people. You're going to be in some cases where you catch ability. You know, we're going to have it on television. An old school television. We're actually communicating a message that's not everybody can afford that. And a lot of districts are expensive. That's one way to communicate.

[00:16:09] And then in your digital where, you know, you've got.

[00:16:16] A lot of ways to send out messages, you know, you're putting on Facebook or some of that case, you can really become interactive sex if you know a little bit more. And here about a lot of that, especially the advertising for you, just you're pushing out your message. You're saying this is what I must say about who I am. This is why you should vote for me. And you're pushing that message out. And there's lots of other things that you can do here. But those are kind of the big ways in which you're kind of one way communicating voters. And again, I think you can start to get the communication coming back.

[00:16:46] But what we're trying to do is, Sarah, how do you create an organization that's two way communication and that reaches people where they are at the doorstep in a local meeting. And that's really what we want we want to talk about, which is how do you create some organization here? Volunteers come back to the campaign or stash. That can communicate with these folks. They can. They can do a couple of things. Second one. I think.

[00:17:18] Which is to say. Have a conversation where that voter says bad enough based on a model, not based on a poll that says back, I'm going for your can. I'm one of those for your candidate. No, I'm going to vote for. Vote for the other candidates in the race. You want to. You want to have this orientation again? I need those folks. That means persuade them.

[00:17:37] An actual persuasion, conversations. And then you can get them out to vote. And they're voting for essentially your team organization ability, whether it's staff, because you have resources to hire organizers or all volunteer. You want to build an organization here that can communicate at scale to a number of people. And if you go back to I said I started about the Y. If you have a hundred people over here and this organization to all hundred of them, you could start moving five to 10 of those folks who were already gonna vote for you, but maybe not turn out to definitely turning out or five to 10 of those folks to vote for you. Otherwise you're going to vote for the other candidacy or or stay undecided in the race. So the real question is, how do you build this organization and how do you create a field and an organizing team that can have many, many conversations and represent the candidate?

[00:18:34] That's kind of the biggest thing that I was psyched about in running a national presidential field operation is basically what I'm trying to do. What I was trying to do, I mean, the whole country was to at the very local level, at the city council level, at the block level. I wanted to figure out how we could have volunteers who were basically saying the same thing as the candidate at that local level and then having a real dialog with somebody. If you can do that, you can have incredible progress in terms of what you're what you're trying to accomplish.

[00:19:04] So what you're what you want to do with these folks, this organization, to get them to do that. I need this. Lesions and turnout is you've got to actually build the organization. So you need to recruit.

[00:19:19] Brain.

[00:19:23] And then mobilize.

[00:19:26] That's what those those volunteers feel it within. Talk to everybody else. Recruitment. How do you do that? There's a lot of different ways you recruit and fight. Essentially. You want to go out and have one on one conversations, if you're running in a primary, you're going to look at your voter file. You're gonna look at people who are voting in past primaries as probably when you're first. Then you're gonna look at people who've signed up online, people who already have said, I'm interested in your candidacy. You want to go out and maybe have a one on one conversation with him. Why are they already interested in your campaign and build a relationship with them? You want your house means.

[00:20:09] All packing.

[00:20:12] You can't run a cabinet can be in the room. Anybody that's interested in your canvasing. Put them in a room from somebody that you are in that way. Who supports you? And then you're able to have a conversation with them and then you bring them in. That's how you're just call. Because you have staff or other volunteers, you call him and say, I want you to be involved in our campaign. And obviously you can use social networks online.

[00:20:39] And in the real world.

[00:20:43] And so you will use social networks simply as liking your page on Facebook. Ask him to come meet with one of the organizers. Bring them in. But there's lots of different ways to to recruit. Once you have one person that's on board. We all. We get to their social network and bring other people in.

[00:21:01] And essentially, you want to grow that pie, potential volunteer leaders. But you're really just trying what, recruitment of your volunteers.

[00:21:08] And then you want to training. You want to train them on how to have those conversations with voters. You want to talk to them about.

[00:21:19] You know.

[00:21:21] What the message of the campaign is and how they deliver that. You want to train them on how to get door to door. You want to train them on how to cross and rack up random voter who isn't yet involved in the campaign of talking about your kids. So the training piece is really critical to that organization being built and happening. And then finally, you want to actually get them to do the work and let people. This is where the voter contact happens. And you want to.

[00:21:48] Reagan in.

[00:21:49] Train them and then get them actually getting our contact. The big things that we want to do in terms of sort of once they're in the final. The training in the molestation. If we have to invest. No, not money. That's some people will spend some resources on. But what I mean by that is you won't actually invest your time.

[00:22:12] Though, when I worked on the presidential campaign in 2012. But we've got somebody in, we were training them. We would make sure that that candidate was talking to these people backstage before an event to show how important it was. We're investing in them. They matter. You want to do that? You want to. You want to say. You know, you want to show our appreciation. Almost everybody that you're bringing to this organization has a job, family, other commitments could be doing, I think they're sacrifice. And in the same way that you are bound to run for public office or to be engaged in politics, you ought to make sure that you recognize that you're thinking them. And then obviously, you know, you want to train them and you want to really think about developing their. When your campaign is over, your folks should be able to run for office themselves, to be able to run campaigns themselves. And that's a real, real testament to something that you're offering somebody so that it's not like when somebody to volunteer for you. They're doing you a favor. There you're letting them act upon their values and you're investing back in them. And that should be something that's mutually, mutually beneficial. The mobilization front. Let's get into the nitty gritty about what we're talking about and then we'll take questions and wrap up here. We're really talking about again, like I said, with love, you will jump right into the tactics. But when we talk about communicating the message, we're really talking about phones. You got to find people where they are. You call them door to door. Those are really the two biggest ways in which we can talk to folks. But then there's others. There's house meeting. I talk enough for you to do. Not just for volunteers, but for. Or any other type of date or event. With voters, town halls, etc.. But you only to people to. And then there's digital.

[00:24:18] And I'm here because basically, you know, phones indoors.

[00:24:22] But then we can also directly have conversation from our years to voters, whether it's through e-mail or social media. I don't want to let this not be a part of it. But what most people are talking about. Often we talk about field of voter contact is constantly going in there.

[00:24:39] A couple of things about this is we have found and this is there was no this from the world that you live in, that that every year things become less and less reliable and that finding somebody from a voter file phone number and then actually picking up the phone, the contact rate has decreased dramatically and it continues to do every year. It's still a very efficient way, especially if you have the resources to use an auto dialer or any other technology that will basically call there until somebody picks up. It can be somewhat expensive and I won't get into all the details here, but you can look up auto dealers if that's something they really want to do, because he still does work, especially the voters who are in the voter file and who have the phone numbers. It's still a method that really works.

[00:25:26] Doing a door is actually become very effective in research and I think it's becoming more and more effective because it's so rare that people are not used to somebody knocking on their door when you're in an urban environment can be somewhat harder. There's there's a lot of that, a lot of apartments and other places to get in. But typically in suburban areas, in rural areas, et cetera, you know, as long as there's a culture that's going door to door and actually having that face to face conversation, something that can be very, very impactful. So you want to think about what your tactics are and then you want to think about how much of this if I want to talk to you, my number is one hundred people. And I need to you know, I need to talk to these three hundred people in order to get there. You want to something you want to figure out how you can do this, where they use that voter file, go out and have those conversations. Those are really the tactics that we talk about and talk about voter contact. And then the last thing I'll say is in all of this, there's there's an element of accountability in reporting.

[00:26:29] So you basically you want to know how many volunteers.

[00:26:38] You want to know how many conversations? And you want to know the number of supporters.

[00:26:51] There's all sorts of fancy stuff out there. You can do it. You can report on lots of different metrics. But at the end of the day, the first thing you need to do is call the number of volunteers and you need that number to be as many as it takes to turn out the number of supporters you need.

[00:27:05] And then you need to have conversations and know how many conversations. One of the biggest pitfalls and people will look at identity numbers and say they'll look at and say, I made X number of phone calls or I'm not on X number of doors. Sure, that matters in the sense of like how many doors that you had. But really the question is how many people are get a conversation with. Because again, it's back to you. We can we can move people if we talk to them. And then how many supporters do we have it at the end of the day? Support supporter number. You want to get to essentially be whatever whatever your win number is local.

[00:27:39] Right? So these are the three things that matter. You can have different variations of these. You could have number of months, your team leaders. You want to know how many team leaders you have in the right geographic areas. At the end of the day, how many people are really volunteering for you? Not just said they want to volunteer, but actually coming in and doing shift. How many people are you having talked to and how many people are with you? And when you talk to people, you want to know, do they support you? Are they undecided for this, for your opponent? And then you can build on that. You want the people that are you. And those conversations are typically in, you know, considered ones or people that are on board. You want to turn those people out. The people that are undecided, you want to have further conversations with anyone, invite them to events. You want to add them to your digital media program, etc.. And those people who are with you. You want them to volunteer. And and that's that's really what we talked about when we talk about the overnights. So I know I simplified it to some extent, but, you know, that's how I think about what you're talking about organizing is how do you know who you're talking to?

[00:28:47] And then build an organization that can deliver that message that you've created that shares your real story with folks. And then how do you build up an organization of volunteers by training them, investing in them, thanking them, recognizing them, equipping them, developing them professionally so that they can represent the campaign and the community. And then how do you figure out how many people do you need to talk to as voters? How many conversations? And then in those conversations, finding out who's with you, get your one number and then turn those people out to vote through GEO TV or get out the vote. So with that. I think I'll open it up for that question. Part of this.

[00:29:27] All right.

[00:29:28] So what would be the best way to leverage your enviros straight credentials to recruit volunteers?

[00:29:36] Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is like in with enviro credentials, like the biggest thing you have is relationships. So the first thing I would start with is, you know, you have done things with people.

[00:29:50] You've shown up. You've been there. You're going to leader. And so people trust you in an environmental world. And so that will be the first group of people who really have real relationship with that. You can reach out to. And obviously, you know, their value credit. You did work with them on environmental issues before. You know what they care about. It's probably going to be a big part of your platform, or least a big one of the big parts, parts of it. So connecting there on their values is huge. And then just leveraging your own trust in the relationships that you built. So it's hard there with people, you know, people you don't know. I think it's using organization, organization, organization. So there are organizations that, you know, in your area really care about environmental issues. And so how do you reach out to those organizations in some of their leadership? And, you know, introduce yourself and then build the network from there. So I think individuals and the network and then then the organizations that know and trust you and the organizations that you represent, etc..

[00:30:44] OK, all right.

[00:30:49] Hey, Trevor.

[00:30:51] All right. So how do you how would you suggest that a candidate or a field program. How do you how do you think they should address targeting, especially in a universe, to to get to their supporters, especially if they don't have polling or access to information about who their strongest supporters are?

[00:31:12] And I think that's really important question, and I assume a lot of folks who are watching, you know, you don't have access to, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60 thousand dollar poll. Nor would I necessarily recommend you have to do that right away. And then you probably don't have access to, you know, a model, which would also be a very expensive to figure out who's who and where they are on the waterfall. So I think an absence of that, you take the voter file and you look at past voting history, that the sermon do you think is going to vote.

[00:31:43] And they figure out, depending on whether it's a general or primary vote, that universe of people. And then you start reaching them. And obviously they'll be you know, there's sometimes are geographic differences, like in a in an area where maybe you're you're running and there's, you know, part of the city and part suburbs and part, you know, rural. All you might you might start targeting, you know, from a geographic perspective. But I think the first thing to target is just people that, you know, high turnout voters and then to build out your volunteer base. You know, you don't need to target that necessarily is like you basically want to put out everything you can and then anybody that comes your way. So so that as anything digitally, anybody that's, you know, signing up on your website, you want to follow them immediately because they're telling you they can be, you know, be on your team and targeting, by the way, you do targeting because you have you need to limit your resources so you don't have to target if you can get enough resources. Talk to everybody. And if you have enough resources, talk to everybody, then you can target from there based on after you've talked to people who's persuadable and who's with you and who's not.

[00:32:46] So targeting is done when you have limited resources or just what you're trying to talk to. And then I would just say using the voter file based on people's past voting history. Party registration and or anything else you can gather to help you kind of figure out who's most likely to be in your camp or most likely to be persuadable. Ready to start.

[00:33:07] So, Jeremy, what would you what characteristics make somebody a really good volunteer?

[00:33:14] Yeah, it's a great question. I think the first thing is no volunteer. There's not like a profile of volunteerism. And I think that's really important to think about. When you think about any organization you're putting together, you're going to have a diversity of people. People are going to come. Some people are going to come in and want to help you out. Who in their day job? They're engineers and other people are going to come with their data of our teachers or, you know, they're going to have just varying backgrounds. And so I think the most important thing is to figure out how to I make the best use of somebody's skills to, you know, how do these impact on on the campaign. And so.

[00:33:53] What makes them the best volunteer, I think, is that they're committed, right? They may share your values and they're gonna come in because they have that connection to the campaign and that's going to get to come back. It's gonna get him to come in at 8 a.m. to do a canvass shift on Saturday. It's kind of him to be there on Election Day at 6:00 a.m. that open up the staging location. And so they're committed. That's the most important thing. And then secondly, do they believe in and doing the work to communicate to voters? Right. So some people might be really committed, but really, they just want to go to the events and that's like really helpful to people.

[00:34:32] But really, when the people that are willing to go out and have conversations with voters or if they're not really good at that, well, some people aren't. Right. Can they help support it in some other way? Right. So the person who maybe is really like has data background can help you put lists and then enter the data. Right. So that might be put out there. But they're still committed to the process of having conversations with people and helping out in every way. So I think the No.1 thing is commitment. And then the second thing is their ability to sort of have that conversation and then consistency and they'll show up again that, oh, they're not, you know, to prioritize it. And because when you get something that comes in constantly, it just makes you so much better because they'll get better at answering questions. They'll get better at understanding. Have used the walkways and how to enter the data most. So we think about it, a lot of campaigns with like recurring donors, like somebody who likes to say, I'm going to give you money, which is great. Somebody is going to give you every month is the best because you can just count on it. And then it is always building higher from that time without volunteers.

[00:35:39] Well, it's that's a man who just wants to hold signs all the time.

[00:35:41] Yeah. I mean, you know, that's helpful, too, right? And you want to use them where you need them. But you know, and I think the big thing is people you know, a lot of people are shy. A lot of people who have never done it before, you know, find it to be pretty intimidating of a random stranger in some cases. Once they do it, they realize it's not as intimidating, in fact, can be really can be actually very like like giving things like having real conversation with people about what they care about. So sometimes getting somebody who just wants to hold a sign first is fine, right? And then you start to move them into the sort of higher level leverage organizing. I think the other thing is the more you can communicate why and like really let them in on the strategy. So to many campaigns and organizers think like I because I'm running the campaign or I'm on the staff or even the candidate.

[00:36:36] I don't need to share too much with people like they just need to do their task or whatever. But but people don't want to be given tax. They want to be given responsibilities. And so and they want to see the strategy. Right. So if I'm able to talk to people about why we talk to 100 people and we know we can get seven of them, or maybe we've seen that we can move 10 of them very hungry that we talk to, if we do that this many times, we win. And then it's like, OK. Like going out and knocking on doors. It's like it's about winning. Right? And then it becomes about and then, oh, that's about my values. Because if we win, these environmental policies I care about are gonna be represented by the person that that I'm fighting. And so then I'm like, you know, I I'm a genius. And I'm actually going to do it with like a commitment to level to do it more. So, yes, it's not just holding signs. I think sometimes you can move people into that. I just like sharing with them a little bit more strategy and then moving them up the ladder that can get.

[00:37:37] You put your hands on a voter file. What are ways, I guess across both. If you had a large budget or if you had a small budget to organize information in context history, how do you organize the information in a voter file in a usable way?

[00:37:57] Yeah.

[00:37:59] So it depends on it depends on the file that you get and how you're able to organize it. So usually most voter files are are Web based.

[00:38:10] So you're not like getting an Excel file, usually getting a web based file of which you can easily you know, it's kind of like you almost always are able to sort and very easily read. So you don't usually you don't need a data analytics degree to least like sort of sort of the voter file and say, right, I'm going to look at just people who live in this part of the district or I want to look at just people who have voted in Republican primaries before, or I'm just going to look at people who have never voted in a primary. And you can kind of cut the different lists in that way. So I would organize it basically based on what phase of the campaign you're in. So early on, you want to have conversations. You don't say you're in a primary. Let's just take a year in a Republican primary and you have a voter file and it's early on.

[00:39:00] You probably want to sort of let people who vote in Republican primaries before there's, you know, they're going to vote, and then that's probably also we're going to get more volunteers from day one, start there and then further on to get the campaign. You know, you might expand it to people who are would would vote Republican based on where they live or different categories, states who haven't voted in Republican primaries, or maybe they voted in one Republican primary in the past, but not two or three or four.

[00:39:27] So you kind of you know, I really saw it in terms of turnout by past usually past voting history is going to be the primary driver and then support. Usually you start with their party registration if you have it or a lot of our friends have a proxy for that, like they'll sometimes have. It's not they didn't register when they signed up. As a voter because the state and require it. But there's often on the voter file like a proxy for that. I mean, it usually voter file say, well, I didn't know Trevor didn't sign up as a Democrat. This isn't a part of restoration, but he's voted in only Democratic primary. So we assume he's likely to be a Democrat. Not everything. Obviously, there's a lot of people, a lot of campaigns that want to go across party lines in general elections, etc. And that's great. But those two things ought to at least be the first things to look at his past voting for turnout. He's likely to vote and then party red or some proxy for it for like who you might want to talk to, at least at least at what phase of the campaign.

[00:40:20] How do you keep voter and not voters?

[00:40:22] How do you keep volunteers motivated and a what could be a very rough and tumble 2013 cycle when there is all kinds of bad news coming from Washington?

[00:40:33] I think if people feel passionate, I'm doing what they need to do each day.

[00:40:37] Yeah. As a group, it's like the best question. Right. And motivation is, you know, it's it's it's an incredibly difficult thing to do. The first thing I think is the campaign needs to be motivated. Right. So every bit like if your candidate is motivated and jaded and, you know, like it all starts from within. If you're self-motivated as a candidate and then a campaign, people can see that. Right. First you got to have that. You gotta find your own motivation. If you're an organizer out there or you're a candidate, they gotta find your own motivation. What drives you? You got to understand who you are. You have the will to do that because it will it is contagious. Secondly, though, when volunteers come in, it is a story I remember from one of the people who taught me about campaigning is like, you know, volunteer goes out to get there, get their clipboard. They go out and knock on doors. They come back in the campaigns. His group takes the clipboard, throws them on the table, says, thanks for coming. The person may never come back. Right? Like never, because it didn't feel like what they did mattered. When I was one of the campaigns I was working on, we were doing voter registration in the state. And if you do voter registration, you'll find if you go out, you might be out for an hour and collect three voter registration forms that can be incredibly disempowering and feel like.

[00:42:02] Do I matter like if I was here? Would it even matter? So you have to show people that it does matter by like explaining to them.

[00:42:09] So what we would do is somebody would go out and they get three read registration forms. We would send an email to everybody who register people that day like today and registered a thousand people. And then it's like, oh, man, my three people was part of this bigger thing. So you have to be a part of a bigger thing because each of us individually as a volunteer aren't gonna win the election result. But as a group, we can. And so you want to be motivate yourself. You'll see that you want to recognize them when they do the work and connect it to a greater thing. And then, you know, it's like a small thing, right? You want to think anything thinking you want. You know, you want to include them in special events.

[00:42:49] You know, you want to do conference calls just with them. You want to bring them into the strategy. You know, the famous 2008 plus name was he did the conference call and the slide show like how we're going to win Florida. A long time ago. But it was one of the first campaigns to say to volunteers like, I'm going to talk directly to you and not to the press or to donors or to politicos about how we're going to win.

[00:43:10] I'll talk to you directly. And people were like. Like, I'm a part of this campaign. When I've worked on campaigns, last thing I'll say here is what you ultimately want to get to. You want to volunteer, say, you know, in their e-mail, Morgan. Comma Volunteer Leader X campaign. Or little or like put the sticker on it says I'm a volunteer here. You want them to like own it, to be proud of it, to have it feel like something that's better than, you know, that's bigger than. A volunteer event. You're going to feel like it's a I'm a part of the campaign. When they start saying we instead of you, that's when you've got it right. That's when people are like, oh, I'm a part of this campaign. When they see it, it's like you're around the campaign professionals over there. You're the candidate. And I'm just a volunteer. And so I want the last thing I'd say and then I'll set up for real is if you actually believe that the volunteer coming in is going to help you win, you'll act that way. If you don't believe it, you won't. And so if you think it's just icing or sprinkles on the cake, you're gonna treat it that way. If you think it's the cake, then you'd have to actually believe that to me. When I hired field directors to work in states across the country, the most important thing is not resonating out there. It was actually believe it. Do they believe the program that they were running is the difference between winning or losing? They didn't believe it. They weren't going to. They weren't going to stay up and come back and have that commitment. If they really believed that they were gonna do those things that showed the volunteers that they believed that, and then that would cascade down.

[00:44:47] Great. I have I have one last question then. I'll see if Morgan has any of. Text messaging has become a more important tactic in field campaigns, especially of the 2016 cycle, but also becoming it's becoming a bigger deal this cycle to suit. What do you think is the value of having a text messaging program? Should it be something that more candidates think about? Or do you think that it be something that will be popular for a psych wards? Who and what kind of become less prominent? A couple of years?

[00:45:21] Yeah, I should admit I should. But that appears a tactic because it's really important. So as I mentioned on campaigns, phones, the ability to reach somebody on their phone is gone down. Right, in part because it used to be that on the voter file, all the phones were landlines. You know, that's just sort of dropping and it's harder to get cell phone numbers that people will give out freely and it's harder to get them to answer.

[00:45:43] So text messaging has almost 100 percent open rate, right? I mean, very few people like don't look at their text. Right. They're going to see it from a vault. There's two ways to think about text messaging, I think, and there's two ways to think about kind of all the different tactics of communication. It's like how can you keep to your people with everything that are in your on your team, the volunteers, and then having to make it voters. The volunteer text messaging can be incredibly, incredibly, incredibly beneficial because you can easily communicate with all your volunteers about what's going on with campaign. Again, it's a way to keep them feeling engaged in a way that keep that relationship going. And you can recruit them to things, etc.. There's two types of text messaging programs. There's like one lady text messaging and then there's two way text messaging.

[00:46:29] So I'll take two examples. There's a company called Mobile Commons and others that do kind of one way text messaging. You can say that's a lot of people. And then there's a company like a company called Hustle where they have like relational text messaging. What that means is, as an organizer, I can have all my volunteers on my text list and I can send them all a message and then have a conversation back to them. So you want to have on the volunteer side, whatever the technology is, one of the technologies allows you to have real relational back and forth and you can get people to sign up to a match. You can connect it to your voter file, et cetera. That's like an awesome program for your volunteer recruitment. Then there's text messaging, like blasting your communication to people and that can be effective. It can also be not effective if you didn't get the numbers in the right way or whatever. But it can be effective as an outreach just to educate people on campaign and who you are.

[00:47:21] But I think from the perspective of this, if you're running a 21st century modern day campaign, you should have text messaging. It's not that expensive for your volunteer base and for little people who are with you. And you should be communicating with them and your staff constantly through it. And people shouldn't feel it as like one of the ways that they're the most good. And it should ideally connect to your events system, whatever that is, so that people can you can say, hey, I got this event. These hundred people are in my vault, they're my volunteers and they're you should you come to this event, just press 1 or whatever? It's very easy to sign people up for events, doesn't replace the ability to build relationships and be face to face, but it can really help you organize. And then in terms of using it's actually contact voters, it can be effective. But you need to be very careful about not feeling spammy, which is true of email and other things.

[00:48:13] Awesome. I have one last question, which is. So as we get closer to the general election, you're going to have more outside folks getting in the mix and getting in, but invested in your campaign might be the party, it might be friendly groups, whatever.

[00:48:31] How do you sort of seamlessly incorporate them into your field efforts?

[00:48:35] And how do you decide what to divide and conquer?

[00:48:38] That's really I mean, great question. So you'll find this first thing I'd say is like we're all you're not normal in the sense that like. You're listening to this because you're either running for office or care about this, and so when you start running for office, it applied to several of the far out from the from the election and it will be incredibly annoying that people aren't paying enough attention.

[00:49:03] And then if you reelect fast forward until the day before the election and all send in so many people that you would talk to two months ago, I think things are now totally paying attention. And so as you're building, you'll notice that early on you'll have a more hard core group of people. And then it will start to get more and more people start to get engaged. This is how elections work, how well we work as people. We do things last minute. We pay attention to things last minute. It just happens, especially cascades in terms of age as well. That's true of organizations as well as being closer to election day. You've been working really hard on this. You've been building up also. And people will come in from the outside saying, oh, now I care about this race. They really do. And I try to win the primaries. But first thing is, like, you want to have you want basically we don't have a net that's able to capture all of that energy.

[00:49:52] So if you've built out a real volunteer base and spent it like the foundation you can build on. If you don't have very much there, you're not going to catch it. Right. So you'd want to have a ton of that volunteer leadership help out. So that would more and more people, whether their organizations or people who are paying taxes are coming in, you're able to capture them. The big thing will be legal. So you know where it's party or some group that can do, you know, electoral work. It's easy. It's the groups that might be outside groups or, you know, independent expenditure where you can't talk to them. You just have to like let them do their thing. And in that case, I think in all cases, you don't have a great operation that's covering all your bases. And then I would say my advice on the leg. You want to split stuff up is. It's very, very risky to give part of your turf or part of your operation to some outside group, and they do it well where you have a lot of trust and they have maybe they've done this really well somewhere else.

[00:50:49] Or, you know, there's one group that's like the best voter registration group in your area and they're always going to do the registration no matter what. You have to do that piece of it. Maybe that's something you sort of like let other groups do.

[00:51:00] But I would just be very careful about the like, hey, you got that? We've got this unit. And the way that you can really bring the most people in and utilize them at their best is to have an awesome organization with a lot of volunteer leadership. And it doesn't rely on one person to take all the incoming like anybody that comes in can sort of have, you know, there's enough people to handle it. Then you'll be able to really maximize that outside group that just wants to send all their volunteers to you at the end because you can actually take them. So that's the most important thing, though. The other thing I would say about that that gets you there is when you start. Think about election day and what you need to run election day. And then you can work everything back from that.

[00:51:41] And that will help your staff and your volunteers think about it as well. Okay. On Election Day, we're gonna need 100 staging locations and are gonna need a thousand volunteers. And so here's where we are in terms of getting there and they can think about where they're trying to go. And that also is motivating the people as they think about all I need to recruit more volunteers, because when it comes election day, I want to be the guy was the woman with not enough people in my staging location or not enough people volunteering. So that's helpful to think about how you would take in people that come at the end.

[00:52:14] Well, thank you so much for this, Jennifer's useful for our guys. Awesome. All right. Thanks for having me.