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More and more GOTV operations are finding new ways to stretch the human capacity for pain and drudgery. An unnamed GOP Senate staffer brought us this gem in 2006:
"Hours go by while our captain supplies us with more coffee, donuts, and pretzels. I haven't heard her make any calls yet, because it did take her a good hour-and-a-half to find the Dunkin' Donuts across the street. After take-out pizza for lunch, she has an announcement. She has "statewide numbers." Lovely, I'd love to hear some internal polling or geographic data. Oh no. She's going to inform us of how many calls our team did during the "morning shift." WHAT?!??! They're actually tallying how many calls we do and scolding us if we don't hit "our numbers?" Really? Oh, but she wasn't finished."
This really is funny (read the whole article here . It makes me kind of sad too that we do such a poor job managing and motivating volunteers. I also kind of feel a little guilty that I might have helped create this meat grinder environment for the GOP by teaching tough enforcement at the RNC Field Schools.
From the Democrat side comes this disillusioned Moveon.org veteran:
"Unfortunately, we still have no cure. Despite all of the candidates talk about bringing change to Washington this year, they all ran identical and very traditional Get Out The Vote campaigns in New Hampshire this past week. Roughly 70 percent of volunteers were from out of state. Directives were top-down and based on models developed in the 1970’s. It was all walk-sheets and pencil scratchings, information collected only to be thrown out the next day (Micheal Beach and Zac Moffatt are gritting their teeth right now), a massive influx of people and energy all directed at a non-sustainable form of interacting with people. It was “town hall meetings” with only a handful of locals, squeezed out by traveling fans (who can’t vote) and the media. It was Gidoudavote in full swing."
She has a pretty valid point in that most campaigns still run horribly outdated GOTV operations. Later in the post she waxes poetic about the need to change the way we operate:
"In short, politics needs to truly be local again, and candidates need to pay attention to the states they’re running in, instead of importing a model that just doesn’t fit all. Instead of simply talking about change, a truly savvy campaign would change the way they run. They would integrate their organizers and their volunteers in a dialogue for change and activate their energy to generate new tactics and concepts for their states. They would focus on creating a sustainable base for their party, or themselves, in the general election. They would be daring enough to generate their own media, by staging events that were worth covering, to give us all a break from 24 coverage of nothing. The result would be a candidate, and a campaign, that was actually involving their supporters and generating a national dialogue. "
She raises some interesting questions, read the whole post here .
5 comments:
Are you doing the field schools this year? Is there a schedule out?
Kinda sorta. The format has changed but I will be helping out. They have a schedule up at www.gop.com under Poli Ed.
There are two easy ways to motivate volunteers and keep them coming back: competition and appreciation.
Announcing how many collective calls volunteers make isn't enough. Posting a day to day leaderboard of the folks with the most calls is a simple way to get an inner office competition going. 100 calls free tshirt, 500 calls you get to pie a staffer in the face, simple goals like this give the volunteers something to work for, a light at the end of the tunnel as opposed to the two foot stack of scripts you have waiting for them. If the operation is big enough to have multiple offices, give them hourly updates as to how the other offices are doing, and try to set it up that the one that makes the most calls gets a visit from the candidate or something like that. "The Nashua office is 220 calls ahead of us as of 11:00am, we really need to hunker down if we want to see the senator tonight."
As far as appreciation, she makes a good point that the staffer in charge NEEDS to sit down and make calls for at least a half an hour each shift. The emails and voicemails will still be there when you get done, but the volunteers need to know that the calls are important, so important that even with your hecktic schedule you wanted to squeeze a few extra calls in. Don't ever ask a volunteer to do something you aren't willing to do yourself. Finally, THANK YOU NOTES. Any field staffer worth a darn knows that when a volunteer is leaving you thanks them and ask them when they are coming back. What most DON'T do is take an extra 15 minutes at the end of the evening and write out a quick thank you for their effort. A gesture like this once every couple weeks is all that it takes to make a volunteer feel like they are part of the team, and more than willing to bring a friend in the next time.
True dat.
Isn't it the same thing that happens to burned out Faulkner employees? They sit around staring out the window striving to think up mail copy and longing for homemade choco-chip cookies?
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