organizing is not campaigning, and high numbers does not mean effective organizing

Last night I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mine who is  creating a tech start up catalyzing local civic engagement.  My friend is engaging in conversations with many companies much larger than themselves to find resources to expand their model nationally.  The offers this start up is getting are exciting and come with the expectation of being in hundreds of cities quickly.  Scaling this local organizing effort fast is the way they will be able to continue to fund doing this work.

In talking with my friend about organizing models to use to scale its organizing I realized we were looking for an answer that doesn’t exists.  There is no quick way to organize a community and you don’t need millions of people to have a successful organizing effort.  Organizations should take this decision to scale quickly very seriously; the how they do it will determine their true impact in society.  But it also begs the question, why must one thing be in hundreds of cities quickly and has that led to us being more effective in pushing our policies?

Is our culture so mass marketed that we must recreate the momentum and look of Obama 08 regardless of what the momentum gets us? Of the millions of people who participated in Organizing For America, very few of them are active in supporting the work it takes to get to hopeful change.   They we’re easily discouraged because the relationship was not deep enough to withstand the disappointment of the expectations they had of Obama.  

Scale and impact are not interchangeable when your goal is organizing.  It’s a choice.  So often organizations sacrifice organizing to be able to hit numbers.  The problem is in doing so; you also sacrifice your relevance to people.   This kills any deeper growth because your communities may not be as with you as you think… Easy come easy go…

If civic organizations can hold the space for organizing when campaigns do come into town they can be absorbed by the on going community efforts and feed into the on going business of hope and change.  Campaigning is not organizing...McDonalds does provide food products to millions of Americans but nobody pretends it’s the same as a home cooked meal.

Crowdsourcing a Campiagn

For the past four years Doritos has hosted Crash the Super Bowl, a contest for consumer generated ad’s. Doritos gets thousands of ad's and picks six finalists.  The top three are picked by the public.  The top three get aired during the Super Bowl.

There is potential of winning up to $5million prize money if the ad scores in the top three spots the Ad Meter and additional advertising meters. The cost of the incentive is well worth it. As Rudy Wilson, vice president of Frito Lay highlights in a press release announcing the finalists.

“Time and time again our fans have proven they have the creativity and talent to match up against the best in the advertising business, and we couldn’t be more thrilled for this year’s Crash the Super Bowl winners.”

These commercials could not be conceived in an advertising agency, they are expressions of the relationship the consumer has with the product, and it works. The Crash the SuperBowl campaign generated more than one billion media impressions and over $35 million in ad equivalency with roughly one half of the impressions coming from non-traditional media outlets.

Business trends of crowdsourcing are very exciting for the world of politics. Crowdsourcing is a way to tap into the collective intelligence of people. It allows you to get the involvement of your target audience and create buy in through their participation. There are some great business models like www.threadless.com are worth exploring. The basic idea of “threadless” is that customers vote on the T shirt design they feel should be produced. The incentive of seeing your shirt be mass produced and sold, promotes the designer to get people involved in the website so they will vote for their design.

This concept is easily translatable for a political campaign that has a base of support to involved. Do it right and it will lead to an authentic way to resource aspects of your campaign and the added value of deepening relationships with your potential voters and people in their networks who have the potential of being a voter at least, and at most an active supporter of your campaign. Saying you are committed to voters does not go far enough in ensuring they are included. Here are some steps to including more voters in a more meaningful way.

Try this:
Have your base help create your message:
Having a contest around posters, t-shirts and commercials for your campaign could give you a lot of creative content and promotion for your campaign. Offering the winner a chance to see their product mass-produced and organizing a high profile PR campaign event to unveil the winner should enough incentive your community will need to create authentic messages.

Having worked on a lot of local campaigns that do not have the money of Doritos or the excitement of a presidential election I caution you to keep your perspective. Smaller campaigns want to evaluate how this could be applied.  The most important questions to ask yourself are 1) do we have a community that will want to get involved in the contest 2) Do we have the means to reach them and 3) is our prize enough to motivate.  Do not organize a contest for making commercials if you're community or your campaign do not have resources to develop and distribute a commercial.

A poster contest is a great one, you can get kids, families and local artists involved and your campaign should be able to produce and distribute them... if not you got bigger problems in your campaign than excitement.

Technology Builders are From Mars Community Builders are from Venus

Notes from a talk at The Future of News and Civic Media Conference-

As a woman, I can tell you I truly believe that men and women are from different planets. As a community builder, I know that technology builders and community builders are from different planets too. But just as men and women can make music together when the learn each other's language, so can technology builders and community builders.

As a Venetian who has been playing around with Martians a lot lately, I hope I can give some key observations on where our cultural traditions separate us, and where they bring us together.

I started The Urban Labs because I saw the innovation happening with technology builders and felt it could inform the evolution needed in community organizing. I knew we could develop new blueprints of organizing using the latest drafting tools. But let me be clear: new tools do not change the time-tested pedagogy of organizing.

Picking a group is like picking a life partner: Choose the organizations carefully, it is great if you have some sort of relationship with the group or the community you want to work with. If you are cold calling an organization… don’t! And if there is an organization you want to work with, do the movement a favor and make sure that they have the capacity to work on your amazing idea’s. Do not mistake authenticity for capacity… find organizations that are viable. You will not get the attention and programmatic support you will need if you pick an underfunded organization...and the worst part will be you will most likely blame the organization for the reason why it did not work out. Organizations first mission is to provide for its community, stopping to include your initiative costs resources may be better used in communities.

The issue of trust:
Technologists must build trust with community organizations, and there is a pretty good reason for that, you can not have a true relationship without it. I want to not only amplify that trust is critically important I want to give you a couple of things to do with that notion on trust.

First, you build relationships with organizers/and community the same way you build any other relationship. You involve them in your life on an on going basis, you get to know who they are and what they like and then you point out the things that you share together. “You like justice, I like justice, we may have something going here… “

Don’t expect the organizer to be your cultural attache: Organizers have worked very hard to build the relationships they have in communities, and you must do some of that work too. Just like you would read up on another country if you were visiting, you must get to know the community before you meet your host, that will also help you not offend your host which will never get you in the community. Go to local record stores, barber shops (get your hair cut, please don’t just walk in and observe), attend a church service. This will help ground you in the community and not just the organizers.

Experience our “Cannons”:
Now what books make up an organizers gospel is a whole other talk and several organizers will have different lists. There are books and trainings that shape how we do our work. Authors like WEB DuBois, Frantz Fannon and books like... The Autobiography of Malcom X or attending an organizing training will help you understand how we see agency and how we do our work. It will also give you a conversation starters. Its very similar to letting drop the fact that you read Eat Pray Love on a date hoping to get points.

Mentioning Malcolm's journey to Mecca and why it helped inform your experience in the world, will get you points. It will also help you understand a very dark piece of America's psyche (which feeds why we seem so mad sometimes). Understanding our pedagogy will help you create technology and experimental projects that actually bring added value. And trust me, what you think brings added value to their organization is different from organizers. They are over worked, underpaid and need to be protective of their communities.  So please respect that, appreciate that and work with your organization so they see you are different than all the other experiences that they have had with outsiders from ivy leagues coming in with idea’s.

Finally I want to end with a point that is at the heart of so many fears you hear coming from organizers, not only do you need to understand it, you need to find ways to reassure organizers that you are not setting them up. CoIntelPro is real. Hundreds of organizers lives have been destroyed because of phone taps, informants etc. Communities have been attacked with state sponsored programs, and most recently we have watched police use YouTube and twitter to charge young people of color with crimes.

I can not make myself clear enough, we have a right to be cautious of technology, stories like Iran excite us, but not enough to put the communities we are working with at risk. So please don’t just roll your eyes when we bring up big brother watching. We have been burnt before and it is only right that you show that you give us more than lip service on this one, because depending who you are working with, you are at risk as well.

So I hope in this brief time I have helped you get through the fist date with your organizer. Like any relationship its critically important to make a good first impression and do not come off as condescending, who would want to bring that into their everyday lives...

I look forward to questions.

Students take to SMS for organizing; Brooklyn Prodigies show connects

For the past month we at The Urban Labs have been engaged in our first experiment with SMS as an organizing tool. The Urban Labs, working with IJJRA, provided an SMS deck for an event campaign that would allow young people to collect RSVP's through SMS and subsequently facilitate event activities through the same deck.

Through the curriculum being taught by IJJRA, the students helped plan an assembly for their fellow high school students to promote street peace. The messages, were expressed through a student generated video and voted on by the assembly. The students, prepared a talent show highlighting nonviolent philosophies. The students collected close to 400 names for the show through SMS.

The Urban Labs created two use cases for the event sign in and voting system. Both were used very successfully at the event, but the sign in, a wordle activity, was a unique way to use texting at a meeting to capture individual feelings and show them collectively, while tracking all the data.

We asked the young people to text in thoughts they have concerning violence, prisons and peace. Here’s some video.  Seeing their own words, seeing the collective response experience of the room created an energetic reaction.  The young people then began texting in additional responses and IJJRA asked the students to do it again. This was a great indication of how SMS can be used to deepen face to face interactions.

The Urban Labs will be releasing a full evaluation of this experiment done in West Brooklyn High School. Big Shout out to Urban Labs board members Rick Borovoy and Chuck Baker for making it happen.