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Was the Obama campaign grassroots?

IWhile it had high levels of volunteer involvement, the overall campaign strategy was decided from the top.

This top-level leadership made strategic decisions and set clear goals and plans for voter identification, volunteer recruitment, voter persuasion, and get out the vote. These came from the central campaign office and local field organizers and volunteers helped carry them out.

This is very different than the common image of grassroots organizations where the key strategic decisions come from the bottom up.

Still, I think the Obama campaign was grassroots, but it was also centralized.

I think people often confuse these two terms. You can have a grassroots campaign with high levels of volunteer involvement that is centralized (like the Obama campaign). You can also have a professional organization with no volunteeer organizaiton that is decentralized (some think tanks operate this way).

For me, as a grassroots volunteer, I appreciated the centralization. I could show up at the campaign office and be put to work. They had already figured out what I needed to do.

And if I wanted to improvise, Yes, there was room for bottom-up innovation, as will.i.am and Obama Girl showed.

My point here is not to say that there is one “right” type of grassroots organizing. Quite the opposice, both centralized and decentralized grassroots organizing have their benefits and their places.

My point is that we should know what we mean when we say we want a grassroots organization or a grassroots campaign. The answer will depend on a lot of things such as the organizations values, goals, and constituency.

Think this all through before you decide if you will depend on or reject strategic guidance from volunteers–or from professionals.

I wear eyeglasses to help me see things far away.

I know plenty of people who wear reading glasses to help them see things nearby.

It can be hard to have both long-range and short-range vision in community organizing.

If you only have long-range vision, you get lost in dreams. You know exactly how the world should be, but you cannot take meaningful action here and now to move toward that goal.

If you only have short-range vision, you get lost in tactics. You might carry out a masterfully run campaign or project, the only problem is that it doesn’t move you any closer to your goal.

Anti-abortion groups have done a masterful job of having both long and short-range vision. Their long-range vision is to stop all abortion, largely by criminalizing it. However, they recognize that the can’t get there all at once. so they’ve engaged in a strategy to chip away at access to and support for abortion through waiting periods, mandatory sonograms, and other short-term tactics. And it’s worked.

Can we create equally effective progressive campaigns on issues like ending poverty, caring for the earth, and overcoming discrimination?

There’s a reason that Organizing for Social Change teaches organizers to recruit people for activities, not for meetings. They know that activities are the real work, and there is a danger in recruiting people who just like to go to meetings.

Last week someone told me, “I worked really hard on this campaign. I was only weekly conference calls.”

Nope. Sorry. That doesn’t count.

Conference calls and meetings may be important for doing work well, but the real work happens when between calls or meetings.

Don’t confuse talking about work with work.

Last week I attended a house meeting for people to volunteer with a political campaign, and I re-discovered the power of face-to-face interactions.

I’ve been considering volunteering for this campaign for a while. I even texted the campaign to learn how I could get involved. But somehow I never got around to actually volunteering.

But then I found myself in someone’s living room talking about the campaign, its volnteer needs, and the ways people like me can get involved.

I now have a plan for volunteering.

And to be honest, I’m not sure I would have done it if I had gotten a text back. I’m not sure I would have done it if the person hosting the house meeting had emailed me a list of ways I could get involved.

I needed that face-to-face, person-to-person contact.

That’s why even with all the new technological innovations, as wonderful as they are, personal relationships built through personal contact remain the baseline for community organizing.

No email blast, not fancy text messaging system, and no robo-call campaign can take the place of face-to-face.

What’s a great meeting? Part of it is that everyone can participate. The talkative people don’t talk too much, and the quieter people get a chance to talk.

Some places formalize this by asking people to “step up/step back.” That is, if you’re quiet, set up and speak up. If you’re talkative, step back and listen up.

But some folks really have a challenge stepping back.

The Chief Happiness Officer blog offers up Five simple ways to STFU in meetings

1. Put your hand over your mouth
2. Ask some great questions
3. Keep track of how often you blab
4. Notice how you feel when you’re quiet
5. Ask yourself a simple question: “Is what I’m about to say something I need to say or something the other participants need to hear?”

(For the acronym challenged, STFU is “Shut the F**k up.)

Great suggestions, and thank you to Jeff Brooks for the recommendation.

Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention has just come out with an new Nonprofit Tagline Report that is awesome!

I’m still digesting the extensive report, but she does a great job of distilling a lot of research into taglines into easy-to-understand concepts and lists.

For example, her   include:

• Must convey your nonprofit’s or program’s impact or value;
• Must be eight words or less; and
• Should clearly complement and/or clarify your organization’s name
  without duplicating it.

I’ve worked with a lot of groups that don’t have taglines. After all, in some ways Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice, Campaign for Labor Rights, and East Timor Action Network are almost taglines in themselves. They convey the essence of the organization.

But Nancy’s report does have me thinking that maybe a tagline would be useful to answer some of the next questions: Labor rights in the U.S. or globally? Why work for peace in an interfaith context? What action does East Timor need?

I’m sure after I read her report I’ll have plenty of ideas about how we can help people undertand what we do and why we’re unique.

As we discuss the importance of focusing on transformation, we need to remember that it happens one step at a time.

I was reminded of this listening to the Fundraising is Beautiful podcast. Jeff Brook and Steven Screen remind listeners to do one thing at a time.

They point out that many fundraising efforts fail when they try to accomplish too much at once. They try to educate, inspire grassroots lobbying, show impact, fundraise, raise awareness and more all in one communication. Jeff and Steven point out that when you try to do all that at once, you usually fail at everything.

Instead, they recommend doing one thing at a time. If it’s a fundraising letter, focus the letter on raising funds. Then you can follow up with showing impact or educating in the newsletter.

A key part of their argument is that you have a relationship with your members, so over time you can work on your laundry list of goals, but it has to happen one action at a time.

So while I’m championing the importance of transformation, likewise transformation happens one step at a time.

You can’t transform someone from a passive bystander to an uber-activist in one step; and you’ll probably scare them away if you try.

So plan each action with an eye toward transformation and recognize you’ll get there one step at a time.

Personal transformation and congregational transformation are important in themselves, but they aren’t what get me up in the morning.

I see them as part of building a broader social transformation.

Let me give you an example.

In 2006, the minimum wage in Michigan was just $5.15 per hour. That’s ridiculous! There’s no way you can pay the bills with a wage that low.

The state legislature wouldn’t do anything to raise the wage, so ICPJ joined with a statewide campaign to put the question to the voters.

It didn’t take long to see that we were serious and that we would get this on the ballot and win. So the folks in Lansing who once opposed the wage increase realized that they would rather have a wage increase than to have the voting booths filled with low-wage workers thinking about which candidate will be best for them.

So Lansing passed a wage increase.

We didn’t even have to take it to the ballot box.

We won!

Now low-wage workers have a bit more in their pockets to pay for food, housing, and health care. It was one more step toward justice.

It was one example of social transformation.

[Note: this is one in a series of blog posts dealing with the importance of transformation iN social change organizing]

Generally when I review an action or event, I use a simple plus/delta evaluation: what went well and what could we change (delta is the mathematical sign for change, it’s more pro-active than saying plus/minus).

In You Don’t Have to Do It Alone, the authors offer a more elaborate reflection tool. It asks:

• What did we plan for?
• What happened?
• Why did it happen?
• What were the key events?
• What assumptions did we make?
• What have we learned?

What I like about this model is that it puts more emphasis on not just learning from what happened at the event, but also learning and refining the planning that brought us to the event. It goes deeper.

The authors also point out that it is vital to include different people in this review. You will find very different answers to the question, “what happened” depending on who you ask.

Will I actually use this evaluation system?

I don’t know.

Sometimes it can be a struggle to get an all-volunteer group to do any review at all. I will copy these questions into my Palm so that I can have them ready and try them out for a future event (if I remember that they are there).

Last Saturday at the Michigan Policy Summit, Jim Hightower drove home the power of story and narrative when he reminded us that, “Martin Luther King didn’t say ‘I have a policy paper.’”

Nonetheless, I heard plenty of statistics that day.

And I’ve forgotten them all.

But I do remember the story that Amy Goodman told about a military family who lost their son to a suicide after he came home from Iraq.

It was a spellbinding story, you knew where it was going when she talked about his obsession with weapons after he came home from the war, and how his parents had to keep sharp objects away from him.

You knew where it was going when she told about how he asked his father to hold him one night.

You knew where it was going when she described his father coming home to a quiet house.

And then she told how his father found that his son had hanged himself in basement, and the last time he held his son was cutting him down from the rafter.

I don’t know if I’ll ever forget that story.

I also remember the story of the mom whose toddler was sick over the holidays. Many babies have times when they don’t keep food down, so for the first few days she didn’t go to the hospital.

By New Year’s Eve, though, the child was still sick, and Mom knew it was time to go to the doctor. There she found out her child had tried to become a human piggy bank, and a quarter was lodged in the toddler’s esaphogus.

She didn’t go into the details of the New Year’s Day surgery, but I’m certain she was terrified. She did tell us about the bureaucratic nightmare she faced when the bills came due.

You see, even though she had insurance, she was changing insurance as of January first, so her carriers and the hospital fought to try to get each other to cover the bills.

I don’t remember how much the anesthesiologist cost, but I do remember how hard it was on this woman to go through that. And even if I don’t know the dollar amount, I know there was a lot of wasted money as people fought to get someone else to cover the bill.

There is a time and place for statistics. They are important for analyzing alternatives.

But if you want something that people will remember, don’t give them a factoid, give them a story.