[
I'm experiencing computer failures and various setbacks, so the next part of Grassroots Campaigns, Inc's Great War of 2004 is a few days away. In the meantime, there has been a very interesting discussion going on in the past few days, way at the bottom of the last post's thread. Brings me back to the days of Game Theory class in college. Also, check out the unexpected turn of events at the MoveOn Minute Taker -- let's hope that the MINUTE TAKER can get back into the Operation Democracy campaign!]
Over the last two months, I've been getting several emails a week in response to the Strip-Mining the Grassroots series, from people who came across the series while working for Grassroots Campaigns, Inc's Democratic National Committee fundraising canvass campaign. I'll post several of them here -- they suggest that the problems in GCI's 2004 campaign seem to be still-present, and also that there is a good amount of negative feedback out there that the DNC might not be getting from this campaign. DNC, are you listening?
Aaron wrote:
I'm a "rising sophomore" at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, just arrived home for the summer in Minneapolis. With the dearth of jobs available, I came across an ad for GCI in the local paper and thought, "Hallelujah!"
Of course, it all looked a little too good to be true; the promise of between $3000-6000 for the summer (made without referencing fundraising, by the way) seemed unrealistic, to be sure. ... But here's my problem. Given my college-age demographic, there are pitifully few opportunities available for political action. And believe me, I've tried. ... I've tried individual campaigns, but the vast majority of the positions there are unpaid.
To be sure, I'm hardly an experienced political operative. Yet GCI... appears to offer two crucial things to those of us at the "interning age": experience and pay. The party structure, as it currently stands, inhibits a crucial middle element from participating: those that need pay, but don't yet have their degree in Political Science.
Despite GCI's apparent similarity to a pyramid scheme, I'm leaning towards taking the job. This is to offer a possible explanation to the success of the organization, and possibly as a salve to my conscience.
I responded:
"Experience and pay for someone of your age is certainly significant. And you're right -- there are terribly few options to get involved in a viable way. But if GCI is imbalanced while holding something of a monopoly on entry-level Democratic party activism, then the 'hidden costs' are drastic."
I encouraged Aaron to keep me posted.
Several days later he responded:
I interviewed and was "recommended for the leadership track." Today I had my training session. I'll give it a week and see how it goes; the canvassing is very enjoyable, and the cause (this time, to benefit the 50 States Campaign) is worthy, but the 5-6 hours of transportation/training/eating seem superfluous to me.
I'm working out of the new Minneapolis "office", which for the past two days has been situated in a coffee shop near the University of Minnesota, so I'm probably not the best judge of how the full organization runs. But it is telling to see who is sent out. The lead organizers (two) are fresh out of college and wholly unacquainted with the Twin Cities area. They're very capable people, to be sure, but there's certainly a little disconnect and confusion.
Let me elaborate... we have our "raps" and our suggested aggressive tactics; very effective, no doubt, on the east coast. This is Minnesota, however, with an entirely different set of social customs and expectations. "No thanks" really means "no" here, and a sure-fire way to piss off potential voters is to keep going in their face. I'm sure most of the people will eventually adapt and tone it down a bit, but this kind of demonstrates the problem with a cookie-cutter campaign: in unique places, one size really doesn't fit all.
It's not bad work, and I'll imagine that I will probably keep at it (I mean, in this economy, there really isn't a great alternative).
[One week later]
I unfortunately had to quit the Minneapolis office. GCI, without really consulting the two head organizers, located them in a highly inconvenient downtown St. Paul office
building, about 80 minutes by bus, each way, from my house. I was already pretty sick of it all, and this last step sealed the deal. So I have to find a new job, which stinks in this economy, but my sanity level is at least back to normal.
I imagine, then, that my rather paltry week of experience in a new office prevents me from being the fairest of observers; nonetheless, I think I gained some insight into the practical problems of the GCI setup:
1. Poor Communication. The two head organizers in Minneapolis had remarkable difficulty in contacting the central office in Boston. This wasn't limited to the office debacle, which will make it significantly harder for the group to successfully canvass the metro area. It included issues such as wiring money properly and even getting permission to use cars to get to canvass sites; when I left, they still had to take public transit, which is slow and fairly inefficient, even in the cities proper. And there was confusion about the pay structure, which I'm still not crystal clear about.
2. "Frog in Hot Water." The two main organizers (I'll call them 'A' and 'B') are very bright people, very dedicated, and easy to get along with. When one canvasser had a personal crisis, 'A' even drove her home to a distant suburb. But they're lacking two crucial elements: experience and support. Both fresh out of college, this is the first campaign that either 'A' or 'B' has worked on, much less been in charge of. Neither are from the state, and neither have a good knowledge of the area; I found myself forced to suggest potential canvass sites when theirs were either hopelessly distant or unrealistic. They're smart people, and they will undoubtedly pick it up; but clearly, the two weeks of "training" (and even then, still mostly canvassing) they rushed through is not enough. And the GCI infrastructure just isn't in place. The coffee shop office and the lack of driving privileges were only two of the problems. By Friday, we realized that we had no turf to canvass, since GCI had failed to contact the other 6 organizations going around the Twin Cities. We were forced to do street canvass in the middle of downtown St. Paul on Friday at 4 pm, where our seven canvassers raised a whopping $62. Not good for us, not good for GCI, not good for the Democratic Party.
- / -
Karen wrote:
I, too, recently answered an ad, in Chicago, for a canvassing job with GCI. I had prepared for the interview by prepping myself for a mini-civics test, a review of my past campaign work (some, but it has been years ago) and my blue collar background, in general. there was no need, as it turns out. nor was there any need to be up on local issues/candidates. it was all about the ask.
though I only wound up going out for one, unpaid day of shadowing with a team, I encountered some of things you point out as limitations in this type of fundraising firsthand:
1. many citizens where we went out said they already gave a good deal locally to candidates and wanted to know, exactly, what the DNC planned to do with the funds they were asked to give at the door. the canvasser who I was following was fairly skilled in the face of a 'no,' but here, he got seriously tripped up. 'we're totally separate from local issues,' he offered...which didn't really endear him as a 'grassroots' fundraiser to people who were, already, involved in the local grassroots...
2. another instance that struck me was a gentleman who we greeted in his driveway, going about some home maintenance. he was friendly enough, but said that he'd gotten to the point where the entire political process 'sickened' him because it was just about money--one of his more entertaining lines was that the whole situation made him want to move to "Costa Rica". my canvass leader dutifully side-stepped what was really an attempt at a larger (and more honest and heartfelt) discussion by repeatedly coming back to the ask. as a newbie, I felt compelled to tell him that walking away from participatory government (frustrating though it may be) was, in the end, self-defeating. but in finally walking away from the man's house, the team leader advised me that it was best to quickly move on from people like that because, 'the amount of money you'll get from them won't justify your time."
totally true and I get that you can't spend hours locked in debate with one person...on the other hand: why weren't we given something, anything to give this guy other than a plea for money, which was clearly part of his complaint with the system in the first place?
3. after a couple hours of the obligatory shadowing, (and having my rap mostly down) I was sent out on my own. all in all, my reception was fairly positive, but one gentleman did say that yes, he was a Dem and yes, he planned to vote in the upcoming midterms, but that no, we wouldn't be giving a contribution. when I gave it my best stab at coming back to the ask, he simply stopped and said, '...or are you just interested in the money?' I said that no, we were interested in letting know people the Dems were out in the community...
and it occurred to me later: to what end? doing what in the community, exactly?
I worry that aggressive local canvassing by GCI will cost the DNC much more in the longrun, if they don't insist that canvassers be educated, motivated, and valued parts of the party--and give them the tools to back this up--instead of being little more than disposable hired guns.
-/-
Nina, a recently hired Assistant Director, wrote:
When I first took the job I was thrilled to do something to 'help change the world' yet get some experience and a salary in exchange. Now I find myself working 15 hours a day but nothing in my office feels like I'm working on a political campaign. Rather than talking about the latest political tidbit, people are constantly discussing the numbers and how they stack up to other canvassers. From the first day it felt like a numbers game and not a cause. ...
The biggest issue for me is where the money we're raising is going and what the percentage of our fundraising profit is going to the DNC. ... At this point, I have a very hard time getting money out of people because I feel like the rap and the responses are complete bullshit. If I were to tell people that really their contribution is going to pay me and my staff so we could get their name on a list I doubt I would raise a dollar. So essentially I feel like I'm lying to people and after last night, where I managed to get $5 out of a woman who clearly couldn't afford even that, I walked away from the door feeling so slimy and sleazy I almost quit on the spot. I guess I'm emailing you to ask if you know anymore of the specifics [of the overhead cost] or if this is just an educated guess, granted it makes sense to me and sounds right but I suppose I'd like something a bit more concrete. Either way, I don't plan to stay here very long. I'm tired already of people asking me for information I can leave with them when all I'm supposed to do is get money out of them, not educate them. I'm exhausted from the hours and stress level which I would be ok with if I felt like I was furthering a cause, but I don't see that as the case. I do understand that it's important to build up the donor database for the DNC and that is an important objective but I can't stand the feeling that I'm lying to people at the door just to raise my quota so I don't have to be the 'bad director' who comes back to the office without making much money.
I responded:
"I don't have a hard percentage to give you, but the bottom line of these kinds of canvassing campaigns is that they are successful if they manage to break even. (A few percentage points of what we raised in 2004 actually made it to the DNC, and that was a campaign to 'beat George Bush.' Imagine how easy it was to make quota.)
There are people who understand this and still do the work, and their reasoning is twofold:
one, it builds a small donor base for the client, and does so for less cost than most any other method (true).
two, the interaction itself is positive, a donation represents an investment on behalf of the donor, they are now 'committed' (i think there is some truth to this, but as you can see from my posts, I think a canvass could accomplish significantly more).
Obviously, I think all of your misgivings are quite valid. On the other hand, it's also true that 'not everyone is cut out for this work.' I think that what you've written here means that you'd like to do the work, but you want the work to be better than it is. You're not alone."
[Two weeks later]
After thinking on the situation for about a week I ended up resigning from GCI. I discussed my reasons for this with my CD at great length although it turned out he already understood how the fundraising model worked and felt that it was still as important to be creating that small donor database. He justified my concerns about dishonesty with donors at the door by saying that he'd once told a guy that most of the money was going to support GCI and really they were just working to build a donor list but the guy still gave him $250. I suppose for him that means people would still be giving money even if they knew how it was really being spent but I find that unlikely. Particularly since so many people who donated to me were already active participants with the DNC so essentially their donations were helping me to reach quota but their contact information was already being used.
I also ended up talking to my RD about my reasoning and she seemed to feel that I should have known from the beginning about the funding model and tried to claim it wasn't something that was hidden. I found that a bit disingenuous since I'd always been told we were raising money for the DNC. I think a lot of my problem with the funding model comes from having worked in development for NPO's where anytime you have overhead of more than 20% it's not good and anything above 30% is just flat out bad. Whereas with GCI it seemed to be the reverse and a system that spends so much on overhead costs while working its employees to death seems to be a faulty system in my eyes.
[E]veryone tries to claim it's not about the money yet that's what everything comes down to. The focus [is] entirely skewed to who is raising how much and I think it creates a very negative culture within the office because it felt like political discussion wasn't valuable since it's only taking time and resources away from playing the numbers game. And frankly, even if canvassing is a good way to get people involved, having no literature to leave with them and simply pointing them in the direction of a website does very little. We didn't even have the information for the local parties to give to people at the door. when I brought up the fact that working in the office never felt like a political campaign but was just a numbers game, my CD tried to tell me that as an AD it should have been my responsibility to make the politics behind it more of a focus. I was also told that if there were things about the system that I thought were flawed I should have tried to fix them.
So in the end I simply decided it wasn't for me and after discussing it with my CD and RD they agreed. There wasn't much of an attempt to keep me in the job once I made it clear that I was leaving and I was actually a bit surprised that they had me hurried out of the office that day. I offered to stay for a few days until the new AD got there and started but apparently they didn't want me to create 'bad vibes' in the office or something so wanted me out the door that day. However, I also picked up my first, and last, check on Saturday and discovered payroll had managed to already make a mistake and took money out for the health care plan that I specifically declined so I suppose some of the problems from 2004 have not been resolved completely.