Candidates Beware: Does Your Hotshot Team Represent You?
I’m going to do that thing that you’re not supposed to do. I’m going to list my accolades, or rather my experience. You’re not supposed to do that when you write on a topic. You don't need to list your qualifications, you just write your knowledge and experience, and that’s enough right? Not this time.
I have a degree in political science. I started off great, working for the Board of Elections in my county, albeit in Information Systems. I ended up as Director of Operations for my county’s Democratic Committee. This was decades ago. When there was a shakeup, and the new chair wanted a salary, the Financial Director was kept on for obvious reasons, but I was let go. The outgoing chair wrote a recommendation for me that was so wonderful I’m convinced it’s how I got every job after that one, including the law firm I’ve been at for the last 18 years.
I’m a Sr Developer by day, but by night I organize, volunteer, get out the vote, and sometimes wear a cape. Just kidding…
I’ve been volunteering for campaigns for years. Even more so in the last 6 (I wonder why). I have been a text leader, a text moderator, a rapid support captain, and a senior organizer. I’ve run phone banks, I’ve developed and run texting programs, I’ve managed Mobilize, worked on lists in Votebuilder, run call time in NGP8, edited websites, managed volunteers, managed Slack workspaces, and more. I take off (PTO) a week leading up to the election to volunteer full-time.
This year, I have found it increasingly difficult to offer my help. I know, crazy, right? I’ve had campaigns not respond to my feedback or offers to help, and it is baffling. Recently a campaign just completely cut me off, and it was such a slap in the face, I really had to write this out. Here’s my experience of what just happened and why it should concern your campaign.
At the beginning of this year, I knew I wanted to go all out on volunteering with campaigns for the midterms. At first, I ended up on a county primary with some fellow organizers. Then I got a recommendation to help another state senate primary.
I also picked out a US Senate candidate, who I really wanted to win. Amazing person, has the right tone, is inclusive, and cares about the people in the state. This is someone I want in the Senate. I signed up for their campaign to make calls. Yes, I’ve run phone banks, but this campaign doesn’t know me yet. I am perfectly happy to pay my dues, go through the front door, and then offer more of my skills. I’m not asking for a job or pay, and I’m quite all right with volunteer gatekeeping. In fact, I respect it.
I hate phone banking. At least at first. But here’s the thing — Volunteering for a candidate is so important. I don’t want candidates who just pump out ads and fill mailboxes with mailers created by some overpriced consulting firm. Talking to someone who supports a candidate, and is volunteering to spread the word — means something.
I attended phone banks for about a month or 2. My dad joined some. My mom joined some. Eventually, the host asked me to start running the weekly phone bank. Great, they are accepting my help. By now I’m in their Slack workspace too, although they don’t have much of any activity in there. Then things start to go sideways. The person running the phone bank program, the one who asked me to run the phone banks, is leaving the campaign. Each week, this person updated the slide deck for where we were calling and they started the Zoom 10 minutes early to let me in and make me the host. This was so they wouldn’t have to give me the campaign’s zoom credentials, which makes perfect sense. Gatekeeping. These are good practices.
Well once they left the campaign, I was told someone else from the staff would start the Zoom. The first week I understood there being some confusion internally on who would be on-hand to get the phone bank started and make me the host, but every week after that, the zoom was not started on time, and volunteers who attempted to join gave up. It was horrible to watch it happen and have no control. I kept asking for a better process, giving more feedback, and offering more help. Not much of any of my advice was heeded.
After their primary, there was a shakeup with the campaign and things were changing. The Deputy CM asked to meet with me and have a call to discuss what I thought the campaign should be doing and how I could help. We talked for about an hour. They wanted me to be brutally honest and I was. I offered to help with Field Director level work (I have been one before), but for free. I could help their campaign by getting a bunch of stuff done to help them. Documentation, procedures, etc. I was willing to do it all. I also mentioned that there were all these events on their Mobilize. My dad had attempted to join a few of them and every time, the link was bad. I strongly recommended they do 1 of 2 things. Either delete every event immediately or identify someone who would do the following that day:
- Sign up for every event
- Fix every zoom link and test to ensure they will all work
- Have an agenda
- Start every event 10 minutes before event
- Run each event
These events had all been set up, but no one was responsible for running them and all the zoom links, which get sent to people who sign up for the event, were bad!! This is massively destructive for a campaign. People who wanted to learn more about the candidate or get involved with the campaign just signed up for an event, the link to the event was bad, and now what?
Because my dad was in the Slack workspace, he told them every time it happened. It sometimes took days for someone to respond, and they would just assure him it would be fixed going forward. He signed up for at least 4 events. It was never fixed.
I mentioned all of this to the Deputy CM. At the end of the call, he said he loved all my ideas and was going to work on implementing them. I had my doubts based on my experience with this team, but I wanted (and still want) the campaign to succeed, so I hoped they would make some suggested changes.
Two weeks later, the Deputy CM messaged me on Slack telling me “Hey, we deleted those bad events!” I was dumbfounded by the inflection of pride that came through that exclamation point. It took 2 weeks to delete a few events? They should have been deleted that day! It would have taken me 5 minutes, tops.
Why does it matter? For those 2 weeks people were signed up or were signing up for an event, the campaign had not planned for and did not intend to run. These are literally the people you are courting to vote for your candidate and volunteer with your campaign. They are precious. They are not to be dismissed and ignored and treated like they don’t matter, and it’s ok if you just cancel on them last minute or don’t show up. Come on.
Anyway, it’s all good. There are still a ton of ways to help. They never contacted me to continue running their phone banks and didn’t even email me when they started doing phone banks again. So I started signing up for other campaigns.
Got some good volunteering in, and then I was looking for more shifts I could to do help campaigns when I see their campaign is doing texting. This is texting voters to make sure they know about the election, ask for their vote, and provide resources like links to absentee ballots, early vote locations, election day polling places, and more.
Yay! I sign up for a shift. I know I can help here! I’ve developed and run texting programs, including the administration of the same platform they are using.
Now let’s go over some basics. Typically in a campaign, there are various ways to do field organizing. This is the effort to get out the vote, with volunteers helping to reach as many voters as possible. You need procedures, training, documentation, gatekeeping, etc to ensure a good field organizing effort will be successful and not cause massive liability to the campaign.
Canvassing, or walking door to door, is a boots-on-the-ground operation. Phone banking can be done virtually, and requires training, but can be pretty straightforward once people get the hang of it. Texting is the thing most volunteers want to do, but this means you need really good gatekeeping. The best practice is to require users to attend a training and/or read a guide, and then take a quiz (often a google form). Once you pass the quiz and follow the instructions you get added to one or more texting channels where you can now text.
The reason for this is that texting is sometimes more nuanced. You want people who know when to use the recommended replies (as often as possible), when to adjust for the flow of the convo, and when to bring the voter’s comment or question to the team in Slack to let the campaign decide the response. Really good texters can propose responses, and the staff or volunteer text mods will tell them their suggestion is good to use. That’s when you’ve really got not just the hang of the texting, but the campaign’s preferred messaging.
So back to this campaign and my first texting shift with them. I go to my email at the time of the shift, expecting a Zoom and training. There is no training. A guide. There is no guide. There is a link to sign up on the texting platform. ok…
Hey! I’ve got a batch of texts! Wow. No gate, just a damn wide open field.
If I was a spoiler with the opposition, I could ruin this campaign right now. Yikes. Oh well, I’m just a volunteer. I’ll send some texts and do my best to help them.
Eventually, I hit a text and the recommended replies ( a list of responses that the campaign sets up for volunteers to choose from) don’t fit. I grab the question and post it in the Slack texting channel (which is totally public). After 20 minutes of no one responding, I tag the last person who seemed to be posting with authority. I have no idea if they were staff or a volunteer manager/moderator/leader. None of them have that in their display name, which is odd because that is the norm on so many campaign Slack spaces I’ve been in, and it was one of the suggestions I gave to the Deputy CM.
This person eventually responds. I mention that there are no canned responses, and suggest one for a question I keep getting. Eventually, that person tags another person, indicating that they are setting up the program and may want my help. That person also emails me indicating they would like my help. Ok, this is good. I see a lot of room for improvement, but I’ve got so much experience. I can help them on the back end by setting up the canned responses, configuring the tool, and making sure they understand the technical side of things. I can help with documentation, training, and gatekeeping. I email her back indicating that I’m happy to help.
The next day I get the automated Mobilize email asking me how the shift when. I put a thumbs down, but only because I wanted to give them all my feedback. I let them know that I got a lot of great responses in the texts, but that the program still needs to be built a lot. I offer as much help as they want.
A few hours later I get a pop-up from Slack me that my Slack account for their campaign workspace has been deactivated.
I was gobsmacked. I had been as helpful as I could be. I volunteered hours and hours for this campaign. I begged them to let me help them. I offered them feedback and always did my best to give feedback with an offer to help them do more. I offered all of my experience and skills, which include being a SQL database administrator and application developer.
I emailed the person setting up the texting program and asked “Was I just kicked out of the [campaign] Slack workspace?”
I received the following response:
“Thank you so much for your support of [campaign]. Unfortunately, you weren’t following our direction and we have made the decision to remove you as a volunteer.”
Again. Gobsmacked. Bewildered. Heartbroken. I could have chosen any campaign to give my free time to. I chose this one, and I was being kicked out, yet this was the first I had ever been told that I wasn’t following some untold direction.
I had to take a bit to calm down because I was seriously frustrated. I’m happy to give my free time. I’m not looking for a pat on the back. My rewards are in the doing. Really good conversations with voters on the phone or in text, helping fellow volunteers and staff get the work done, get more done, take things off people’s plates, etc. That’s what I look for. I can get paid. I have. I don’t want the money. I have repeatedly turned down pay, telling the campaigns to put the money into good field organizing resources.
Once I calmed down I replied:
“With all due respect, I have no idea what you are talking about. This is what I have done in my efforts to support [candidate] and [their] campaign. I have made phone calls, I have run phone banks, and I have given a multitude of feedback to the campaign, including directly to [Deputy name] your Deputy CM. I signed up for a texting shift, I asked questions, I did my best to be diligent with responding to texts, and I have repeatedly offered to help in a more extensive volunteer manner.
This is what has never happened. Not one person from the staff or any volunteer leadership role has told me that I have done anything wrong. No one has ever communicated in email or slack DM to tell me that I am failing to follow specific instructions.
So I ask you, what instructions did I not follow, and who from the campaign reached out to me to counsel me on correcting what I was doing wrong?
Thank you,”
I have yet to receive a response.
Look, I can roll with the punches. I can assume best intentions and try to not take it personally when a campaign ignores a non-paid volunteer like myself, but at some point, there is a straw and a camel’s back. This broke it for me. I stopped my recurring donation to the campaign and unsubscribed from all their emails. I am already volunteering with 3 other campaigns, and I will find more places I can help.
This was definitely a rant because I needed to get it off my chest, but it’s also the only way I have to reach out to candidates and give my feedback.
Does your campaign staff accept and welcome volunteers with special skills and more experience than they have, or are they shutting those people out? Why would they do that? Do they not want anyone else helping them do the work, because they want to own it? Is that in the interest of the campaign’s success or their personal career?
Do they take the feedback they get and implement changes or do they punish the people who give feedback?
Are they running haphazard field organizing programs, because they have never run one before?
If so, are they potentially burning out potential voters and volunteers?
I have been on some incredible campaigns. Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign, the Biden/DNC coordinated campaign, NGPAF, and Malik Evans for Mayor of Rochester. All of them had incredible teams, they welcomed feedback, they counseled and encouraged volunteers, and they fostered an incredibly welcoming team atmosphere.
I’ve also seen some campaigns where that is not even on the radar. They end up being s*** shows and the candidate is often not aware of what is happening, because the team just tells the candidate they are too busy to be worrying about the “small stuff”.
So which campaign is yours? How are your field and volunteer operations being run? Do you know?
As I told this one campaign, there is a lot to do and the clock is ticking.
It was cathartic writing this, and now I will move on. I hope the candidate in that race wins, because they really do belong in the US Senate. I had a great meeting today with the Field Director on another campaign I’m helping, and by the end of they were thanking me profusely. I’m hoping to help them set up their phone bank program, get their training materials together and run their phone banks. I’m also texting with 2 other campaigns.
I feel like Julia Roberts.
