Online Organizing

News you can use:

• According to research commissioned by EMILY'S List, Obama leads McCain among women aged 18 - 27 by 30 points (62 - 32%).
• If you haven't seen it already, The Washington Post has a very good piece profiling Tripple O: Obama's Online Operation.
• Allison Fine on why oldschool nonprofits need Millennials, but Millennials don't necessarily need them.
• Rachel Maddow needs help coming up with a name for her new show. Go give her good suggestions.
• Ashwin Madia, one of the youngest congressional candidates in the country, blasts Joe Lieberman on Iraq. Ashwin is one of the young candidates endorsed by the Young Voter PAC.
• Rock the Vote is teaming up with X Box Live to register voters who use the game console. Next time you get booted out of Halo for betraying the jackass flinging insults at you, go to the Dashboard and get your vote on.
• The Commission on Presidential Debates announced the format for each of the three debates. Some free-form discussion periods could be interesting. The internet stuff sounds lame. I'm sticking to my original review: wasted opportunity.
• Heather Smith offers a brief history of Texting in Rock the Vote's voter registration campaigns.
• Howard Dean was in Nevada recently trying to rally young voters around the Democratic Party.
• Check out this widget from Progressive Future. Pretty cool:

According to Colin Delany's ePolitics.com

IPDI Book Discussion on Online Politics 101 with Colin Delany - Wednesday, August 13
Noon-1:30pm
The library of the Graduate School of Political Management
4th Floor
GWU’s Media and Public Affairs Building
805 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052

RSVP REQUIRED to julie@ipdi.org

Should be a hoot and a half, and I’ll see if Julie will let me record it on one of those new-fangled video devices I hear are all the rage.

See also the new cut version of mine and Colin's mutual interview (upper right) which pretty much keeps the camera on the person who is talking the whole time... its fun for the whole family.

Last week I wrote a post about horizontal segmentation in political communication on my blog, and this post will look at ways you can harness the concept online in promoting your own campaigns.

The example I will use for this post is the Vote Pledge campaign from the Young Democrats of America. The desired action of the campaign is to get young voters to sign an online pledge to vote for Democrats on election day. Specifically this post will deal with getting people to take an online action, but many of the strategies are applicable to offline actions as well.

E-mail
Once you have created an online campaign you should start with your old stand-by: the e-mail. For online actions, I suggest that your e-mails do two things: first, get the people on your list to take the action, and second get them to use their own social networks to encourage others to take the action. Check out the TechPresident post on writing a good e-mail.

Call-to-action completion page
Too many times we have people take an online action and leave it at that. Your action completion/confirmation page should include a call-to-action to spread the word about the campaign. Possible actions could be:

• Send to a friend
• Share on Facebook
• Online button/profile picture

Online buttons/profile pictures
Many of your supporters will have blogs, websites, MySpace profiles, etc. where they could put up an html graphic linking to your online action page. By creating one with copy/paste html code you can increase your exposure as well as increase the Google Rank of the action page. Here is an example:

<a href="http://yda.org/votepledge"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3061/2625068863_f23311d597_o.jpg" alt="Pledge to vote Democrat on Election Day" /></a>

The same graphic can be used as a profile image for supporters to use on their social network profiles. Make sure that the image includes the link.

Status Updates
Most social networking sites now allow you to update your status, and these updates can include links. Encourage your supporters to occasionally set their update to the call-to-action of your campaign. Example: Pledge to vote Democrat in November http://yda.org/votepledge.

Instant Messenger
Encourage your supporters to use IM to contact their friends, family and co-workers to ask the to take the action. You can also have them use the call-to-action as their away message or status message similar to the status updates mentioned earlier.

Twitter
Have your supporters that use Twitter send a tweet out with the call-to-action. For more on using Twitter check out my post on using Twitter for your organization.

Blog Outreach
Reach out to bloggers and try to get them to write something about your online campaign or even to put the online button on their website. Larger blogs tend to online put buttons on their site for money, but a lot of bloggers will be willing to do this for your campaign for free if they believe in the cause. For more on blog outreach check out my Blogger Outreach 101 post.

Facebook
I have already mentioned status updates and profile pictures, but there are additional ways to use Facebook to promote your action. Message the members of your organization's Facebook group, as well as reaching out to the administrators of allied Facebook groups asking them to do the same. You can also use Facebook's share feature to post the action page and encourage your supporters to do the same.

You can also write notes on Facebook with the action and ask to spread the word. By tagging supporters in the note it will put it in their mini-feed for their friends to see as well as definitely get their attention.

You can upload the online button image to Facebook and tag a bunch of your supporters in the picture. Have the photo description ask them to take the action and change their profile photo to the image. This will put the image in their mini-feeds as well.

Continue to innovate
There are always new methods of promoting your actions online, so keep looking at the online tools that are popping up and think of ways that they can be leveraged by your campaign.

What methods do you think online campaigns can use to promote their actions? Share in the comments.

When Michael asked me to be a guest writer here on Future Majority last month it was mostly because of my tutorial and organization tips posts that I wrote on other blogs. While a few were cross-posted on here I figured I would write a round-up post with my previous tips and tutorials articles. Many of these were targeted to a Young Democrats audience, the tips should be useful for anyone involved in youth organizing.

Tips for College Chapters Starting a New Year
It’s that time of the year again when college chapters are looking to recruit new members from the influx of wide-eyed freshmen joining their campuses. Here are are a few ideas for new member recruitment that have been used effectively by chapters in the past.

Blogging for Young Democrat Chapters
Blogging has grown from being a novelty in political communication to a vital tool for candidates, campaigns, and organizations. This post is designed to guide Young Democrats chapters in developing their blogging strategy.

Why You Should Get Involved in Your Local and State Parties
We all know the stereotype of the composition of local and state Democratic Parties: a plethora of old activists that consider anyone under 50 a young Democrat. While this keeps many younger voters from becoming involved in those entities, it would be to your advantage to bite the bullet and take the plunge.

Blogger Outreach 101
One of the best ways to get your message out to an audience that is likely to be receptive to your message is by working with established bloggers to cover your organization. Good blogger outreach is a subtle art, and this post is a crash course in implementing a strong outreach program.

Making Your Website’s Posts Social Bookmark-Friendly in Textpattern
A lot of state and local chapters use Textpattern for their websites. Sometimes the page templates don’t have adequate textpattern code for the titles of your posts. This means that no matter what page, article, or post is being viewed the same title will appear. While this may not seem like a big deal, it makes a difference on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. I use del.icio.us for my links posts, as do a lot of bloggers. With some chapter sites when I go to add a post it will just show a generic title, for example if it were YDAZ every post would show up as YDAz.org :: The Young Democrats of Arizona. I have to write in every post title that I share. While I am willing to do this, some bloggers won’t, and it can limit your exposure.

Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 1: Media Lists and Press Releases
So I have written about reaching out to new media, but it is always important to develop a traditional media strategy to get your message out to print, radio, and television news. This post will help you create a media contact list and learn some best practices about writing and sending press releases.

Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 2: Working With Reporters
In Part 1 of the Developing a Traditional Media Strategy series I discussed how to create a media contact list and best practices for writing and sending press releases. Today’s post will give you some advice on working with reporters once you have their attention.

Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 3: Media Monitoring
It is important for you to know what is being said about your organization in both new and traditional media outlets. You may also want to keep track of posts and stories about candidates, issues, and legislation that your organization is interesting in. This post will give you two tips to efficiently monitor the media. These are the methods I use in compiling all the stories in my link posts.

Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 4: Rapid Response and LTE
This is the fourth and final part of my Developing a Traditional Media Strategy series. Part 1 covered media lists and press releases, Part 2 covered working with reporters, Part 3 covered media monitoring, and this post will cover rapid response and letters-to-the-editor.

Getting the Most Out of Your Members
Chances are that the members of your organization have a wide range of experience, skills, and knowledge that you may not even know about. This post is designed to help you learn what you members bring to the table and how to effectively utilize their skills through goal-setting.

The Importance of a Quality Website
We have reached the point in the internet revolution where organizational websites are not only common but expected. If you don’t have a website, you don’t appear to exist. With more people using search engines to find information than ever before it is critical that your organization have a strong web presence. This post will cover the importance of chapter websites and ways to improve or start one.

More Tips on Blogging and Websites
I have come up with some additional tips on blogging and websites since I published my Blogging for Young Democrats Chapters and The Importance of a Quality Website posts. Here are those tips.

The Bring Back Bondelli’s Blog Strategy
Following the success of the “Bring Back Bondelli’s Blog” strategy (if it wasn’t a success I couldn’t be posting this right now) I thought it might be helpful to explain my methodology and show how you can apply the same techniques for your own causes and campaigns.

Using Twitter for Your Organization
This post is an attempt to unravel the mystery that is Twitter for the youth organizing community. While Twitter is pervasive amongst the early adopter crowd, it is just now beginning to gain traction with regular internet users.

So these are the tutorial and tips posts up to this point. I hope they will be helpful to you and your organization. If there are any topics that you would like to see a tutorial post on, please leave a comment and I will try to fill your requests.

This post is an attempt to unravel the mystery that is Twitter for the youth organizing community. While Twitter is pervasive amongst the early adopter crowd, it is just now beginning to gain traction with regular internet users.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that consists of 140 character "tweets" that are broadcasted to a person's subscribers. Think Facebook status updates but not constrained by Facebook. The question you are probably asking yourself is "if this is essentially the same thing as Facebook status updates, why is it even useful?" Well, here are a few reasons:

• With Facebook status updates, only your friends see them. With Twitter, anyone can subscribe to your updates.
• Facebook updates are more one-way than Twitter. Twitter users can direct message or reply to tweets, creating two-way communication.
• For the most part only people that go to your profile will see your status updates. Twitter updates are sent directly to subscribers.
• Twitter works with text messages (SMS), instant messages, and online.

Here is a video from Common Craft that explains the concept:

Getting started with Twitter

The first thing that you need to do is go to Twitter.com and set up an account. You can set up your cell phone, AOL Instant Messenger, and/or Google Talk to send/receive tweets. Once you have an account, start sending updates and find people to follow. You can start with me.

Enough about the basics, now it's time to see how you can use Twitter as an effective tool for your organization.

Applied Twitter

There are a number of ways that you can use Twitter for the benefit of your organization. The first is as a general SMS communication tool. SMS short codes are extremely expensive, which rules them out as an option for most organizations. Twitter provides a free alternative. You can set up a Twitter account for your organization and encourage people to subscribe to it. Use it to send announcements about upcoming events, rapid response items, to share links, etc. While it is true that currently most Twitter users are technology early adopters, those people tend to be online influentials, those who help get your message out there. As more and more users sign up for Twitter, the more effective a tool it is.

My favorite idea for using Twitter involves intra-group communication. Though Twitter does not currently support group functionality, using the free GroupTweet service gives you that power. Let's say for example that your group is at a conference and wants to be able to easily communicate with one another during it. I'll use the Young Democrats of Arizona and the upcoming YDA conference in Nashville as an example. I create a Twitter account named YDAZNashville. I register the Twitter account on GroupTweet. I make sure everyone in the delegation signs up for a Twitter account and follows YDAZNashville and I as YDAZNashville follows them back. I now have the equivalent of an SMS Google Group to coordinate the delegation during the conference. Whenever someone in the delegation sends a direct message to YDAZNashville, like (d YDAZNashville Everyone needs to head to Room A for welcome reception at 7), everyone in the group will get it.

I am sure there are a number of creative ways that you could use such a service in your organization.

Tips and Tools

If you have mobile internet on your phone, you can access Twitter at m.twitter.com.

To direct message someone you send "D username message" and to reply "@username message."

To share links easily without worrying about length you can use short-url services like TinyURL.

There are a number of Twitter desktop applications you can use. My favorite is Twhirl.

If you have a Blackberry, Twitterberry is a solid application.

The Twitter Facebook application allows you to use your tweets as status updates.

Links to Twitter Resources

Ultimate Guide to Twitter Tools

101 Must-See Twitter Resources

Twitter Tools, Tweaks and Theories

Newbie's Guide to Twitter

Big Juicy Twitter Guide

What the Web Strategist Should Know About Twitter

I hope that this helps. Now go sign up for a Twitter account and think of ways you can use this tool for your organization. Don't forget to follow me.

Quick hits for a lazy Saturday. Look for an announcement here tomorrow.

• Are today's teenage girls the next generation of online organizers? Looks like it. A new study from PEW shows that young girls are more likely than boys to be online content creators (35% vs. 20%). The one exception is online video, which is still an area in which boys participate at twice the rate of young girls.
• In anticipation for March 4th, Sen. Obama is wooing young Latinos in Texas, trying to take a bite out of his opponents base. The senator was at UT Pan American this week speaking with students about his education plan.
• Hat tip to Sarah Lai Stirland at Wired for tipping me off to Hillary Speaks to Me, a grassroots video project designed to showcase Sen. Clinton's support among young Americans (from 4 - 35 looks like a descriptive range). The site is one of the most authentically bottom up efforts in support of Senator Clinton that I've seen. The creators say that it's not "too little too late," but I have to disagree. This would have been good to see eight or nine months ago, but at this point it is overshadowed by the sheer volume of quality user generated content clogging the tubes in support of Sen. Obama.
• At WireTap, Future Majority friend and researcher for CIRCLE Karlo Barrios Marcelo explains why three is the magic number.

This post is by Wes Morgan, an online organizer for U.S. PIRG. Projects like Code for Change and CiviCRM and incredibly valuable as they teach young coders about the nuts and bolts of politics, young organizers of the value of open source tools, and provide free, high-quality tools for youth organizations which, as we all know, are frequently strapped for cash. Thanks to Wes for all his work and for guest blogging about it at FM. --Mike

As of last Friday (August 17), the first Code for Change summer has officially come to a close. We set out to turn CiviCRM into a better system for helping organizers spend more time organizing and less time shuffling things around on their computers. CiviCRM is a constituent relationship management system, but that's just a nerdy way of saying that it's a program to save you from spreadsheets-pasted-into-Outlook hell when it comes to keeping track of and in touch with all of your contacts. I'm pretty excited about what we got done.

Code for Change is my brainchild, so I'm a little biased. However, other people seem to think it's cool too. The basic idea behind Code for Change is that by putting a little effort into an existing open source project, we get a lot more out of it than if we wrote something ourselves from scratch or paid someone else to modify an off-the-shelf system. We hired some computer science interns--current students and recent grads, downloaded the source code to CiviCRM, and set about turning it into a system that everyone can use (from large, complex organizations all they way down to my mom who sends out a regular newsletter to her home-based business contacts). In the true spirit of openness, all our work is open source and is planned to be released with the CiviCRM 2.0 release later this year.

From June 4 to August 17, we hacked away at it. We had a lot of help from others in the CiviCRM developer and user community, and their contributions were invaluable. Here's what we all accomplished:

• We made CiviCRM a standalone system. This means you no longer need Drupal or Joomla to use it. (Those are web content management systems, and not everyone who wants to use CiviCRM uses those.) For people who just need a CRM, this makes it much easier to get CiviCRM up and running and doesn't put a lot of unnecessary CMS functionality between you and your contacts.
• We added OpenID logins. OpenID is a pretty cool new technology that allows you to use one login for all systems that use it. No more having to remember umpteen different passwords for every system you have to login to.
• We added support for complex groups and organizational structures. The organization I work for, U.S. PIRG, is a national network of state-based organizations. This means we need a system that can keep all its data separate for each state, but still allow those of us who work centrally for all the organizations (I'm an online organizer, for example) to aggregate that data when necessary. Other organizations (such as political parties) have similar geographic and departmental structures that they need a CRM system to model. CiviCRM is now pretty powerful in this regard. You can put groups inside other groups (inside other groups, inside...) and you can affiliate groups with organizations and sub-organizations.

I'll be working over the next few weeks to actually roll out CiviCRM as the new system that U.S. PIRG uses for its online organizing, so we'll be eating our own dog food. If you want to give it a try now (instead of waiting for the official 2.0 release), you can download a preview release of CiviCRM Standalone here.

And we're not done there. We're looking to hire an intern for the current fall semester and another in the spring to continue working on CiviCRM. If you or anyone you know is interested in applying, let me know.

Pretty interesting chart from Business Week marking out who's doing what online. Regular readers will know that I take issue with how they break down the generations, and it seems a little arbitrary to draw such distinctions between "creators" and "joiners." There's a middle ground in there which Fred Stutzman has identified as the "in-between spaces" - twitter, ma.gnolia, del.icio.us,Tumblr - activities that are not quite blogging, but are more participatory and creative than simply joining a social network and browsing your friends' profiles.

In relation to politics, the breakdowns in the "creators" category is interesting. BlogAds surveys show the political blogosphere to be much older. The majority of young "creators" in this graphic are engaging in non-political content creation - gossip blogs, music blogs, etc. Yet we also know that they are volunteering and participating in politics more and more through other venues - voting, on the ground engagement, social networks. I've already written about how I think progressive youth organizing could stand to benefit from greater integration with the local and national blogospheres. I wonder when and if we'll start to see more crossover there.

Cross posted at MyDD

The media life of the CTYD YouTube video was informative to watch. It's the first time (that I can think of) that a democratic youth operation successfully used new media and the blogs to get out a story that didn't have a coordinated national push already behind it.

The story started as a press release about a CT House vote, leaked into a local media outlet, became a YouTube video, found its way into more local media including a CT blog, became a blog topic here on Future Majority, got diaried at the Daily Kos where it was front paged, and then traveled into more national blogs. What could have been a one day local story was potentially seen by a large swath of online progressives and CT residents, and it worked because CT Young Dems delivered a creative message and also because the story cycled through the local and national blogs. It's a model to replicate, and has been promoted as such both here and on the Young Democrats Blog.

So how we can make it even more replicable? How can local youth organizers increase the reach of their stories? When best practices like this arise, how can they get in front of as many of the relevant eyeballs as possible?

There seems to be two pretty simple solutions:

1. First, local chapters of youth organizations should actively engage their local blogs.
2. Second, the progressive youth organizations that have blogs should start blog-rolling each other and reading each other's blogs on a daily basis.

Mike Gravel may be the crazy grandfather in the Democratic presidential primary, but he's also a potential rallying point for a whole bunch of folks who voted Nader in 2000 and think Kucinich is a toothless joke. He's had some solid appearances lately - particularly on the Colbert Report and during the Democratic debate, where he was a jolt of energy in an otherwise soporific event. He's also already encountering some pushback from the mainstream media and politicos, who want to exclude him from future debates - an opportunity to make hay and consolidate a (very minor) grassroots uprising if ever there was one. In short, Gravel's got nothing to lose and a lot to gain, so his campaign isn't nearly as risk averse as those of the front runners. That makes him an interesting petri dish for testing new strategies, and his supporters are rising to the challenge.

Case in point is the use of Digg by Gravel supporters and Students for Gravel. Every single blog post on the Students for Gravel site has a "Digg" button. They're using it to increase Gravel's profile online, and it's probably going to work. Gravel is dominating the 2008 elections page on Digg, and some articles about the candidate are bubbling up to the front page of the site. It helps that the Digg community is somewhat contrarian/libertarian, and very much a culture of subcultures. Gravel, as an outspoken outsider against an unpopular war is a natural candidate for a place like Digg. It probably makes it easier to move Gravel stories up the queue, but it also potentially taps into a new supporter base.

Digg is in all the major newspapers this week because of the hex key drama. Lots of new folks will be visiting the site, and tooling around. Now, maybe they'll get introduced to Mike Gravel.