On the first day of the New Organizing Institute's August 28-30 summer training in Washington, DC, somewhere into the fourth or fifth hour of instruction on the fine craft of email fundraising, all the talk about response rates and the pursuit of the perfect Subject line started to lose me. After futtering around on MySpace for a while, I leaned over to the trainee beside me and asked: 

"Am I being impatient, naive, or just confused about who is meant to be here?" 

She looked up from some doodling, thought for a moment, and answered: "confused." Then she went back to doodling.
 
I considered my fellow trainee's answer for a while. Who, then, was meant to be here? Already I'd met several directors of young (even startup) non-profit organizations, and I’d met staffers from dinosaur NPOs; I'd met campaign managers, programmers, community organizers, a filmmaker, Carter-era consultants, and plain old (literally, old) "free-agent" volunteers.

By comparison, the NOI Training roster was deceptively close-knit, with sundry big names and lesser-known smarties whose credentials zig-zagged between the progressive net pillars—MoveOn, the Dean team, the DNC, the blogosphere, the consultants. The array was scattered yet inbred, like the credentials of the group that organizes and runs the NOI. Their mission: "to train and support a new generation of technology-enabled campaigners...[with] knowledge gained in the field of political technology and online organizing...[and] results-focused, systems thinking to make progressive campaigns and organizations more efficient."  

Accordingly, in the first hour we NOI attendees had been told that "online organizing [with] political technology" is all about "giving people options," and about creating a "trust network" through which campaigns can be open to feedback and grounded in accountability. But as that opening day passed through hours upon hours of lectures about email, those concepts were quickly, narrowly redefined—as one of our first trainers told us: "it’s all about the list."  

I felt increasingly impatient, but still wondered if I was just being naive. 

So, they want you to talk about wolves.

The training began with a heartfelt speech from a MoveOn volunteer coordinator. She had first engaged with political activism through MoveOn PAC's Leave No Voter Behind campaign in 2004, when she'd been recruited by one of MoveOn's field organizers; I was one of those organizers myself. This Super-Volunteer told the audience that the experience was "transformative" for her; in a rather different way, the same is true for me.

Though she didn't refer to this in her speech, MoveOn's Leave No Voter Behind campaign had actually become trapped, and partially crushed, by its own technology. The "Web Action Center" platform had been the spinal cord for the LNVB campaign -- a centralized command center that ultimately suffered total infrastructure collapse. As a result, we all learned an important distinction between "online organizers" and "organizers swimming with heavy monitors chained to their necks." Last month, at the end of an extended post-mortem of LNVB, I imagined a modernized, robust field campaign in which participants could use peer-to-peer online technologies to facilitate ground operations that are more productive than old-school command-and-control cages. Such a campaign exists, to my knowledge, only in the future.  

When Micah Sifry read that post and asked me to cover the NOI, it seemed to both of us that this training might be where the seeds of such a campaign are being planted. Go to DC, Micah told me, and see if the New Organizing Institute is really "exploring new ways of empowering grassroots members and activists as co-creators of political organizing efforts." (The NOI had announced that almost each session of its training about online organizing was to be "off-the-record"; that doesn't seem like a very realistic request, given the content and audience, but I'll try to respect it here.) 

The training spanned impressive boot-camp hours of 8:30AM to 6:30PM, over the course of three days. So forgive my impatience upon discovering  that almost the entire first day would cover MoveOn-style email fundraising. And imagine my sore naivete when we heard but one peep about the very idea of social networking -- and that peep was along the lines of: "if someone on your campaign wants to create a MySpace profile, that's fine -- but don't let it distract from the tasks at hand."  

At the end of the first day, we broke into groups and were given an assignment: for our campaign (actual or hypothetical), write the "key" email that would prompt the decisive step on our path to Victory.Pay special attention to the subject, the first sentence, the ask."ask."  My group leader was Kevin Thurman, a senior strategist with Blue State Digital, and he coached us with palpable relish:
 
"Your emails are telling a story. And every good movie has a ticking bomb of some kind or another. It has to be urgent. It has to practically scream "CLICK NOW!", and there has to be a good reason why they should take the time to do it right now. Remember that your supporters need to see online donation a form of activism -- a new way to participate. But you have to make it worthwhile for them."" 

I stayed behind when the session was over, and asked Kevin how an email campaign could really be about activism, or whether these were just techniques for top-down marketing. 

"Well that's kind of a 'when did you stop beating your wife' question, isn't it?" he asked with a laugh.  Then he made a convincing case for why I'd presented a false dichotomy: in a proper email campaign, he explained, recipients are communicating to the organization, even without writing a response. Their open rates are tracked; their clickthroughs are like votes for the particular message being clicked upon. A smart campaign will spend a lot of time reading and responding to what people write back, and it will regularly call its list-members, to speak with them in-person about its emails. "If you're doing it right, this is really like a conversation with your membership. You're figuring out what they want you to be talking to them about."

By the second day, I'd spoken with a number of trainees who were finding all the email instruction to be essential. "Email is just the bread and butter of what we do," I heard several times.

At least the bread and butter was getting spiced up with some sprinklings of hard data--for example, from the PowerPoint presentation by the vice president of a national environmental protection organization:  Wolf-focused tone [in email] increased donation rates by 29% in one segment.

Platforms and “Virality”

On the second day, my patience was rewarded almost immediately after the email seminars were over, during a show-and-tell of various web sites. Benjamin Rahn took us through his Act Blue, which seemed to singularly encapsulate why we were all here: in just a couple of years, the site has proven its usefulness as a fundraising tool -- not just for any and all would-be candidates, but for individual supporters as well. (Rahn made sure to note that a tool that can inspire said supporters to actually do the fundraising for their candidate is not built into the platform.) 

The brightest moment of all (IMHO) came when the plucky Working Assets folks showed off their brand-new Volunteer for Change, an event-sharing site for non-partisan activism. On Volunteer for Change, organizations can advertise their events, provide instructions and contact information, and prompt volunteers to invite their friends. When you sign up for an event on the site, you’ll be sent reminder emails -- a week before and a day before -- and thank-you emails afterwards. Heads snapped to attention across the room upon hearing that the thank-you emails ask volunteers to submit feedback on the event, and organizations' feedback rating is then compiled and displayed next to its event listings. Some organizers will fear this development for the same reason it delights me: an organization that lists an event on Volunteer For Change is going to have to take particular care that the event will make good use of its volunteers' time -- if it wants to be able to attract any volunteers in the future.

The rest of the day covered the basics of The Website--from simple definitions of Content Management System and Constituent Relationship Management platforms, to advice on managing the prickly human relationships that revolve around site construction and management. It had my attention, and a number of novices who actually had websites to build were watching rapt and anxious--while those trainees who’d had any prior experience in site-building were now the impatient ones. Tough crowd.

From my unscientific polling, some frustration seemed to linger in the room around the question of "What is online organizing?" The issue crystallized late in the second day, during Zack Exley's presentation,"Nothing is Viral (Sorry!)" His argument was, essentially, that the internet is not just some magical ether that can summon millions of dollars if you wave some wacky Flash on your site -- you still need a way to bring people there, and it's still going to take work. Exley's point was surely well-taken -- amusing stories abounded through the crowd of profound folly committed in the name of making something that can send a campaign "viral" (I even had one of my own). But amid all the deflation of hype, a more important point was missed. The internet does not have a Special Viral Tube that can funnel out to millions of people if you put something crazy into it, but this is still technology that's changing behavior, relationships, and culture. Extreme “virality” is just one very visible effect of how information is being transmitted in new ways. 

I was still impatient to hear about those ways. As one lifelong organizer (a "fuddy-duddy," in her own description) observed to me: "there's technical change, where you use new tools to do your thing, and then there's adaptive change, where you actually do new things with your new tools."

Day Three: The Super-Activists Will Rise

The shadow of MoveOn, which had fallen over the email sessions, loomed once again on the third day of the training. Talks about field ops and press relations were (at times explicitly) more concerned with a campaign's scale and timeframe, rather than its content and effect. Questions of content and effect were still raised -- but still in the margins, and in passing, and mostly by the trainees themselves. Alan Rosenblatt, Executive Director of the Internet Advocacy Center, finally acknowledged the potential of social networking sites (MySpace got a bullet point!) and actually landed right on the head of the matter ("We need strategies that will engage the activists to become stakeholders, rather than just worrying about how to get this information to them") at the very moment he was told that his time was up.

 Patience was again rewarded.  Amanda Michel, Communications Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law, gave a field-smart primer on what to do with 'Super-Activists' -- people who not only open your emails but read them all and will even do stuff if you ask them to. Up until now, the only thing we'd heard about Super-Activists was how to craft a fundraising email campaign so as not to piss them off through multiple requests for money. Michel hit a long series of important notes about how to craft and manage a volunteer program -- concrete goal-setting, patient training, thorough feedback, and firm protection (i.e., don't give out your volunteers' names to other people's lists).

And yet, almost all of her insights would have fit right in at an Old Organizing Institute. (Except, perhaps, for one particular point: If you don't give your Super-Volunteers something to do, they'll probably just do it on their own, and then it might not serve the campaign's objectives.) The question remained: how can technology generate more and better Super-Activists, how can it make them even more Super?

It took a blogger to grapple with it. Tim Tagaris told us that one of the true roles of the blog community in the Lamont-Lieberman race was lost amid all the talk of the "rise of the lefty bloggers." It’s not just that they were zealous and loud -- –and Tagaris was not just a blogger. He was an organizer, and his  Super-Activists worked together (without central command or even having met one another) to cohere into an open-ended hyperlocalized media machine so effectively that one Connecticut reporter stated that the LamontBlog (which up until recently was not affiliated with the campaign) is the first thing he reads every morning. And even though Tagaris didn't have a teachable lesson as to "how do you do it?," he didn't need one. He had results.

The Future Is When

In between sessions, NOI co-founder Judith Freeman told me: "We're always talking about those issues [like social networking, etc], and we plan to work on them in the future -- but we wanted this training to provide our trainees with the most effective ideas that can be brought to bear on this election." Indeed, by the end of the seminar, every trainee I'd spoken with had found something to be important, and each section had been important to someone. Everyone got their share of time for a one-on-one consulting mini-session -- for those who actually had campaigns to run, this was very helpful. And for what it's worth, Judith was serious about the NOI's plans for the future -- just a few days after the training, the NOI announced the initiation of RootsCamp, its version of the open-ended, genially radical BarCamp. RootsCamp will allow anyone with ideas or experience, not just a select group of trainers, to come together immediately after the upcoming election, to share what went right (or what went horribly wrong) and what they want to try next.  

That won't be a moment too soon. The day after we turn the corner on November 7th, right up the road will be 2008. NOI probablymade the right move by mostly dodging the questions this time, but there will never a "good time" to plop down and get it all figured out. The campaigns and organizations have to start asking the questions while doing the work. So I'll stay impatient, thank you very much. Hell, I'll even hang on to the naivete -- it might come in handy.

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