The New Organizing Institute (NOI), is a grassroots program that trains young, technology-enabled political organizers to work for progressive campaigns and organizations. I interviewed Rosalyn Lemieux, NOI's Executive Director, for the NetSquared Podcast about how organizers can use the social web for their work. You can read a transcript of the interview below.

Rosalyn Lemieux: My name is Rosalyn Lemieux. I am the Executive Director of the New Organizing Institute. NOI is a training and research institute, and it was formed by the Internet strategy gurus of the big '04 campaigns -- Dean, Kerry and Clark, as well as MoveOn, the DNC, ACT, the AFL-CIO. The origins of NOI are that those folks I just mentioned, those Internet gurus, got together in the summer of '05 basically to look at what had their experience had been in '04, when they had these terrific campaign successes online, what had happened in the field since then, and how could they help the progressive movement, applying the lessons that they had learned in leveraging technology and the Internet for progressive organizing.

Out of that meeting, essentially they agreed that there was a need for a disinterested third-party, an institute that could sort out hype from proven tactics and facilitate sharing that information among progressives. So, Zack Exley, who had been with MoveOn, then the Kerry campaign and then Blair and Judith Freeman, who is a Senior Data Analyzer at the AFL-CIO, took on creating the New Organizing Institute.

Primarily we fulfill our mission through training, by bringing guest trainers who are currently actually practitioners, who are actually doing the work, who can point to strategies that they themselves have employed, and say, "This is what we did, this is how much it costs us in dollars and staff, and this is the result," which is distinct from the sort of enormous field that has grown up in the intervening couple of years, of consultants who you can get to speak about any tactic you can imagine in the world of Internet strategy, but that doesn't match exactly to what you can get people to talk about, where they can actually point to something they did and show that it was successful. So we are really rigorous about making sure that, if we are going to be training on this tactic or strategy, that those are proven strategies. You can get people to come in and say what they did, what they learned from it and how to apply that going forward to other progressive campaigns.

Britt Bravo: You have been doing online organizing work for quite some time now. How has it changed in the last five years?

RL: I have been doing online organizing and online campaigns since about 1999, and some of the basic principles are exactly the same. I mean, I think what has changed more than the principles, and more than even the tools, is just how many people are using the Internet to get information, to participate in politics, to participate in activism. What has changed is what I think is the most interesting, and most applicable to progressive organizing, is how integral the social web has become to people's lives, sort of average people lives, so that they are more comfortable voicing their own opinions in the many forums that now exist, and better able to sort out reliable information from unreliable information, and comfortable using the Internet for the primary source and venue for their political engagement.

BB: And, when you think of organizers using the social web for their work, are there any particular success stories? I mean there is the Dean campaign, but is there anything beyond the Dean campaign that has pointed to as a success story of these tools?

RL: (Laughs) Yes, I think there are quite a few. And I guess it depends on how narrowly you define social web, right? Obviously the other kind of standard success story is MoveOn, which I am sort of familiar with because I worked with them for two and a half years prior to coming to NOI. I think they are known, in part because they have got this huge list of like 3.5 million people. But, really what they did that was ground-breaking at the time, and now, hopefully, has become much more standard, is to really engage with their own members in a way that's meaningful, and that extends much beyond, "Here, sign this petition." Asking people to hold house parties, to write letters to the editor and to do stuff, and even do legislative visits--it's really changing the level of engagement of the members and supporters in the campaigns, where they understand all of the steps between what they themselves want to see -- the change they want to see in the world -- and how engaging with that organization makes that happen.

So, I think traditionally, the old-school way that organizations used their email lists and their online presence was to sort of ask for the next thing "Hey, can you give us 10 bucks because we want to stay afloat?" And MoveOn has made it clear that that's not an effective way to engage people, and what is an effective way is to say, "Look, we all want the same change in the world," maybe it's to prevent this war from happening, "And here is a strategy that we see can work," really explaining it, and saying "Here is where you fit in that picture." Maybe today it's giving ten bucks to help put a TV ad on the air, maybe tomorrow it's showing up to a rally. Maybe the day after that it is visiting your legislator, really engaging people in the full picture of the campaign strategy, online and offline. So MoveOn, obviously, is another example.

There are examples in the non-profit world; of innovative campaign strategies that would have been impossible without technology. There was one particular protest that I thought was kind of interesting. I want to say it was organized by Oxfam in 2003, but it might have been another anti-war group, that they literally wanted to create a compelling visual for an aerial photo and they actually mapped out how many people they would need to stand in each space or spot in a public square to create this visual. I think it was a peace sign. People came to their site and signed up to stand in one square until they had filled up the entire peace sign and created a really compelling aerial visual out of that. So that's not exactly a campaign success, but it's sort of an interesting use of technology for a campaign.

BB: What is the biggest challenge of using the social web for organizing?

RL: I think the biggest challenge is internal to organizations, especially organizations that have been around since before the Internet was something that everyone used, before it was kind of part in parcel of what you have to do to have an effective campaign. The real challenge is shifting organizations. Shifting how they relate to their supporters and their members, from kind of a broadcast mentality, where they have a message and they broadcast it out to people and they're looking at their email list and their website as just another mechanism to get out that set message. That is not an effective way to engage people online, and it is not an effective way to grow the number of people who are engaged with your organization. What a major stress that this technology has created is that people have an expectation of being asked what their opinion is, and being engaged in a meaningful way.

It's very difficult for organizations that aren't used to operating in that manner. To give up control enough to shift their operation. Starting first with asking their own members, "What do you care about? How do you think we should go about this? What can you contribute to make that happen?" And then in reaching beyond their current membership, going out and finding potential supporters where they're already at, looking for where there is already activity around their particular issue, and bringing people in in a way that's respectful that says, "Hey, you're already doing this terrific thing. We're doing something that's aligned with you," and treating them as equals and potential partners rather than passive recipients of information.

That's a pretty major philosophical shift for a lot of organizations and one that seems scary, because when you put your campaign in the hands of people who you only know online, essentially, it feels like loss of message control. It feels like giving up control of your campaign to some extent, but what it's actually doing is allowing many, many more people to become engaged with it in a way that is deep and meaningful to them and that will encourage longer term relationships. That's something that I found is the biggest challenge.

BB: What kind of social web tools still need to be developed for organizers?

RL: Before I answer that, can I just take a step back? Prior to inventing anything new, I think there's an awful long way to go in taking advantage of the things that are already out there. To go back to this philosophical question, I don't think that a lot of the exciting tools out there are necessarily new, and even just using what's already out there. I think a lot of organizations could get 10 times or 100 times the campaign juice that they're getting out of them just by shifting the way that they're using them. Part of that is shifting resources internally to integrate their Internet strategy more fully with organizing, fundraising, membership relations. Some of that is using the tools that exist to find supporters where they're already at given the tools that they have. From what I've seen, the tools that you think of almost as boring or passe, if this is the world that you operate in, are still largely untapped for progressive organizing.

Blogger outreach is just now becoming a standard thing for organizations to integrate into their Internet strategy. There's a ton of potential left just with blogs and integrating with blogger outreach into Internet strategy. There are social networks like Facebook and MySpace which again, are just starting to be built into Internet strategy for organizations. Even though if you've been working in this space they seem like old news. These are not a cure-all, but they help to build buzz and identify volunteers. Since some of the footwork can be done by volunteers, it is also an opportunity to keep in a relationship with current supporters.

There still haven't been a lot of campaigns that have used social networks in a ways that are innovative. One idea, and I would like to credit the person who put this on my radar, but I can't remember who it was. One idea that I've heard that I thought was smart, but I haven't seen anyone do, is partnering with a band or some group who already has a huge following on say, MySpace to co-brand . For example, bands have predictable spikes in traffic. So when they're going to launch a new album, a great way to use MySpace is to partner with that band and say, "Can you just put our campaign banner at the top of your page on the day you're going to launch a new album?" and that's a huge, free influx of traffic. That's using MySpace in a totally different way than most organizations think of it when they're building out their Internet strategy which is: We put up a MySpace page.

Obviously, YouTube. I think video has had a big explosion in the last year, but organizations still have not made it standard operating procedure to take decent video of the interesting things that they're doing and just pop them up on YouTube. Even this last week there were some events in DC around the DNC winter meeting including all of the presidential candidates made speeches, and they didn't just throw those speeches up on YouTube, which was ridiculous. It still hasn't sunk in for organizations that this should be part of standard operating procedure. It doesn't take you any longer, it doesn't cost you any money, and you're reaching people where they're already at.

So those are things that are already out there that have been heavily used by individuals, and even by companies, but still, progressive organizations have not really taken advantage of them.

And then, to answer your real question, on the front of what new tools should be developed: I don't know what this would look like, but no one's nailed the mobile text thing yet, so if there's a magic text widget that makes that easy or cheap for organizations to be able to integrate that mobile technology into their campaigns--right now it's still expensive and unproven, but maybe at some point there's some movement on that front.

Volunteer engagement. I think that the next huge potential that I see, especially for organizations, is to engage supporters in more complex ways than they have been. I think organizations have done a really terrific job engaging people offline in meaningful ways for their campaigns. It's still been kind of this throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall kind of approach, asking everyone to do the same thing, and the truth is that people have all kinds of varied skills that they can contribute that add up to potentially a light-year leap forward in the growth of a campaign.

But there isn't a tool out there yet that's become dominant, that makes that easy for campaigns. There are two out there that have potential that I'm aware of. One is VolunteerForChange, which is something that Working Assets put together. It's nothing more than a standard volunteer management tool, but what's nice about it is that it's in this neutral space, where when you sign up to volunteer for one organization's campaign, you then become a potential volunteer for other organizations, and I think that is a good model, where separating the tool from the organization or the campaign itself allows over time for the larger movement to benefit from the work that other campaigns are doing. So if I hold a big campaign and I engage a lot of volunteers, next time some other progressive organization has a big campaign, they've got a pool of volunteers to draw from.

I think that is true to, and takes advantage of, this next phase of development or phase of evolution that we're in online, which is separating the tools, and allows a larger pool of people to engage. It's similar to the reason why it's better to post your video on YouTube and link back to it on your site than to host the video on your site.

And so that's one volunteer engagement tool. The other one, Green Media Toolshed has developed something like the Yahoo Mechanical Turk, where basically as an organization, you can go in and say "Here's this 10 minute or 15 minute piece of work, that if 1000 people did that 15 minutes of work it would add up to us actually getting something significant done."

So you can go as a volunteer to this site and say, "I have 15 minutes, and I have this skill," and it'll pull up a task for you to do. The idea being, if there's enough traffic to this site, thousands of people can do 15 minutes of work, and you actually accomplish something significant.

But neither of those has completely taken off yet, so we'll see what happens there. But I do think that the tools that find a way to engage people in a way that actually uses their individual skills, their individual talents, their particular availability without requiring a lot of staff overhead to manage them, that's a huge potential place of innovation.

And then, the other thing that could be developed is not so much a particular tool, but a resource where people trying to leverage technology and use the Internet for progressive organizing can go to to figure out what's already out there for them.

I think there's already tons of neat little widgets, and there's already tons of tools that exist, and one individual online organizer in an organization has a really hard time knowing about all of them and knowing what's been tried and what works well and what doesn't.

So I think a go-to place, or a resource library, or some kind of an experts' network where people doing this work can go and find out what's available to them, and how well it's worked for other people, that would be a great development.

There's a few projects out there that look like this. There's the Organizer's Tool Crib, which was developed by DotOrganize, and that's a very simple directory of tools for nonprofits and peer ratings.

And the NOI is working, in partnership with a couple of other organizations, to try to pull together a resource library which anyone could add to, hopefully to be launched in the next six months or so.

BB: NOI is having an online organizing and political technology training for nonprofits in March, in Washington, D.C. Can you tell me a little bit about the training, who should go, and what folks will learn?

RL: It's a three-day training, and it's focusing on Internet strategy for progressive organizations and unions doing advocacy.

The first day will focus a lot on effective email outreach writing, which is the most fundamental skill for effective online campaigns, and the actions themselves, how to choose the ask, what kind of actions are effective for different types of organizations, different types of campaigns. We're bringing in some people who've had really great success with different types of online campaigns. For example, an advocacy campaign, a fundraising campaign, an earned media campaign, and really break down what were the elements of their success. And then break down into smaller groups to workshop, and apply this to your own work. What are the takeaways to generating success in your own online campaigns?

Day two we're looking much more at outreach, which is, as I've mentioned a bunch of times now, finding potential supporters where they're already at, which means looking at social networks and events and paid ads, like Google ads and so forth, which are proven. And then also, we will be looking a little, on that second day, at earned media, because one of the ways that Internet organizing can be very effective is generating offline press, creating buzz and engaging the mainstream media, because that allows a campaign to spiral up, to snowball into a much larger thing.

And then the third day, we are going to be looking a little more at technology and how to structure your budget. A lot of organizations now have recognized the importance of the Internet as a part of their overall organization. They've got a couple of staff people; they've got a budget for it, but maybe aren't using that budget in the best bang-for-your-buck kind of way. We are going to look at really breaking down what the available technologies are. What do they cost? What are they actually worth? Where does it make sense to spend a little less on tools, a little less on consultants, and a little more on staff, or vice versa? That is basically the third day.

And so, the idea, aside from what we do, is we are bringing in primarily guests trainers, who have been successful in these different areas, plus experts, people who work with many organizations, or have done a significant amount of research identifying benchmarks and who are technology experts and so forth. But also this a place where you get to spend three days with people from other organization who are doing the same kind of work, and there are people you might not normally be in a room with. Like, if you are an environmental online organizer, you get to be with folks from the unions who are doing online organizing, and folks from more political and youth organizations who are doing online organizing.

All of these different types of organizations have success in different areas and have a lot of knowledge, themselves, to share with each other. And so, at the end of these three days, you really get to go back and take your own organization's Internet strategy to the next level, so that you are getting more use out of your technology dollars, more response out of the emails that you send, and more impact out of the campaigns that you are running.

Britt: What are your predictions for the role that the social web will play in the 2008 elections?

RL: I have never been one for predictions, but I think it has already changed the election cycle. It is earlier. I mean, we are pretty far out from the '08 elections at this point, and there are a huge number of people that are already very much engaged. And a large number of candidates have announced, and are already making speeches and people are watching it. There are a number of "draft so-and-so" campaigns. So, I'd say that it has already changed the cycle, in that it has pushed it back earlier, it is more public, and for the first time in a presidential cycle, from the start, it is recognized pretty widely that being seen, at least on the Democratic side, that being seen as the most progressive and netroots-friendly candidate bestows benefits. That isn't something that was at the forefront of potential candidates' thinking in 2003.

Every cycle, the progressive netroots are more coherent, more savvy and more organized. And every cycle more citizens and people are getting their political information online. More people are getting engaged beyond just voting. They are giving small contributions, going to house parties, voting in online primaries, so it is an easy prediction to say that it is going to be a multiple of what it was in '04. And, I think, to just step back from it all, I think that what has changed in the last four and eight years, the seriousness of the issues that have arisen under the Bush administration, and the openings of the different avenues that technology has created in that same time frame for regular people to plug into politics and to engage in the system in meaningful ways is combining to, what I believe and hope to be a new era in American politics, where it is essentially a healthier democracy. There are way more people engaged, politicians are held accountable, and the system, because it is more open and more people are paying attention and have access to quality information, it is a system and a government that serves the many and not just the few who can afford to, out of their own individual pocketbook, make an impact.

BB: Is there anything else you would like people to know about NOI and its work?

RL: I guess two key things. One is that we are online at http://www.neworganizing.com. Yes, it's dot-com, not dot-org, it's a legacy. And also, just to put it on the radar, for anyone who is interested, one of the major projects or programs that NOI runs is a very intensive one-week training for people -- mostly it is for young people who are graduating college, but also for people who are kind of at a transition in their career -- who want to go do Internet strategy on an electoral campaign. What we do is we offer an all-expenses-paid one-week intensive, basically boot camp in Internet strategy and campaign training, at the end of which they go work on an electoral campaign.

We did this last year in February and March and a lot of those grads went on to work on '06 campaigns, and they are our base for an NOI alumni network, which will be expanding over time. This summer we are going to offer another training like that, and hopefully help place people in '08 campaigns. It is a very intense experience. It is competitive to get into, because it is a career-changing thing for the people who go through it, and a great opportunity. So, that is just a thing to look for if you know any sort of bright, young people, or people who are looking for a career change, and you want to go get into Internet strategy on a campaign, that is something to keep an eye out for.

Transcription by CastingWords

politics
organizing
online