How might we...
- How might we build a left pole of 11-12 State Senators & 27 House of Delegates that shift the balance of decision-making power in the hands of a new majority in Virginia?
- How might we build a sustainable online deep base community using issue campaigns?
- How might we move online members to be more involved in our issue campaigns?
- How might we significantly increase our membership base around criminal justice and democracy issues?
Hypothesis
If RTV leaders engage one on one with new FB community members, then we’ll have built one rung on the deep base ladder and be able to bring more FB community members into issues campaigns.
Design
This experiment would be centered on a tangential campaign to the Right to Vote work that is more timely in this moment of crisis. So instead of focusing on pushing for a RTV amendment, this campaign would center on pushing the state government to provide resources for those recently released from prison so they can safely integrate back into society.
This experiment is intertwined with the Crown Royal experiment.
Actions:
- Training 6 core leaders to engage new folks who join through the FB group (reaching out and scheduling a one on one phone convo)
- Leaders engage with new FB community members and build relationships
Metrics
Retention/Engagement: Connect 6
- What % of Facebook group members engage in the community?
- Can each of the 6-7 current leaders start holding relationships with 6 new people?
- Through messenger, they start meetings of another group that they hold the relationships
Learnings
- Facebook messenger wasn’t an effective tool for one on ones. FB messaged 70 individuals for 2 responses. Could be a variety of technical and cultural reasons for this. Texting when possible resulted in better connection rates.
- Weekly orientation meetings consistently had 4-5 new members over 2 months, the eviction rally and a petition action helped bring more attention to the Right to Vote campaign.
- Core members with our team since November are having to pivot to digital organizing and are craving in person interaction, even physically distanced.
- This design relied heavily on tapping newly joining members to our online container vs both that AND engaging with existing relationships that core leaders have/may have with other formerly incarcerated individuals and/or loved ones. Want to make this more of a both/and.
- Regular experiment meetings with leads (across departments) is essential to pivot and make choices about emergent issues.
Across Crowne Royale and Connect 6:
Want to close the binary of digital and organizing, not to make organizing digital but to implement. Organizing vision has to be more informed by digital tools and that takes some learnings. Understanding what is possible. The big difference between vision and execution. We can make a little less abstract in visioning. Starting to clarify the importance of having a one on one socially distant in person is one thing but we’re also doing digital one on one’s. So what does that mean?
We are committed to do to build power in distributed fashion and takes step and surrendering to notion that right now we can’t do that the old way. Face to face stuff. There is no magic tool, if we are doing it then how do we get better at organizing digitally? Are there other tools that might be helpful? (We know organizing). Challenging for our core members and broader community to engage online so what do we do to get them to acclimate and get them used to these tools!
Decisions
Advice for other Baselab groups:
- Make sure we have specific asks and tasks when onboarding new members. Whether its Phone Banking, Community Outreach, Training on how to do outreach/recruitment, anything other than “just” recruitment. A majority of new members have to develop those soft-skills in people interactions. We have to help them overcome the fears our being transparent with their story. All their stories are relevant and powerful.