How might we...
- Base Building: How might we improve our engagement with our members/base to build power?
- How might we develop key member leaders into community organizers?
- How might we develop members in recruiting and maintaining organizing relationships between members (not staff in the middle)?
- How might we get increased acquisition and activation from our 44K members?
Hypothesis
If we train member leaders to text people in their own neighborhood, then member leaders will have a leadership role and new members will be jazzed WACAN and the organizers will gain training and follow up skills.
Design
This method is a digital analog to the tried-and-true Block Captain/Neighborhood Team Leader/PCO model. WACAN would recruit and train members as Digital Block Captains (we can find a better name) who are in charge of a certain number (100-200?) voters with valid cell phones in their neighborhood.
We would give members a digital “turf” of nearby voters from the Voterfile, and assign them to cultivate relationships, and donations, from voters in their turf using an ongoing p2p text campaign. Rather than using p2p as a discrete “blast” about a particular event or ask, we could approach it as a conversation-starting/relationship-building tool, driven by members, with the end goal being a donation ask.
To prepare for the pilot program we would create two trainings:
- An internal training for WACAN staff organizers to help them learn the basics of the P2P texting tool and how they’ll recruit, manage, and train volunteer leaders for the program.
- A public facing training for volunteer leaders that guides them through logging in, sending their texts, and how they’ll report and check in w/ their organizer.
Staff training would take place the week of August 20.
Volunteer trainings would begin the week of Sept 5. Right after Labor Day.
Metrics
Staff Training:
- Staff feel excited and empowered by the training to recruit leaders to participate in the program.
- Feel prepared walking out of the training to talk to their leaders.
- Staff feel like they know how to use the P2P texting tool.
- We come out of the training feeling more like a team. A united effort that everyone is part of.
Volunteer training:
- Volunteers are excited and confident to try it.
- If people felt like they were really engaged w/ the organization.
- Previous leaders feel reconnected to the work.
Learnings
This was too big of a chunk of experiment given the timing and our team culture. We made a smaller experiment that focused instead on training organizers on the tool first.