Lessons from Obama (part I) – Organising

Now that all the excitement is beginning to die down, it’s worth stopping to take note of some lessons that Irish politics can take from the US elections.  There are three key ways in which I believe we can learn from the Obama campaign in particular: organising, fundraising and communication.

Obama pic

(pic stolen from Keith)

I’m normally a little cautious about publishing ideas that I think could be used by other political parties, but as the Greens are hiring a new web person, and Michael Martin has announced that FF are going to copy Obama tactics (both items courtesy of Alexia), it’s clear that none of what I’m posting about is exactly secret information.

Organising:

Much has now been written about Obama’s incredible ability to get volunteers out knocking on doors on his behalf.   A big part of building up such numbers of canvassers was empowering people to take responsibility for their street/block/area.  This was then combined with an astonishing web system (as shown to us by Zack Exley at the recent Social Activism blogging conference), which allowed individual volunteers to fill in their canvassing information online.  Finally, the follow-up on canvassing was immense, with enormous phone-banks of volunteers using the information gathered from canvassing to target likely voters and make follow-up calls to motivate them the final step towards the polling booth.  These three aspects need to be considered separately.

Canvassing

The division of responsibility is an idea that has been in limited use in Ireland for some time now. For example, the Drumcondra mafia always appointed ‘ward bosses’ (anyone watching ‘Bertie’ will have seen that this was how Royston Brady came through the ranks) who were responsible for organising the FF operation in an area of the constituency.  Aodhán Ó’Riordáin has taken this idea further in his campaign in my own area of Clontarf, with individual members being given responsibility for canvassing/leafleting areas of the electoral ward at times that suit them.  Very Obama-like indeed!   However, I have two caveats while encouraging the use of this strategy.   Firstly, it’s important to remember that a lot of people join political parties for the social outlet they provide (among other reasons naturally), and it’s important to ensure there are regular group activities so that individuals don’t feel isolated.  And secondly, it’s important to have some senior figures who check on the progress of work in the entire electoral area – it’d very easy for someone to tell you there’s tonnes of work being done if they know there’s no-one checking!

Collating information

The use of technology to allow individual canvassers to fill out their canvass returns is also pretty astonishing, but much, much more difficult to replicate in an Irish context.  Firstly, the very size of the US assists in building the financial might to invest in state-of-the-art technologies.   That’s considerably tougher to do in Ireland, with the very limited resources available to political parties.   Secondly, low broadband penetration levels make the likelihood of individual canvassers making such returns somewhat limited, particularly in rural areas.  Thirdly, in the US it is possible to buy credit card data etc. which allows very specific targeting of voters, and very centralised databases full of voter information.   Data protection laws in Ireland raise some difficulties here.   If a candidate manages to gather the email address or phone number of a constituent, my understanding is that that data cannot be passed to the central party without some form of waiver being signed by the constituent.  Equally, the only information readily available to parties is the voter register, and even that can be patchy at best at times.

All that said, there are major steps Irish parties could take.  The availability of electoral registers (and to be fair, they have been cleaned up somewhat in recent years), at least gives political parties a base of names and addresses to begin with.  A little investment could surely see someone develop an API to take phone numbers from the phonebook to add home numbers to this.   Adding a data protection waiver to canvass query forms and/or web contact forms could allow at least some local information to be shared with national parties.  Alternatively, building a database which consisted of constituency cells, with only shareable information fed into a central database could provide a way of collating information without breaching data protection rules.

Using a database such as this has three massive advantages for political parties.   Firstly, over time, you build up an idea of the voting intentions of constituents, which is enormously helpful when you’re targeting particular types of voters (eg. A FG candidate in Galway in the next locals would find it brilliant to be able to effectively target constituents who have voted PD in recent years).   Secondly, you can relatively quickly build up an idea of the recurring issues and concerns of particular electoral areas.  And finally, when it comes to succession, new candidates don’t have to start from scratch, but can hit the ground running with a good working knowledge of the state of play of a constituency.

Phonebanks

The use of phone-banks by both sides in the US election was a very effective use of the information gathered by local canvassers.  There are a number of things that can be done with the information contained in a database such as that described above, and I’ll cover most of them under the third part of this extended post – Communication (this is also where I’ll conver my views on online organising, as I think there’s a big cross-over between the two areas).  However, I think phonebanks deserve consideration as an organising method in an Irish context.

Simply put, phone banks consist of teams of volunteers with call sheets in front of them, targeting particular types of voters (eg, those who have indicated they will vote on economic matters, or those who have indicated they would be willing to vote Labour).  By using pre-prepared scripts for such target groups, little training of such volunteers is required, and volunteers can be used for an hour or a week – whatever time they have to give.   Finally, because you’re operating by phone, teams are not geographically restricted, so volunteers from areas that a party is very strong can be redeployed to work on voters in weaker areas.

How does this work in an Irish context?  Well, anyone involved in politics will be familiar with the idea of canvassers giving a list of phone numbers to a candidate at the end of a canvassing session, for follow-up phonecalls the next day.   If resources are available, this can be greatly enhanced by ensuring regular follow-up phonecalls to such constituents.  But most importantly, when it gets down to the last month of an election, and there are scores of volunteers willing to help all over the country, this is a really simple task to hand out, requiring relatively little supervision.   Of course, the outcomes of such phonecalls are then also fed back into the database mentioned above, and again the quality of information in that database continues to be enhanced. Irish politics has seen dalliances with auto-dialling message systems in the past – it’ll be very interesting to see if physical phonebanks now become a part of our landscape.

Fundraising and communications posts will follow over the next day or two….