Innovative Organizing

There is a tendency in the online political world to look at the online political world as the object. However, in the Obama campaign, the organizing success has less to do with the blogosphere and more to do with other organizing strategies. The online world was mainly a tool to empower the offline world. To my knowledge the best description of those organizing strategies is from a March Rolling Stone article. One of the key insights was this one:

Figueroa's goal is not to put supporters to work but to enable them to put themselves to work, without having to depend on the campaign for constant guidance. "We decided that we didn't want to train volunteers," he says. "We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves. ...

The result was a network of trained organizers who became what Figueroa calls the campaign's "secret weapon." Early on, the volunteers essentially served as Obama's staff in key states where he didn't have employees. "It quadrupled the size of our operation in states that were going to be voting not only on February 5th, but February 9th, February 12th and here on March 4th," Figueroa says. "We had an anchor in those states for a long, long, long time."

The key insight here is that a volunteer organization isn't made up of volunteers but of volunteer organizers and recruiters. The people who are in touch with and motivate the volunteers. This is a shift in thinking from both traditional Democratic and Republican organizing strategies. Some people will look at this as nothing new because it is somewhat based in community organizing principles, but it is quite similar to organizational innovations in other spheres. For example, in megachuches, small group leaders are the pointy end of the spear in member recruitment and retention. We will look at more examples in a second.

Read on.