Dan Ratner

The more I have engaged with supporter-driven organizations – political and nonprofit – the more I am convinced that the way they interact with their supporters is fundamentally wrong. So much of it comes from the sales and marketing world.

Each organization seeks to build its own base. The less sophisticated ones treat this base as a simple sales funnel, an audience to be solicited frequently with the goal of raising more dollars. The more sophisticated ones go beyond that and try to engender genuine concern in their bases about the issues the organizations are addressing. They often build some kind of ladder of engagement to get people to care, but that ladder too often represents a simple sales funnel: the only goal is for each piece of communication to get a user to level up or get out.

All of this is reflected both in the culture and tools of these organizations. Tools for nonprofits and tools offered for campaigns are essentially customizations of corporate CRM tools. But the problem of supporter engagement is fundamentally different than a sales funnel for a variety of reasons.

Many have written thoughtfully on this topic, notably Marshal Ganz, and may of my coworkers from Obama for America. In various places we implemented ideas of snowflake organizing – the notion of a semi-hierarchical structure that devolves down from headquarters through regional, state, and city levels to ultimately create action through neighborhood teams. Each neighborhood team is large enough to do meaningful work, but small enough to create accountability.

But one thing that each of these organizations have in common is that address the big, hairy issue in people’s lives. While there are multiple elected offices in the United States, none has the power to motivate people like the presidency. And while there are multiple community issues that need to be solved urgently, none are as holistic as people’s livelihoods. It is hard to get people to engage continuously around worthy but less all encompassing issues whether they are congressional elections or food banks.

This makes me question a fundamental idea of all supporter engagement. That it should be owned.

Let me pick that apart. One common thread in all of the supporter engagement approaches that I’ve seen is the idea that they roll up to an organization with an agenda and fixed leadership. Ultimately, that is a big constraint. What if, instead, the organization could be federated and self-governing, more like Bitcoin than like Salesforce.com?

As a thought experiment, consider how it might work.

First, you would form a legal entity. Fortunately, US law allows for a legal entity without ownership. It’s called a nonprofit. Since nonprofits don’t have owners, they are controlled by a board of directors. If the organization had bylaws allowing those directors to be directly elected by a constituency, we’d have a framework for a participant-managed organization where power could be transferred much as it is in government.

Second, the organization’s structure, bylaws, and voting could all be modeled in a software tool. Much like the snowflake model, their would be neighborhood teams and a hierarchy, but unlike the snowflake model, each layer of the hierarchy would be elected by the members of the layer below it. So the ten or so people on a team would elect a captain, the captains in a city would elect a city manager, the city managers would elect a county representative, the country representatives would elect state representatives, and the state representatives would elect the slate of directors (or might themselves be the directors) and a chief executive.

Broadly, the organization would engage in a few tasks: setting policy, directing action, and raising and distributing money.

Anyone on the network would be about to push ideas up vertically (so a team captain can send things to the city manager, the county manager, etc., hypothetically all the way up the chain) or down to everyone who is “below” them in the hierarchy (so a state representative could message everyone in the state). Broadly, this would apply not just to messaging, but to authority generally. Anything can be suggested up, anything can be decided and directed down.

This same structure would apply to policy making. It could be as simple as a wiki with cascading editorial rights. And it would certainly apply to information distribution and actions people could take. For example, the organization could decide to support a slate of candidates for office (not just a single one). Then the network would take action in support of those candidates even though individuals would be free to dissent.

On the issue side, the network could decide at each level of the hierarchy what issues matter to them and adopt organizations relevant to those actions. For example, the Chicago group might be most concerned about combatting violence while the Los Angeles group might be most concerned about immigrant right. These priorities could change, but they’d change democratically and people could have confidence that through their own involvement they could make the case for their own issues.

Smaller actions could work through such a network as well. Neighborhood watches, alley cleaning, even school board meetings could be coordinated.

One critical facet would be that teams could also connect regularly in the real world and they’d get some sort of credit for their level of engagement. It is simple enough to pick a spot in each neighborhood (the local Starbucks or McDonalds) and a time every week or few weeks for such meetings to occur.

If a network of this kind could gather momentum, it would ultimately become a highly democratic but autonomous civic network. Organizations and candidate could effectively put their cases to the participants and, if they prevail, get a meaningful level of support even though each person may not be able to contribute much individually. The organization could also take meaningful actions between elections and between fundraising cycles: town hall meetings, calls on policy issues, and so much more.

The key point is that the network isn’t owned. It isn’t locked into a single person, a single cause, or a single organization. It should be self-healing (unlike a campaign when a candidate leaves office), perpetual, and provide ways for people to make a difference. It could also be a binding layer for communities.

The software to support it is easy enough to build and maintain (I built a prototype while I was thinking through this that I might opensource.)
I curious about if people think such a network might work in reality?

Since I had the opportunity to work on President Obama’s 2012 campaign, it may be taking me longer than most to process the fact that the inauguration of the 45th president has just taken place. I’m trying to buy in to President Obama’s optimism about the future, but as he said, the future is in our hands only if we work for it and only if we organize for it.

With this in mind, since election day Genevieve and I have worked with a team of amazing volunteers to build RISE. Our goals are to create coordination among groups with an agenda of resistance to the most toxic incoming policies and to address many Americans’ real economic insecurity. We know that the country benefited hugely under President Obama with 8 years of economic growth, wages which are finally rising, a government budget in primary surplus, and so much more. But we also can see from the fact that the 45th president was elected that there’s a long way to go.

People no longer feel like the American Dream is working for them. Though wages are finally growing, middle class incomes have stagnated for a long time. We have huge issues around the impact of automation, climate change, and globalization. But we need answers that take us forward, not ill conceived ideas that try to take us back to a nostalgic history that wasn’t real, sustainable, or good for many groups of people like women and minorities. RISErs have many ideas for this and will work to engage new voters and persistent non-voters as well as the progressive base on these issues. We will do it by engaging thought-leaders and by listening to people’s individual concerns by building a permanent grassroots movement. We are also a political organization and will work directly to support like-minded candidates and policies as well as to oppose regressive ones. Our structure is a hybrid of tech startup and permanent campaign.

If you are as disturbed as I am by the direction the country has taken, please come and check out what we’re doing. RISE is only 60 days old so it’s a work in progress, but to be successful we need your support, your contributions, and your ideas. We need you to help us spread the word. Help us shape RISE and help us be a powerful voice for both resistance and change.

Genevieve is also touring the country to build support. Sign up to find out when she’ll be in your area (Cleveland, Philly, Milwaukee, Detroit, SF, and Denver are all coming soon.)

Today Senator Susan Collins introduced a compromise gun proposal to limit gun sales to people on certain terrorist watch lists. I support the proposal, even though I don’t think it goes far enough and even in spite of several seemingly reasonable arguments against it. I want to explain why.

First, there is the argument that this proposal would not have prevented Orlando or Newtown let alone the violence plaguing big cities like Chicago. That may be true, but it is not a reason to oppose the proposal for several reasons. The most consequential public policy victories of the last few decades were won not with a single sweeping piece of legislation but through incrementally building up smaller pieces to build a foundation and to make it clear that the fear, uncertainty, and doubt associated with a big change is unfounded. Examples of this include gay marriage rights and health care reform. If this policy is a good policy, opposing it on the grounds that it doesn’t go far enough is wrongheaded and simply allows the great to be the enemy of the good. It’s not my opinion that we should pass this compromise and move on, but that we should use it as a starting point and build towards other sensible reforms. Even a small bill with bipartisan support would help build trust for further discussions. It would also help eliminate the fear that passing any reform whatsoever is equivalent to stepping on the political third rail.

A more interesting challenge to the proposal is the argument that using a government list (like the terror watch lists) as the basis for exclusion from a constitutional right (like the second amendment) is a slide down the path to tyranny. This sounds sensible until you pick it apart. Virtually all constitutional rights have exclusions (e.g. you can’t yell “fire!” in a crowded theater nor can you utter hate speech.) If the concern is that due process may not be observed, that can be resolved by allowing for an appeals process from the list. While that may seem tantamount to being considered guilty until proven innocent, that opens the whole issue of the legitimacy of the lists to restrict other rights like free travel. In fact, I don’t think it’s that different from someone being declared mentally ill (which virtually everyone accepts as a reasonable basis for exclusion from the right to buy a gun). The analysis is done by a professional and is either accepted or not accepted by a court. I may be wrong on this, but these kinds of decisions are what the Supreme Court is for.

The last point – that more guns make us safer and therefore any restriction is bad – simply flies in the face of the data. There are good reasons why people want to own guns (I own one myself) but this one doesn’t pass muster. And while I agree that not all policies make us safer, I still support this one for the reasons above.

Speaking of the courts, it’s still important to add that the scope of the second amendment has been subject to different interpretations (including skeptics of all political stripes ranging from John Paul Stevens to Robert Bork.) To simply throw up our hands and say there is no possible restriction that is constitutional is simply incorrect.