Kucinich volunteer meeting
This afternoon, I attended a volunteer meeting for the Kucinich campaign in Washington state. I've written up some notes on it for those who are interested in learning about how various state campaigns are being run. I hope that the information may be useful to someone, inshallah. Please follow the extended entry link to read it.
The meeting consisted of three parts. During the first part, the coordinators for various campaign efforts spoke. During the second part, we had breakout sessions to develop new ideas in these areas. During the third part, each group reported back to the larger meeting on their discussions. The topics were the Washington for Kucinich website, volunteers and events, MeetUp, Dialogues for Democracy (a.k.a. Kucinich House Parties), caucuses, communications (media response), and speakers.
The website you can see by following the link above. It's an excellent site with lots of useful information.
Volunteers and events talked largely about the difficulties of getting Kucinich campaign materials to the people and places that they need to be. Logistics can always be a problem, especially in a cash-strapped campaign. I have to say, though, that they're doing an excellent job getting volunteers at events in this area and seem to keeping up fairly well with the Dean campaign (which has 10 times as much money). None of the other campaigns seem to have a presence at any of these events.
MeetUp is going along well. The MeetUp organization itself seems to make it difficult to change venues and has other requirements that are sometimes too rigid; but it's certainly an excellent tool and does most of the work organizing volunteers and interested folks from around the country to all meet at the same time.
The house parties are proving to be a good way of fundraising, but this is also the most difficult part for most folks to do. I know it would be for me. They discussed holding practice sessions so that house party hosts would be more comfortable and at ease.
The caucuses are of course a major focus of efforts and the end towards which every other project must lead. We can do all the other activities that we want, but if Kucinich supporters aren't at the caucuses on February 7, the campaign will die. The procedure is unknown to just about everybody and apparently a lot of people are getting confusing information when they contact their local Democratic party. So there's a lot to be done just in educating people. We also need to build our organization around the legislative districts and precincts. Some parts of the state are doing well at this, other parts not. I attended the breakout session for this issue and listened to one of the area coordinators who's pulled together an excellent organization in the northwest corner of the state. He described how he starts expanding into an area by finding at least one local contact who can direct him to a Kucinich supporter there. He then works with the Kucinich supporter to set up a meeting at a community meeting area (e.g., in a public library or labor hall) and advertise it in local media and via phone and email. At the meeting, he shows a video of Kucinich, holds a question and answer session about Kucinich and the campaign, then begins buidling the organization, asking for volunteers to become chairs or coordinators for outreach, visibility (media response), database, fundraising, caucuses, and volunteer work (tabling, doorbelling, etc). He also has them set up their next meeting before they leave. The sign-up sheet that he uses includes a place for supporters to list their legislative district and caucus and asks them to commit to joining the official email list, volunteer for the campaign, and/or attend the caucus. All of this information goes into a database.
This is basically the process we'll need to be doing in my local area. I've already been gathering information and brainstorming ideas, which I am passing on to my area coordinators and local volunteer group and I've volunteered to do database work.
Communications, as I noted above, was really media response. They highlighted two success stories. The first was an action alert about NPR's coverage of a recent candidate debate, which managed to mention all of the candidates except Kucinich. The action alert started out in Washington and went nationwide. Over 100 people emailed NPR, which issued a correction and read some of the emails on the air. The second success was the Daniel Pipes action alert. This also went national and generated over 100 emails to C-SPAN. They forwarded these emails to other organizations, including the Institute of Peace. There are still some bugs to be worked out, since it's easy to send out an alert before you have all the facts, but so far it seems to be working very well.
The speakers bureau is arranging for people to give speeches and informational talks about Kucinich at various locations. The Kucinich volunteer who spoke at my legislative district meeting last week was sent by the speakers bureau. This project also is just getting off the ground, and seems to be off to a good start.
So we covered a lot of ground. I am really impressed with how far the organization has come since July, which is when it first began to come together.
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