Uniting our supporters. A simple strategy.

[parocks]

I should also argue that often when people say.

"We should be organized. We need a big email list."

They really mean

"A big email list is worth $$$. Give me your email addresses."

This happens a lot here.

 

[dusman]

There are a lot of organizational tools out there. I think a lot of them fail because supporters have to use them. That's the primary problem in my opinion. Why do we need anything more than an email that says, "we would like you to attend the below events if you have time, please RSVP the sender if you can, click here for details".

What do you think the reason is that the movement at large isn't using tools like this or CFL? There has to be a reason. I think its because people don't want to do work just to figure out what their options are. We should figure out the options and email it to them. Simple as that. Minimize the threshhold for participation.

While our organization may not be using it, I pinpoint this as a major problem.

The Obama Administration has a fully integrated system they use for campaigning which is partly responsible for their rapid success online. In fact, NationBuilder was developed based off of Obama's 2008 system. One of the founders of Facebook helped work on it, including a campaign staffer/manager from the Obama campaign.

We don't have anything close to NationBuilder available. I've tried this whole year to get the campaign to recognize the need and put it in place, as its an extremely low budget item to deploy.

E-mail is fine, but it does not serve the full purpose of engaging support. Someone gets an e-mail and they read it and whether they act upon it or not (a crucial need is to verify) that's about the full nature of the interaction. With a campaign system, support logs in and interacts with not only what is targeted for them, but also gives them a birds-eye view of what is happening at county, state and national levels. This software even maintains canvassing efforts and could just as easily integrate the Phone From Home program.

Nonetheless, its one of the big mistakes this campaign, in my opinion. We had a perfect template from 2008 via Obama's campaign and we ignored almost all of it.

The good news is this system certainly doesn't have to be exclusive to a campaigning strategy. It just as well can serve as a general organizational tool for our movement to keep engaged and updated on what is happening. The problem is who will be responsible for potentially years of leadership to maintain and uphold the integrity of such.

 

[ClydeCoulter]

I respectfully disagree, central planning is essential in some aspects of the rEVOLution. Without central planning there's no huge money bombs, and if we have a central hub for grassroots activity that also branches into the local hubs we can make a huge difference.

RPF and DP seem to be about as central a planning as it gets for us and it has worked pretty well for money bombs and the like. Lots of good videos come out of here and DP etc.....
Central planning in my state didn't seem to work very well. All it takes is a broken link somewhere and a bunch of people are left in the dark.

 

[LibertyInJeopardy]

Here's an idea I proposed awhile back that kind of fits with some aspects of the OP:

http://www.dailypaul.com/211540/is-t...e-caucus-teams

Isn't there a tool out there that would let supporters join together with layers of local accountability and support? This way teams of 3-4 supporters could make sure one another shows up to vote and caucus, then they can report their own votes and overall totals upward to the campaign.

I would look at groundcrew.us, but it appears inactive.

Anybody out there an app developer?

If we know the caucus and polling sites in advance, you'd just need supporters to sign up then they could automatically be teamed up for practice caucuses based on their local site, they could be put in teams of 2, 3, or 4 and be responsible for making sure their entire team votes, and finally they could check in at the location and confirm they vote.

User levels

Admin -
This level is for app management.

Organizer -
Sets up polling site locations, sets up team sizes, and creates events.

Supporter -
Automatically divided into small teams. Able to message eachother and mark a teammate as inactive to potentially remove them from the team (if teammates also mark) or transfer themselves to a random team.

Example -
Teams automatically have the first activity of correctly identifying their polling location and planning transportation on vote/caucus day. The team must complete this activity in order to officially name their team and get on the list for their county.
Once this is complete they earn the ability to contact their organizer for the next activity. As they complete activities they earn more features like the ability to communicate with other teams. The final level of team evolution is breaking up into organizer level users, each having new teams beneath them.

How about some activity ideas that an organizer shoud add to the game? If you were an organizer level user what would you add for your local teams? Your job would be to get them active and teach them the local process so they could all become organizers too and to make damn sure everyone you influence shows up at the local site.

One idea- post your money bomb contribution on DailyPaul.com on the day of the next moneybomb.

 

[parocks]

While our organization may not be using it, I pinpoint this as a major problem.

The Obama Administration has a fully integrated system they use for campaigning which is partly responsible for their rapid success online. In fact, NationBuilder was developed based off of Obama's 2008 system. One of the founders of Facebook helped work on it, including a campaign staffer/manager from the Obama campaign.

We don't have anything close to NationBuilder available. I've tried this whole year to get the campaign to recognize the need and put it in place, as its an extremely low budget item to deploy.

E-mail is fine, but it does not serve the full purpose of engaging support. Someone gets an e-mail and they read it and whether they act upon it or not (a crucial need is to verify) that's about the full nature of the interaction. With a campaign system, support logs in and interacts with not only what is targeted for them, but also gives them a birds-eye view of what is happening at county, state and national levels. This software even maintains canvassing efforts and could just as easily integrate the Phone From Home program.

Nonetheless, its one of the big mistakes this campaign, in my opinion. We had a perfect template from 2008 via Obama's campaign and we ignored almost all of it.

The good news is this system certainly doesn't have to be exclusive to a campaigning strategy. It just as well can serve as a general organizational tool for our movement to keep engaged and updated on what is happening. The problem is who will be responsible for potentially years of leadershi p to maintain and uphold the integrity of such.

It wouldn't have been difficult at all for the Ron Paul Official Campaign to come up with a social network with all the bells and whistles it wanted. I've never looked at what Obama did 4 years ago, and presumably that could've been duplicated, but if whatever they had then was too hard, it would've been easy enough to get some sort of social network that would've replaced the random collection of meetup groups, facebook pages, and the random selection of Ron Paul supporter Ron Paul sites.

This would've been up to the Ron Paul Campaign to do, and they didn't do it. Oh, well.

 

[ClydeCoulter]

Parocks, I agree. If the campaign would have done it early, I think we could have used it and it may have provided benefit.

But, that's a push type thing which works for short term goals. With individuals such as what we have here, a push per project as they come up seems to work well. Thomas Massie, Money Bombs, etc... Fewer trolls and less media-blitz-topics would help, but that comes with Freedom. It just means we have to be mindful of bumping the stuff that matters.

It might help if we had a "current hot to-do list" type thing that we could add new/current items to that had from-to dates and/or complete-flag so that they could automatically drop into the standard grassroots topics after completion. This could be in a single grouping within grassroots at the top with a count of threads and date/time of last update. It might cause the mods extra work to ensure posts on each thread were on topic and threads were valid, but it sure would help.

 

[parocks]

It would take more than both hands to count the number of times I've seen someone post this exact sentiment. That somehow trying to come up with a strategy that addresses the needs of the movement as a whole compromises and violates some unspoken rule that "central planning doesn't work" as you say. Collaboratively maintaining an email list by liberty supporters in order to get out event info to relevant parties doesn't qualify as central planning. And that meme is related to the economy as a whole not to strategies for growing and organizing the liberty movement.

I want to work on the local level personally but I also see a need for supporters to be motivated by viewing feedback for what's happening in other areas. People aren't going to spontaneously start organizing for the cause of liberty all over the country on the local level in some magical "decentralized" way. You need a community of supporters to germinate the effort, like what we have here at RPF. We need organizers to do the work of gathering and organizing events and then emailing appropriate supporters. I believe doing this in a collective fashion will motivate people when they see how many people are involved in the effort. But we have to make the effort.

I am planning to start scouring places like meetup and CFL to get emails names and locations from my area, but haven't done it yet as I just posted this thread today.

"scouring places like meetup and CFL to get emails names and locations from my area"

that.

and people don't want to do that.

People should be gathering data. There's no clear reason to do that, but it's useful info to have. Sometime later, there's a place to drop this information. Hopefully with a campaign.

No grassroots Ron Paul website did anything really useful organizationally. People naturally gravitated to Facebook and Meetup. There was no consensus about what Ron Paul grassroots website was best (and it's unlikely there would be consensus - this requires the official campaign).

 

[ClydeCoulter]

I think "privacy" is an issue for a lot of people. People would trust the campaign, but trusting others with all of their personal info is another thing.

In my county, I was made the coordinator, but was not given a list of supporters in my county until 6 days before the primary, and delegates are elected in the primary. I requested a list early on but nothing. I was even told I might be the only RP supporter in my county, yet, once I received the list and put together a meeting at a park here I found out that one guy was a delegate in 2008. What? Why didn't I know that and was he even contacted to be asked to get on the ballot for 2012? He did not run this time, and I don't know if he was contacted prior to the sign-up date back in Feb.

One of the guys that did get elected (only 2 of 12 in my county that I know of support RP) told me that he is part of a large group of RP supporters, but would not give any information on them, he would only pass stuff on that I sent to him.

Privacy is important to a lot of people, especially in these days of NDAA and the like.

 

[parocks]

Parocks, I agree. If the campaign would have done it early, I think we could have used it and it may have provided benefit.

But, that's a push type thing which works for short term goals. With individuals such as what we have here, a push per project as they come up seems to work well. Thomas Massie, Money Bombs, etc... Fewer trolls and less media-blitz-topics would help, but that comes with Freedom. It just means we have to be mindful of bumping the stuff that matters.

It might help if we had a "current hot to-do list" type thing that we could add new/current items to that had from-to dates and/or complete-flag so that they could automatically drop into the standard grassroots topics after completion. This could be in a single grouping within grassroots at the top with a count of threads and date/time of last update. It might cause the mods extra work to ensure posts on each thread were on topic and threads were valid, but it sure would help.

Are you talking about what RPF should do within the context of the phpbb system (which is something that can be integrated into joomla)?

It really isn't very difficult at all to put up a social network. There are free out of the box solutions. A paid solution like nationbuilder. These things just aren't hard at all to do. I have one up there right now. Back, last summer, someone came here to RPF and said "hey, I have bachmann2012.com, which really is a great url, and if someone would put up a website for it, I'll point my url to it". There was a handful of people who were interested in doing that, and I ended up doing that. And it's still there online webmusicvideo.com/bachmann2012. I can change any of that in a half hour to a ron paul url. All the bachmann specific content is gone, it's mostly Ron Paul content now. No one uses it, but if you look at it you'll notice that it has a big bunch of tools that people can use. This took me, like, a day or 2 to do. The reason why I'm mentioning this isn't that I'm arguing that I'm amazing at this, it's that it's really really easy to do. Even a serious political campaign that wants to win can do that, not just a guy with a bit of experience in creating social networks. Of course, there are or were MANY Ron Paul social networks, with the standard profile page, the ability for one registered user to communicate with another, etc etc etc, like facebook, or myspace, and whatever specific thing that is desired could be achieved quickly and easily. But if it's grassroots, it's not going to fly.

See http://rp2012.org - somewhere in that site is a whole bunch of data, there are a lot of people signed up, and you can sort by state.

See http://ronpaulsocialnetwork.com - that's pretty much a facebook clone. That's been up since last year. That too has thousands of registered users.

Ron Paul Country came and apparently went. Same thing, gathering data, sending out emails.

There hasn't been a shortage of these websites by Ron Paul supporters, they just really aren't very useful when facebook and meetup are more popular, have more users, and the only way these social networks would get the critical mass is if it's official. RPF and Daily Paul have critical mass, I'm rarely on Daily Paul (typically only when people are sent there from here), but there doesn't seem to be any big push here on RPF or there to add myspace / facebook like social network features to the sites with the eyeballs.

 

[parocks]

I think "privacy" is an issue for a lot of people. People would trust the campaign, but trusting others with all of their personal info is another thing.

In my county, I was made the coordinator, but was not given a list of supporters in my county until 6 days before the primary, and delegates are elected in the primary. I requested a list early on but nothing. I was even told I might be the only RP supporter in my county, yet, once I received the list and put together a meeting at a park here I found out that one guy was a delegate in 2008. What? Why didn't I know that and was he even contacted to be asked to get on the ballot for 2012? He did not run this time, and I don't know if he was contacted prior to the sign-up date back in Feb.

One of the guys that did get elected (only 2 of 12 in my county that I know of support RP) told me that he is part of a large group of RP supporters, but would not give any information on them, he would only pass stuff on that I sent to him.

Privacy is important to a lot of people, especially in these days of NDAA and the like.

I wasn't thinking of trying to obtain full lists from the official campaign. I'm not sure why they'd be interested in doing that. Just trying to find data of people on the internet. There was probably a Indiana for Ron Paul facebook group. Go through that group, and get the data from there.