26 March 2009
Joe Rospars Discusses Online Outreach in Political Campaigns
CO.NX webchat transcript, March 26
Joe Rospars, former new media director for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and a founding partner of Blue State Digital, an Internet strategy and communications firm in Washington, discussed new media in a CO.NX video webchat on March 26.
Following is the transcript:
(begin transcript)
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Bureau of International Information Programs
Webchat Transcript
Online Outreach and Political Campaigns
Guest: Joe Rospars
Date: March 26, 2009
Time: 10 a.m. EDT
Joe Rospars: Hi, everyone. Hope this is working out well for you. And thanks to the America.gov team for putting this webchat together. We're here to talk about online outreach and campaigning. And I wanted to make a couple of points briefly before we start.
The first is that online outreach isn't actually just about technology. It's an extension of a certain set of principles and a philosophy of how you build your campaign or your organization. Online outreach has the potential to amplify the potential of people to be involved but it's – the requirement is a real bottom-up, people-oriented strategy for your campaign. And to make that work, an organization or a campaign really has to be transparent and authentic and open to the participation of people in a substantive way towards really making the organization successful. And these principles apply everywhere, no matter what the constraints of availability of, or the constraints of a political system or situation, that when you invest in making an organization that is transparent and connecting with people on a human level and really open to people's participation, when you're investing in people's ability to affect your organization to affect the political process, to affect their communities and helping people become leaders and organizers, technology and online outreach can really extend the reach of the organization and the reach of the individuals who are working on its behalf. So with that said, let's jump into questions.
As you submit your questions, be sure to say where you're from so we can get a sense of how connected we all are through this new technology. I’ll tell you where I am. I'm at public affairs section of our embassy in Minsk today, and thanks to the help of everyone here, we have a good connection and a typical interesting backdrop complete with extra patriotic American flags, so thanks to everybody here for your help and we will jump right into the questions in a moment.
We are the first question here that we will take is from Sophie, who didn't say where she is from yet but her question came in before we did that so we will let her slide. The question is: Do you think new media is the future of politics? In other words, will efficient internet streams become a prerequisite to winning an election?
That's a good question. The answer is that I don't think the media is a replacement for the traditional kind of politics or the traditional parts of an organization. It's actually something that works best when it's integrated with the rest of the organization and working towards the goals that are the traditional goals of the campaign, whether that's communicating with more people and extending the reach of the message, organizing more people, getting more volunteers involved, getting more people registered to vote, or raising more money for people in small dollar increments and getting people involved in giving $5 and $10 and things like that, that's the potential of the new media part. It's about the same traditional outcomes but getting more people involved and lowering the barrier to entree.
So as organizations, whether it's a campaign or NGO or nonprofit or labor union or any kind of organization that has a people-based membership, we look at their situation and the question is: If you have 10 people in a room, what would you ask them to do? And how many of them doing it could your organization support?
So I think that an efficient new media strategy can really amplify the reach and the effect of these traditional outcomes and get more people involved and the folks who run both a good traditional campaign as we did on the Obama campaign, and integrate tightly a new media and a lowering of the barrier of entree to those traditional parts of the campaign, those will be the ones that are most successful.
Another question that came in here, the question is: What the most important thing in a political campaign?
There are a lot of important things in a political campaign. A prerequisite is a candidate and a message that resonates with people and a staff of dedicated people that believe in the candidate and the message in order for it to work. But, I think, even broader than that, when you broaden it out, the most important thing is the relationships with people. So not just the staff and building the core committee group of people who believe in the candidate and the message, but also to build relationships between the candidate and the organization with thousands and hopefully tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of the volunteers who want to be a part of things. And those relationships that you have between the organizations of those people are powerful. But even more powerful are the relationships that you can build between those folks.
If you give people the tools to find each other and work together, that is actually something that is an unbelievably powerful component of the organization, that building of networks among the supporters within the context of your organization and the campaign where people can step up and become owners of the campaign and owners of the organization and recognize the corrective power to come together in local small groups, and also in a big way, together create change.
Next question from Alexi: What are the most common mistakes you see made by other political organizations?
These political organizations or any organization that is involved in advocacy or fighting for a cause can make us forget who the important people are, the people who are supporting that will do the actual work and get the message out to the rest of everyone else and provide financial power to do the work that you do or help get those voters registered or whatever the volunteer activity is.
It's typical of organizations not just in Washington but anywhere in these big buildings where there are lots of fancy conference rooms where people get together and whatever happens in the conference room is the be all and end all of a particular organization. I think that it is useful for organizations, political and otherwise, to remember that the folks at the end of the food chain on the receiving end of the email or the visitors to the website are really the ones who are important because they are the ones who can organize it in a mass way.
If somebody has a week to give you to volunteer or just have five minutes to give you, to open your email and read your content or take an action that you're asking, serving those people, providing them with the content, which is authentic and transparent, providing them with clear opportunities, providing them with volunteer opportunities that are meaningful and are very clearly related to the outcome and not wasting their time, I think those kinds of things, it boils down to a sense of respect and involvement for ordinary people, and I think that a lot of organizations need a little shake to remember that and remember who the important people are.
Next question from Fay Durant. She is a librarian and wants to know if libraries play a significant role in the dissemination of information regarding the campaign.
That’s a good question. Libraries are special places in society, both in America and around the world, where there's incredible [inaudible] rates but a place people can meet each other and exchange ideas and have conversations about their common situation and their community.
So we saw a lot of the meetings and events that were organized by our supporters on the campaign would have the library as the meeting place or just the parking lot as a place to meet before going and knocking on doors or handing out flyers. And that's part of, I should note, you know, we allowed all of our supporters to plan and promote their own events on our website. So on www.BarackObama.com, anyone could go and say "I would like to host an event" and then provide the critical information - time and location - then it would be posted to our website to an online event calendar. So anyone from around the country or even around the world, for all of our democrats involved and the Americans abroad out there can type in the country or the zip code and find events near them. And so hundreds of thousands of these events took place, simply because we provided an events tool as a public utility to our supporters. So these events became a core focal point of turning the online energy into offline action.
The question about libraries, libraries are often meeting places for the campaign but I think, you know, as we talk about these principles in a larger civil society type of context, that libraries can be a good place to start and begin the building blocks of a new organization or bring people together around a cause.
In our country, I had the occasion to meet an organizer last week at a conference in a project called "The September Project" which is designed to get people meeting up in libraries to talk through issues that are important in their communities, whether it's a film screening or book chatter or these types of things and it's about bringing people back into the libraries which are crucial resources.
But the same thing happens around the world here, in those and other countries, the libraries are a part of the American Corner project, which the State Department and the U.S. has provided books and local media materials to different libraries to try to encourage people to have contact with not just American people, but American life and literature and culture and knowledge and the conversation around these things in different parts of the world.
So there are places where people are meeting up and having conversations but also watching films and reading books together to talk about things and that's a part of our foreign policy that I have been very impressed to learn about in the recent months that is sort of a remote organizing sense, for people interested in learning more about America. It's an interesting program and it allows the reach to go beyond where the sort of traditional embassies and consulates go and really to get deep into communities and countries around the world and provide access to people who maybe wouldn't otherwise get to interact with the resources and the information at our embassies.
So for folks out there on the challenge, I encourage you to find the American Corner project near you.
Next question from Pavo: How can technology help combat oppressive political regimes such as the one we have in [inaudible]?
This is a good question. It's important to remember that technology is just a tool and can be used for good or bad or indifferent. And so I think that there's a challenge in thinking through how to use technology for good to help build a civil society and organize people from the bottom-up. I think it's also important to remember that not everybody needs to be engaged with the technology in order for it to make a difference - that, you know, on the campaign trail in rural South Carolina is very different from San Francisco in terms of Internet connectivity, but when you're in the business of organizing online, I think it's important to think about the metaphor that you're trying to give people the tools.
So if you think back to the days of the publications in communist societies, particularly in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, when we're talking about technology, it's not the publication itself, but it's actually the photocopier or the printing press that one person can get their hands on. So you can use technology to just connect with and organize and provide training materials or guidance and leadership to one person in the community. Even just once a week if they can get to the internet cafe, that if you can provide them the leadership skills and the tools to get other people involved, then that person can be a leader off line in their community. So there are organizations here and elsewhere and other countries that are organizing, and if you have a couple of thousand people signed up for your SMS or email or a couple of thousand people coming to your website, you can talk to them and that's a connection that you can have with people and build relationships with.
So it doesn't have to be anything personal. You can use technology to talk to other organizers. So while it may not always be the best way to reach every person in the population or everybody who would like to support your cause in a general sense, you know, it's something that you can use to help organize, and I think that's also true in the U.S. - that not every voter is connected to the Internet; the Internet isn't the way to necessarily reach everyone. But I think that it's an opportunity to lower the barrier to entry for people who really do believe they can help in your cause and really want to step up and take ownership of the campaign the organization and help achieve the goals.
Next question from Paloma: How many people did you have running the media such as flicker, you tube, etc?
I want to note the heroic effort of our staff working on all of these issues. There are a couple of folks that were engaged in all of the external social networks. What they did have was an incredible group of volunteers who came into campaign headquarters to help deal with all of these different networks, so not only were we able to engage these different social networks in a way that brought fresh content and opportunities, but we did it in a way to try to speak the language and acknowledge the different cultures and ways of talking. The pacing of these different networks is a way that we try to address people on their own terms.
And, like with Twitter, you only have characters to interact so it requires adaptation as well. So we try to provide all of the information on these pages but we also tried to provide the correspondence, so people writing into the campaign's MySpace account or Facebook messages or Black Planet or all of these different sites. We tried to get back to people and if they asked a question about foreign policy or health care, taxes, that we could write back and say, “Hi, this is Emily at the campaign headquarters and the answer to the question that you're asking is here; here is the PDF of our materials; here is the group on BarackObama.com that talks about foreign policy issues; if have you ideas you can submit them here; if you want to share your story about why this issue is important, you can do that at this other link.”
And all of these different things became a big part of the conversation, and really that's the important part - the ongoing conversation with folks through the network. If you get people to help out and are really experienced and familiar with the media, you can get more done and start more relationships with folks.
The next question is from [inaudible]: My question is about his background and own political experience, his work before this position.
Good question. The answer is that I worked for Governor Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004. That was my first political experience. After that, I worked with him at an organization called Democracy for America, and then helped him run for Chairman of the Democratic Party. And then went in with him into the Democratic Party to really transform the way the Party used new media and helped explain and implement his “50 State Strategy” - the notion that the Party, in order to be successful, should organize everywhere, not just in the states that we think we might win in the next presidential election. This was a big effort that involved hiring a lot of organizers and putting them into the states in one sense, but also sending the message that that the Party was open to business for people in ordinary businesses. A lot of the tools and the tactics that later came into being on the campaign were part of the experiment in 2005 and 2006 in the Democratic Party. So that's my experience before the campaign.
But the larger point that I want to make is that you don't have to be a political-type person or even that experienced with media or anything else to go and do good work with an organization or a campaign. I am not a technical person. I don't know how to write any code or do HTML or CSS or PHP or any of these other things that make all of the technology work. I was a political science student but, you know, I don't have any special political qualifications either.
I think the point is that, if you believe in the cause and are willing to quit your job and go to work for a hundred dollars a week or for free for it, if you do that and you are smart and you are dedicated and you believe in what you're doing, that, you know, I would encourage people to try that and see how it turns out. For me it turned into a job on the campaign after a couple of weeks of working for free. But it's something that is a good experience and if you're a user of this stuff, if you read the emails that organizations send you, if are you on a different social network, then you yourself have experienced what it's like when an organization does or doesn't open itself up and give you the opportunity to get involved, then you probably have a good head on your shoulders about what organizations or campaigns or causes that you believe in should be doing to do a better job of this.
So I think it's important for organizations to have us normal people come in every once in a while and help sort out how to make sure that the organization is accountable to regular people and that the website and the tools are easy to use and that the language that the organization is using, something that regular people understand and not, you know, rhetoric or institutional jargon that people use. Ordinary people can really help organizations out if they're dedicated and they believe in it and they want to help out. So I would encourage folks to spend time volunteering with the organization that you believe in or with a party or the candidate who really inspired you because you can make a difference.
It's important to realize that everything our campaign did was not perfect. It was a big experiment in trial and error and finding ways to get people involved and help them participate in the calls. So we tried a lot of things - some of them worked out some of them didn't work out. But the point for any kind of organizational look at the media is just being willing to try a lot of stuff and throw things out there and text them and use the simple tools that the Internet has and that Google has and the various technology platforms have - to try things and succeed or fail.
And so, we were engaged in constant experimentation. We could have done a lot more if the campaign had gone on for another six months - God forbid - we would have learned a lot more and become a lot better at our jobs. And that's something that we are continuing now with the different products that we work on - is that we get to experiment and try different things across different sectors, so the campaigns and the advocacy groups, trade unions, nonprofits, university alumni associations and different kinds of organizations that have different kinds of relationships with people. You learn lots of different lessons that you can cross-pollinate to other lessons. It's an exciting time and medium to work in, but you have to have a very small ego about what you think works and what you think is a good idea. With the Internet you can check anything and find out if you're on the right track or if you got it wrong.
Another question here from Mike: “Was there any kind of censorship on Twitter or Facebook?
Censorship is the wrong word. On our own website we used the tools in the other social networks and built our own tools to allow people to flag inappropriate comments or content or to say that's inappropriate or whatever it was. That was something that made it possible for the campaign to have all of this user-driven and volunteer-driven content on our website. The community would police itself and so we had people using the tools to organize and post content and also to flag anything that looked like spam or looked like it was fake. So we had folks constantly in real-time addressing them and those problems. That's important. Because you have to have that kind of involvement from people and that kind of feedback if you're going to have all of that stuff on your website. There was no way we could keep up reading 400,000 user blogs on our website, and 400,000 people did have their own blog on our website, and there was no way we could possibly keep up with it all other than to expect the community to police itself and also for the community to find the best stuff and that things would start moving around and going viral and the best most moving and interesting content would get flagged to us and we would promote it to the main headquarters blog and show people what a wonderful job and what wonderful people we had working with us on the campaign.
Another question from Pahoma: How important was the media in fundraising and attracting volunteers?
I think the goal of the media was to make all of these things a lot easier for people. So when it came to fundraising it was incredibly easy to give the campaign $5 or $10 or whatever you could afford and really own a piece of the campaign. Same thing for registering to vote, finding your polling place, finding your caucus location, organizing or finding the place in your community, forming or joining a group - the technology made it a lot easier.
But it's important to recognize that these things aren't online actions for online’s sake but all of them are designed to get people off line and connected with each other and building real substantive human relationships and connections, as well as driving people to take very concrete actions that they know and that we know would affect the outcome of the race.
So it's something that – it can't be viewed as separate from the traditional aspects of the campaign. In fact, they need to be tightly integrated, but it's something that can be very powerful and a lot more people can be a part of those actions. The Internet, you know - the media - didn't invent the idea of reaching out to voters, but we made it easier for people. So people who had two jobs or some kids and couldn't make it into the campaign office at the time had the option to make phone calms from home. So we took people from traditional operations and made them realize that the best thing for them to do was go into the office and be with the other volunteers and make phone calms but if that wasn't an option for them they were able to download a targeted list of voters to call and make the phone calls from home and tell us how it went and put the data back in our systems so the calls from home were effectively as useful as the calls made from our offices in the traditional sense.
Next question from Tom Connolly: Have these networks and conversations changed the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party?
Good question, Tom. This is something that is actually most interesting about what has happened after the campaign has been over. The relationship that Barack Obama had with his supporters and that those supporters had with each other didn't end on Election Day. That's in part because we built those relationships and these people came together, not around either candidate or a particular election, but came together to work with Barack Obama and each other for a larger notion of change and direction and the vision of what America should look like - not just over the next four years but over the next 10 years, 20 years - and the kind of world that we all want to leave for our children. So the conversations that started and the organizations that were built are something that, I think, market a new kind of relationship between people, particularly the Democrats and the Independents and also Republicans who organized with our campaign.
A distinct difference in the relationship with the political process – that people who told us and testified during the campaign that they had been cynical or involved in the political process tacitly – was that this was an opportunity for them to learn more about the political process and participate in a substantive way for the first time. So these people, and their relationships, have continued and they're getting involved through “Organizing for America,” which is the organization that the campaign turned into, as well as the Party which works closely with Organizing for America” – they’re related to each other – and also other organizations across the country.
So these groups and these people that are involved with the grassroots level, they're working to have an effect on the conversation in Washington and how their leaders are behaving, but they're also organizing with each other to shape their local communities in very specific and unique ways. So they're discussing which one of them is going to run for City Council. They're discussing who among them is going to run for State Representative or for Mayor. They're discussing what local community organizations or charities they're going to work with to help feed the homeless people or help people who have had their homes foreclosed on or help clean up the town square or local area or harbor.
I think what the campaign has done in terms of our civil society is almost as interesting as the complete outcome – that there is right now, at this moment, a generation of people, and I don't mean generation in terms of young people or old people, I mean a generation of the people who took part in this moment together. It was a very unique moment - that these people have developed skills and relationships, but most importantly an outline on political life and civic life that is very unique and incredibly powerful.
And I think for the next 10 years and 20 years and 30 years we will be seeing the ramifications of that - that these people will go out and do amazing things. They already are, both in politics and in general in the community service and all of the walks of life, so it's - it's a testament to the value of running a campaign in this kind of way. But also with any organization, political or otherwise, it’s a testament to investing with the people and the leadership and the potential of what people can make a difference, that it can affect not just your project at a particular moment or in your campaign or your election, but it can impact your society and your civic life for a long time to come. So this is pretty powerful stuff and I think it's worth it for organizations to spend time on it and putting effort into.
Another question from andre2: I'm interested in social networks, especially were there any difficulties that you couldn't overcome?
Interesting question. On the social networks, it's important to recognize all of them are different and they provide different tools. So you can be in contact with and message people differently on Myspace than on Facebook than on Black Planet and other different web sites. So we tried to use each one to the maximum of their potential effectiveness to build as many relationships as possible through them. But obviously you're limited by what the platform provides you and what the technology provides you.
Facebook is a unique case, because they allow you to create your own application. We did that to provide an application that employed more functionality than Facebook provides to get people trying to do things to help the campaign using Facebook.
In general, in terms of things going wrong and difficulties we couldn't overcome, I mean, things go wrong all of the time, and things that you try don't work out, and things that you think work, don't. But the lesson is that you need to just keep trying and what is great about the Internet is that you can experiment and test and quickly change things if you find a better way that works. What is also great is that, when you run a campaign or an organization that has these deep relationships with people that people are willing to work with you to experiment and try these things.
So we created new tools to help people make phone calls or knock on doors in the campaign. We involved them in the feedback of what functionality we should create and how the tools should work to help them do more with the limited time that they had to give us. So we spent time with users, testing, and seeing how they reacted to the tools. We got a lot of comments from people. We received a lot of email and had a lot of conversations with people. And by being open and transparent and authentic and involved with people, they were willing to work with us and be part of finding a solution, so that when things didn't work as they hoped they would - the functionality wasn't as good as they expected or, you know, sometimes things just break. We were able to work with them and be participant of a team together, figuring out how to make everybody as effective as possible.
Matt from Belarus asks: What was the most important of the campaign for Obama: online or offline?
The answer is, if you're successful and the campaign is integrating these things properly, or your organization, your NGO, your community group is integrating things well, you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between the offline and the online. The online tools should be focused on bringing people together offline. And offline, every opportunity should be taken to collect more contact information and let people know about the tools that you have available online.
So both the online and the offline things should be focused on getting the work done and viewing things that will affect the concrete outcome that your organization is looking for. This is very important. Because participation for participation's sake and having conversations or chatting about things online just for the sake of everyone chatting about their opinion doesn't necessarily help you win an election. So we try to keep all of the online activity focused on education and building skills or leadership, providing materials for people, or connecting people offline, or to take actions that have a real offline impact. So getting people to register to vote; or checking registration on our website; establishing relationships through grassroots volunteer groups; writing letters to the editor - all of these kinds of things, are about integrating off line and online. One is never a replacement for the other. The challenge is to integrate them so tightly that you can't tell the difference.
Daveyf, I hope I’m saying that correctly. He says: Hey, soon the EU will have elections for the European Parliament in an attempt to raise turnout, the Parliament will use a lot of social networking and interactive tools. How much do you feel the tools need to be adapted for the different cultures and nationalities of Europe? Or do you feel that these tools by nature adapt themselves?
I think that the tools need to be adapted obviously, not just to the nation, although that is important, and the language, of course, but also to the particular task. So, in an NGO, a communication action should be related to the specific fields that they're trying to achieve. Inasmuch as different countries have different voter registration procedures, have different party structures and organizations, or the need for fundraising and things like that, it's important to construct the online tools and the relationships with supporters and the things that you're asking people to do, to focus clearly and directly on those outcomes and those goals.
So I think that by taking the tools and the approach and the philosophies of online organizing, namely the authenticity of the organization’s voice and the language and the personalities and the notion of getting people involved and participating in every aspect of the organization's work, that these things adapt themselves when you use these principles to approach different projects. And so when you are working with a campaign or advocacy group or nonprofit, or a project in an international setting, you start with the same principles, but you adapt to the particular goals in the particular situation.
So I hope that is something that answers the question and makes sense, and I hope it's also something that speaks to the fact that the principles in the bottom-up idea of making organizations more accountable to people and more responsive to people is something that can be applied in context, in different kinds of political cultures and different cultures more broadly-speaking and in places where technology is not available. As we talked about before, you really need to get at one person in a community and if you can turn that person into an organizer and into a leader, they can go offline and make a big difference. The question - for you, for your organization, for your campaign - is how much of a leader can you turn them into?
One more question here, from Mike in Belarus: Mr. Rospars, what do you think about the future and the next stage of developing the social networks?
The next statement is one that I hope makes things easier for folks and allows more people to get involved in the political process. Not just the political process, but allows folks to get involved together and help build the relationships and civic culture that I think has been missing not just in my own country, and is something that can help people everywhere bring themselves together and build stronger philosophies. So I hope that Myspace and Facebook and Twitter and all of these sites allow people and encourage people to connect in different ways and I think we're already seeing, you know, the improvement of the functionality and the adaptations of different groups and social movements to use the tools as they exist to make things happen. So the million strong against [inaudible] [the FARC] in Colombia is a good example of people using new media to combat old problems and organize people in ways that they wouldn't have otherwise come together and have been organized without these tools.
So my hope is that the next stage of social voice and social media is one that opens the doors for a lot of people to participate in the political progression, in civil society and civic life and make a difference in their communities. And I think as more and more people sign up for Facebook or Myspace and more and more organizations build their own web sites that have these basic, you know, very basic tools to let people collaborate and meet each other and build relationships, that we will see hopefully in the best cases, a new era and renaissance of civil society and people coming together around their common interests and common purpose to make their societies and democracies better.
So with that, I think we are about out of time. But if folks have questions beyond this, feel free to email me or find me on face book and send me a message. I'm happy to talk. And thanks again to everybody at America.gov, which is a great website and it has put together a lot of these chats and programs and lots of interesting folks much more interesting than me, so I encourage you to come back and be a part of the global conversation. So thanks very much for taking the time and I hope to hear from you on Facebook.
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