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How would you compare it to working on an electoral and legislative campaign, field side? I've done some work on both and am about to start working for a superPAC.Mooseontheloose posted:I help run a SEIU paid canvass if that helps? Thanks, I was wondering specifically about superPACS though. If I can think of any good questions that overlap (since I'm sure there probably is plenty) I will definitely ask though. Tim Pawlenty fucked around with this message at 16:09 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 15:54
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Tim Pawlenty posted:How would you compare it to working on an electoral and legislative campaign, field side? I've done some work on both and am about to start working for a superPAC. My SuperPAC worked on behalf of a candidate during a special - exclusively field. It was tougher to get volunteers than I experienced on the campaign side, but we also had vastly more money for paid canvassers/equipments/offices/salaries. Besides that, it was pretty much the same.
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May 20, 2014 18:10
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Fried Chicken posted:Volunteer here: is there a good VAN refresher available online? It's been a while since I used it and I was never well trained to begin with Not that I'm aware of. I could probably answer general questions though, I trained folks on it in 2012. My experience is that campaigns can be pretty stingy about giving out more than basic VPB or data entry access[1] - what are you looking to do with it? It's entirely possible that if you're only seeing 3 buttons on your My Campaign screen then it's an access/privileges issue. [1] - This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it drives me crazy when I know more about it than the FOs.
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May 20, 2014 19:20
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During the first introductory day of work, everybody really emphasized the chain of command. What if our direct boss is already breaking into fits of nervous giggling and we still haven't found anyone who will tell us straight what our pay is? What's the best way to actually break the chain of command? What if 3/4 of a county's FOs are this far away from mutiny already Ofaloaf fucked around with this message at 11:57 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 11:50
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Jackson Taus posted:Not that I'm aware of. I could probably answer general questions though, I trained folks on it in 2012. My experience is that campaigns can be pretty stingy about giving out more than basic VPB or data entry access[1] - what are you looking to do with it? It's entirely possible that if you're only seeing 3 buttons on your My Campaign screen then it's an access/privileges issue. They haven't told me my job yet (they had me submit a "volunteering resume", is that normal?) But since that's what I did on other campaigns I figured I should try to get ahead of the curve to be more useful.
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May 21, 2014 12:36
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Ofaloaf posted:During the first introductory day of work, everybody really emphasized the chain of command. What if our direct boss is already breaking into fits of nervous giggling and we still haven't found anyone who will tell us straight what our pay is? What's the best way to actually break the chain of command?  Disaster field program spotted
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May 21, 2014 14:13
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Ofaloaf posted:During the first introductory day of work, everybody really emphasized the chain of command. What if our direct boss is already breaking into fits of nervous giggling and we still haven't found anyone who will tell us straight what our pay is? What's the best way to actually break the chain of command? is this a statewide or local?
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May 21, 2014 14:31
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Concerned Citizen posted:is this a statewide or local?
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May 21, 2014 14:51
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Fried Chicken posted:They haven't told me my job yet (they had me submit a "volunteering resume", is that normal?) But since that's what I did on other campaigns I figured I should try to get ahead of the curve to be more useful. Having never applied for a campaign job, I can't speculate about what's normal in their hiring process, but it makes sense that they're much more interested in your campaign volunteer experience than your other job experiences, since (for instance) retail experience is less relevant to field work or whatever. It's going to be pretty tough to learn the VAN/Votebuilder without using it, but basically the way it works is that you have My Voters which is just the voter roll, and My Campaign which has records only for volunteers and potential volunteers. From those you apply filters to generate sub-lists. Then you match that list up with a script (usually created by your RFD/FD) and make call lists/virtual phone banks/walk packets out of it. For instance I might generate a list from My Campaign that is Women, in [My County], who are top recruitment prospect, who haven't been called in the last 30 days. Then I'd match that list to a script and either print it out for call sheets or set it up with a VPB and I'd have a "Women-to-Women" phone bank. Or I'd go into My Voters, pull folks with a Party of 'U' or 'ND' (Undecided or No Data) in [My County], filter out the folks we've talk to recently, and I have a good list of folks who could use a Persuasion/Voter-ID visit. Then I again match it with a script, and I can use a geographical turf-cutting tool built into VAN to partition the list into sections for folks to walk in each precinct. Ofaloaf posted:During the first introductory day of work, everybody really emphasized the chain of command. What if our direct boss is already breaking into fits of nervous giggling and we still haven't found anyone who will tell us straight what our pay is? What's the best way to actually break the chain of command? At this point, whatever you think your pay is, it's lower.
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May 21, 2014 18:36
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Looking for some advice here; I'm wondering if it's in my best interests to go in as an FO or just hold out for an RFD position? I've worked two special elections as an FO, oversaw interns and volunteers for a municipal, and worked an issue based campaign most recently at a quasi-FO/RFD hybrid level. All of my friends and former colleagues tell me I should go in as an RFD, I feel confident in my ability to be an RFD. I've had a few interviews but no luck so far, I think a lot of that is because I haven't worked a campaign more than 3 months which makes it hard for anyone to want to hire me. I just feel like having FO over and over again on my resume is a red flag and I won't feel like I made any progress in the past two years honestly.
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May 21, 2014 19:36
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Xanderg posted:Looking for some advice here; I'm wondering if it's in my best interests to go in as an FO or just hold out for an RFD position? I've worked two special elections as an FO, oversaw interns and volunteers for a municipal, and worked an issue based campaign most recently at a quasi-FO/RFD hybrid level. Absolutely go for RFD. 2014 cycle, there will be (and are) a bunch of positions. 3 months doesn't matter at all, i've had bigger gaps multiple times. Campaign people get it. And having FO over and over again is the reddest of red flags, generally. Also, if you don't move up this cycle, 2015 is going to be real tough, but if you rfd this year, you're probably in good position to find a virginia or new jersey FD job in 15 or maybe even land a FD on a congressional special if you get lucky. (Or, head to Iowa/New Hampshire) You could also chase some FD jobs, at a congressional or lower level, but your resume sounds pretty spot on for a statewide RFD, and i'd encourage that over a FD job unless its congressional.
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May 21, 2014 20:19
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G-Hawk posted:Absolutely go for RFD. 2014 cycle, there will be (and are) a bunch of positions. 3 months doesn't matter at all, i've had bigger gaps multiple times. Campaign people get it. And having FO over and over again is the reddest of red flags, generally. Also, if you don't move up this cycle, 2015 is going to be real tough, but if you rfd this year, you're probably in good position to find a virginia or new jersey FD job in 15 or maybe even land a FD on a congressional special if you get lucky. (Or, head to Iowa/New Hampshire) Thanks for the reassurance. I've had a few interviews but they haven't panned out to anything so far and I've also been getting nervous since a lot of the top campaigns seem to have staffed up. What about partner groups? Would taking an RFD position with something like Planned Parenthood or the League of Conservation Voters be a good idea or should I still exclusively to electoral campaigns?
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May 21, 2014 22:06
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Xanderg posted:Thanks for the reassurance. I've had a few interviews but they haven't panned out to anything so far and I've also been getting nervous since a lot of the top campaigns seem to have staffed up. What about partner groups? Would taking an RFD position with something like Planned Parenthood or the League of Conservation Voters be a good idea or should I still exclusively to electoral campaigns?
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May 21, 2014 22:33
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We are supposed to get breaks for meals, right? Like, I get that we need to devote all our energies to getting out the vote, but we should be getting breaks for lunch and dinner, right?
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May 22, 2014 01:37
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Ofaloaf posted:We are supposed to get breaks for meals, right? Like, I get that we need to devote all our energies to getting out the vote, but we should be getting breaks for lunch and dinner, right? Do you have a primary election coming up or something? I would say a reasonable policy is no breaks for meals once you're within a month of so of the election. Before that, you maybe shouldn't leave the office for a meal but it should be okay to spend 10 minutes eating at your desk and catching up on email. Edit: Clicked your post history in the thread. Still depends on the timing of what you're getting out the vote for but it sounds like you've had the poor luck to sign up for a pretty dysfunctional organization.
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May 22, 2014 02:16
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Ofaloaf posted:We are supposed to get breaks for meals, right? Like, I get that we need to devote all our energies to getting out the vote, but we should be getting breaks for lunch and dinner, right? I mean if it's crunch time there should be food in the office. And if you're doing call time until 9pm and then entering data, I wouldn't count on eating dinner until 9:30, so have a mid-afternoon snack.
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May 22, 2014 02:55
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Jackson Taus posted:I mean if it's crunch time there should be food in the office. And if you're doing call time until 9pm and then entering data, I wouldn't count on eating dinner until 9:30, so have a mid-afternoon snack. I lost 10 pounds in two weeks on one campaign.
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May 22, 2014 03:44
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IMO the only time it is acceptable to starve yourself and not sleep is during GOTV or some other real crunch time: end-of-quarter/month (for money people), dry runs, or whatever. Learning to delegate everything and anything you reasonably can is great. Also not working for crazy people. I now work ~44 hours a week doing this stuff not in field so you can trust me
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May 22, 2014 04:21
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There's no primaries that we have to be concerned about, and primarily all we seem to be doing is phone banking to build up volunteers. We're not even doing that good a job of it- the paper lists have a depressingly low rate of return, and nobody seems to've bothered properly stocking VB. Wouldn't it be more useful for us to physically go out and attend local party meetings, and just try to get people from those face-to-face contacts in groups we know are already interested in seeing us succeed? Or just something, goddamn anything else. Thus far it all seems less organized than it ought to be, no one's ready to say anything about pay, and they're trying to retain us by keeping us occupied in a holding pattern of busywork calls to numbers that don't answer.
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May 22, 2014 11:52
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Ofaloaf posted:There's no primaries that we have to be concerned about, and primarily all we seem to be doing is phone banking to build up volunteers. We're not even doing that good a job of it- the paper lists have a depressingly low rate of return, and nobody seems to've bothered properly stocking VB. Wouldn't it be more useful for us to physically go out and attend local party meetings, and just try to get people from those face-to-face contacts in groups we know are already interested in seeing us succeed? Local party meetings probably aren't that useful to recruit at either - most of those folks know there's a Congressional race going on already, after all. You should still go and try to get them to sign up for specific events though. But at this stage volunteer recruitment is a big part of what you need to do.
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May 22, 2014 14:03
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Ofaloaf posted:There's no primaries that we have to be concerned about, and primarily all we seem to be doing is phone banking to build up volunteers. We're not even doing that good a job of it- the paper lists have a depressingly low rate of return, and nobody seems to've bothered properly stocking VB. Wouldn't it be more useful for us to physically go out and attend local party meetings, and just try to get people from those face-to-face contacts in groups we know are already interested in seeing us succeed? 1. it sounds like your campaign is a shitshow 2. the "busywork calls" are what actually works, local party meetings are mostly a waste of time 3. But, it sounds like they havent actually explained any of this to you or the logic and way field works, which, #1
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May 22, 2014 18:59
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Ofaloaf posted:There's no primaries that we have to be concerned about, and primarily all we seem to be doing is phone banking to build up volunteers. We're not even doing that good a job of it- the paper lists have a depressingly low rate of return, and nobody seems to've bothered properly stocking VB. Wouldn't it be more useful for us to physically go out and attend local party meetings, and just try to get people from those face-to-face contacts in groups we know are already interested in seeing us succeed? Calls are the best way to recruit volunteers. It's really hard. Keep calling anyway. Party meetings are terrible places to find volunteers. I think you should talk to your boss about your pay, or other FOs. I'm not sure how you didn't find out your pay prior to taking the job, to be honest.
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May 22, 2014 19:04
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G-Hawk posted:1. it sounds like your campaign is a shitshow Yesterday I got one (1) scheduled volunteer out of ten or so hours of calling, and out of something like 14 contacts total and about 300 dials. I (or any other FO) could've gotten one volunteer from attending one of the party meetings going on last night, and it wouldn't have taken 10 hours or cost the party 10 hours' worth of wages. I get that, for the most part, phone banking is an effective overall strategy for reaching
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May 22, 2014 20:16
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Ofaloaf posted:Yesterday I got one (1) scheduled volunteer out of ten or so hours of calling, and out of something like 14 contacts total and about 300 dials. I (or any other FO) could've gotten one volunteer from attending one of the party meetings going on last night, and it wouldn't have taken 10 hours or cost the party 10 hours' worth of wages. If your numbers are accurate then you have some terrible data OR you are in a non-battleground state that doesn't have any sort of serious field infrastructure. Probably a combination of both to be honest. Are you pulling lists based on when people are home? (calling people 55 and older during the day and 54 and under at night?) Local parties are a mixed bag. It should be your RFD that meets with them and keeps them happy and recruits from them when possible. For the most part a lot of them are very old and very entrenched in their methods, they may just be all about poll-watching or worse, they may be ran by a local consulting firm which does paid-canvassing. The ones that are volunteering now out of local party are probably the only ones you'll get. As for numbers: http://campaignsick.blogspot.com/2012/07/voter-contact-formulas.html this is a pretty decent list of formulas, but don't consider it as being from the mouth of God or anything. Now as an FO you can't do squat but just truck along and realize it's a very very slow and grueling process. I've worked in non-battleground states with poor data and it takes awhile and a lot of not homes to get anywhere. Just be aware that 3 months from now you'll be amazed at where you are. I think every FO goes through a period where they think "this is a complete waste of time." but trust me; you'll find a volunteer one day through phone calls that is PUMPED to help out and they will be your best friend. Also if other FOs don't know the difference between 'disconnect' and 'deceased', that's very alarming. RFDs should be phonebanking and entering data alongside new FOs to make sure this doesn't happen.
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May 22, 2014 21:06
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Xanderg posted:If your numbers are accurate then you have some terrible data OR you are in a non-battleground state that doesn't have any sort of serious field infrastructure. Probably a combination of both to be honest. Are you pulling lists based on when people are home? (calling people 55 and older during the day and 54 and under at night?) New data was loaded into VB last night. We would've used the better numbers today, except the FO who's been using her tethered phone as a hotspot was sick and so we had no wifi in the office again (the staff at Panera are very generous, thankfully). Allegedly we'll have proper internet access in the office tomorrow and won't even have to rely on phone-based hotspots, but I am skeptical. *Another region experienced the same problem, so probably it's the latter.
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May 22, 2014 21:16
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Ofaloaf posted:Yesterday I got one (1) scheduled volunteer out of ten or so hours of calling, and out of something like 14 contacts total and about 300 dials. I (or any other FO) could've gotten one volunteer from attending one of the party meetings going on last night, and it wouldn't have taken 10 hours or cost the party 10 hours' worth of wages.
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May 22, 2014 21:21
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G-Hawk posted:Contact rates often aren't great but thats shockingly low if accurate. I'd be hard pressed to find a way to do that unless a universe has been run into the ground beyond any possibility at this stage of the campaign. To be fair I think I was on the unlucky low end of the spectrum- another report was something like 40 contacts out of 350, but that was the deceased-disconnect guy so I dunno. Average rate of volunteer scheduling out of whatever contacts were made was around 5%, both from our region and the other region which had to fall back on the paper lists.
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May 22, 2014 21:35
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Ofaloaf posted:Yesterday I got one (1) scheduled volunteer out of ten or so hours of calling, and out of something like 14 contacts total and about 300 dials. I (or any other FO) could've gotten one volunteer from attending one of the party meetings going on last night, and it wouldn't have taken 10 hours or cost the party 10 hours' worth of wages. I'mma real talk you here Ofaloaf. It sounds like your RFD is maybe no so great, but I also feel like you need to (wo)man up a bit. 1. You should be making far more than 30 calls an hour on a 5% contact rate. Each call should take you about 45 seconds including dialing. That means about 800 calls at a theoretical maximum, but realistically you should be making at least 600 in that time. More calls = more vols. My suggestion is to dial more. 2. 1 volunteer from 14 contacts is a good conversion rate in May. I wouldn't be too concerned about that. Your lists will improve as you call into them more. You would get zero volunteers from a party meeting, not one. Many will not allow you to even make a volunteer pitch. Trust those of us who have been doing this for awhile - if these people were going to volunteer, they'd be the first ones you'd call. 3. Does HQ load your VPBs, or your RFD? They should be having you call seniors during the day and younger people after 5pm when they come home from work. If it's your RFD, maybe you might suggest to him that he load the list differently since the contact rate is so low.
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May 22, 2014 21:37
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Concerned Citizen posted:I'mma real talk you here Ofaloaf. It sounds like your RFD is maybe no so great, but I also feel like you need to (wo)man up a bit. 2. The 1-in-14 rate doesn't bother me as much as it just being 1. Whole pages were nothing but NH-- but the pace for those pages was slower than it'd be for disconnects, since standing policy is that a dial must go through to the answering machine or some other termination of ringing before moving on. Ring-four-times-then-hang-up is frowned upon, and that's straight from the mouth of HQ. 3. The paper lists are HQ-issued. They're sorted alphabetically by last name, with no other details sorted beyond that.
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May 22, 2014 21:59
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Ofaloaf posted:decimated lists by confusing the code for 'disconnect' with 'deceased'. In votebuilder, you can make a list of everyone canvassed in the last X days with a result of deceased, and just delete those canvasses. Ofaloaf posted:Yesterday I got one (1) scheduled volunteer out of ten or so hours of calling, and out of something like 14 contacts total and about 300 dials. I (or any other FO) could've gotten one volunteer from attending one of the party meetings going on last night, and it wouldn't have taken 10 hours or cost the party 10 hours' worth of wages. And tomorrow you'll have a volunteer helping you and you'll get 12 total hours done. Two weeks from now you'll have 5 folks at a phone bank and they'll knock out that 10 hours of calling themselves. Concerned Citizen posted:1 volunteer from 14 contacts is a good conversion rate in May. I wouldn't be too concerned about that. Your lists will improve as you call into them more. Yeah. Your success rate once you get folks on the phone is gonna differ pretty dramatically between May and October as folks think more about the election, so keep that in mind. Plus many of your later calls with be to folks who've already committed or volunteered with you. Concerned Citizen posted:You would get zero volunteers from a party meeting, not one. Many will not allow you to even make a volunteer pitch. Trust those of us who have been doing this for awhile - if these people were going to volunteer, they'd be the first ones you'd call. I'd at least take a pass at it, and make sure you have the local party distributing your event info (where your office is, when your phone banks are, etc), but yeah. The folks who are in the local political party fall into three groups:
The first group of people you can slowly engage and pull into volunteerism. The second group will show up to your events if asked and don't really need to be persuaded super-hard. The third group aren't going to help in any meaningful way. They'll show up at office openings and parties and stuff, but they won't make any calls/knocks for you. Maybe you can drag one or two half-assed shifts a year out of them, but more likely they'll consider things like yard signs or a few bucks worth of office food to be their noble sacrifice. So it's worth it to spend some time working with the local party just to make a pass at the first group and to make sure the second group find their way to you sooner rather than later, but don't stress too much about that third group. I've had folks in that third group literally point-blank ask me what time a phone-bank/party turned into a party, because they didn't want to make the phone calls. And political parties tend to over time get dominated by that third group because the guys in the second group get bored/frustrated at the social/business meetings and feel like it's a waste of time, and it's not like there are that many new recruits if nobody in the party actively recruits.
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May 27, 2014 19:45
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Reserving this space for Eric Cantor's campaign manager. /sarcasm
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Jun 12, 2014 00:38
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Mooseontheloose posted:Reserving this space for Eric Cantor's campaign manager. /sarcasm Is it true his polling people had him up by 20-30 points on election day?
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Jun 12, 2014 08:22
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Skeesix posted:Is it true his polling people had him up by 20-30 points on election day? No, that poll everyone's talking about was a week or two old. Also it had him up by 34 points... 
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Jun 12, 2014 16:03
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Good to know the GOP has been working hard on their internal polling and IT infrastructure! 2016 is a shoe-in for them! 
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Jun 12, 2014 18:08
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My campaign is now without a manager. I worked with this guy on a couple of city-level campaigns last year, and he's a smart guy, so I figured that he'd help out a lot for this one. He also wants to start his own Long Island-based consulting firm, so he's trying to establish that as well. Unfortunately, he was more heavily focused on the latter and went to the Working Families Party convention while telling our candidate to not come. She found out, and she let him go. Also, gently caress Andrew Cuomo and the WFP's spineless endorsement of him. Edit: But it's not like my candidate is hitting the ground running. Her campaign literature doesn't have the date of the state Democratic primary, and there are no Spanish-language flyers, which is vital in a heavily Hispanic district. Next time she should move to the district where I just moved out of, since the incumbent there is in some hot water right now (so is the incumbent here, but lobbyist money trumps a DUI). get that OUT of my face fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Jun 12, 2014 |
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Jun 12, 2014 23:08
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I'm going to get laughed at but might as well try anyway. I want to work in campaigns so that I can get a feel for how elections work and make some contacts here and there. I also work a full time job, so that impacts what I can do. That said, I do have some data analysis and GIS experience and I'll be happy to work the phone bank and go door to door. My goals and ability to commit isn't as strong as some of you guys, but I would figure doing some volunteering on the side works out well. Thoughts?
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Jun 17, 2014 04:17
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I was basically going to say the same as that guy just said. If I work a full time job, is it worth reaching out and volunteering? Can I even be useful? How would I even get started?
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Jun 17, 2014 06:12
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I might be getting a (very lowly) paid position on a city District Leader campaign. I'm surprised that I get money for it because in New York, the district leader is unpaid.GlyphGryph posted:If I work a full time job, is it worth reaching out and volunteering? Can I even be useful? How would I even get started? To get started, check out which candidates are running in your town, city, county, etc. all the way up to the state level and go to the candidate website. They usually have a contact person somewhere on it that you can email, and that person should get you set up.
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Jun 17, 2014 09:20
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I've had some interesting experiences volunteering to gather signatures. It's kind of neat because 90% of the people you talk to are already inclined to agree with you so it's mostly positive experiences. I can almost guarantee that if you spend 3 hours gathering signatures, you'll have an interesting story or two. Liberals ARE kind of weird.
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Jun 17, 2014 10:13
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Dante Logos posted:I'm going to get laughed at but might as well try anyway. GlyphGryph posted:I was basically going to say the same as that guy just said. Yes, volunteering every once in a while is definitely helpful, especially if you're willing to do poo poo like doorknock or phone bank. Seriously just walk into an office or whatever and be like "I wanna help" and the staffers will break out into like the biggest smiles. Your local Dem party should also have like an email list mentioning when events/phone banks/canvasses are and who to contact. I don't know necessarily if volunteering for a few phone banking shifts is going to get you on first-name terms with your Senator or anything, but you'll definitely meet some people and learn a lot.
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Jun 17, 2014 22:39
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