Notes on the life of an Organizer

The best way to meet a lot of people and to get people to do work for you is to work a network, but it’s not as easy as you might think. First of all, you can’t just go out asking anyone and everyone to refer you to other leaders they know. They won’t. They don’t want their friends and colleagues sending yahoos to them and so they won’t send them to yahoos.

You have two tasks to complete before you can ask someone to share the names of good people that they know with you.

1)

You need to credentialize yourself

. The best way to do this is by getting a referral from someone else the person knows. It really helps. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had conversations on the phone where I heard the voice of the person I was calling audibly change when I named someone they liked. For example, “Hello there, Ms. Corcoran, I was referred to you by Jennifer M.”
“Oh, okay.”
It’s amazing. Of course, the hard part is winning that first person over without a referral, but you’ll figure it out.

2)

You need to establish a relationship

. The most common technique for doing this is a one-to-one, popularized by institution based institutionally oriented Organizing techniques, such as DART. Rather than go into a lot of detail, the main point is to try to meet a person face to face, have a conversation and find some sort of common ground (whether or not it’s relevant to the issue you are working).

Once you’ve accomplished both of these things, you can start asking for people to refer you to other leaders around town. Eventually, you’ll have double-referrals and so many referrals you can’t keep up.

Notice I didn’t mention anything about the issue. The issue is secondary. People get involved in things because they like the people and the culture. The issue is not a very big deal, so long as you’ve done a decent job of picking one.