The funny thing about this entry is that I think it could be potentially one of my most controversial — if lots of Organizers read it … but it sounds pretty boring when you see what it’s about, right? Funny.
The Organizer loves the telephone. The Organizer believes that it is the single most important tool that any Organizer has. Still. Despite the Internet. Better than his feet. It is the best of the old and the new. The Organizer believes this deeply.
The Organizer believes that too many calls is always better than too few.
The Organizer believes you should leave messages but don’t expect much out of them.
The Organizer believes in the phone.
Recently, the Organizer was doing some work on the side for a political campaign and calling people on behalf of a political candidates. The people on the list were all unfamiliar. When The Organizer does cold calls, the Organizer believes in using people’s first names.
You will often be told when you do these calls that if you use people’s first names its disrespectful and you might tick some people off. This is certainly true. Why just a couple weeks ago I was lectured by a 40-something woman about how I had no business using her first name and she hung up.
So use last names, right?
No way.
The Organizer has called the young and the old, the rich and the poor. The Organizer has made cold calls in multiple states under multiple contexts. Sometimes the Organizer modifies his rule for one reason or another, but 95% of the time I prefer the first name. I very seldom make anyone mad by doing it, and everyone always agrees that I get pretty good results out of my cold calls. I’m not the best in the world, but I’m pretty good.
The deal with cold calls: most folks aren’t home, but you will reach a handful of people and you’ve got those first few moments to make the right impression on them. Probably a good 50% of them won’t give a stranger on the phone the time of day anyway. Forget about them. The rest are deciding whether or not they have time to talk to you for a minute about their candidate or their issue, and your manner will have a great deal to do with convincing them to talk to you. I definitely find that I get more people to really talk to me when I’m in the right mood for calls. People are judging you based on very intangible qualities, and I find that using the first name gives me a boost in most cases. Not all, but enough to make it worth using.
Like I said, not many people get mad about the first name thing. In fact, I’ll take that a step further and contend that I get more time on the phone with people because I approach the calls more informally and casually, in part by using the first name. By using the first name, I don’t sound like a salesman (or, worse, a bill collector) and I believe it earns me more air time with the folks I have some chance of getting air time with.
My point is this:
- you can use terms of respect if you want, and you won’t tick anyone off, but I will contend that you will also lose more folks.
. On the other hand, you can use first names and you will win a few more crucial seconds from people, while they are deciding whether or not to really talk to you. Of course, you’ll also tick some of them off. Not many. In fact, you’ll probably go weeks without ticking anyone off.
So the question is this, do you want to use the approach that’s more effective with more people? Or do you want to use the approach that won’t tick anyone off but will also win fewer people over?
A little while back, The Organizer made the rather controversial and unsettling statement that socially driven artwork is not helpful to the political campaigns they might indirectly relate to. I’m not backpedaling from that point, but I would like to extend the subtext of that post a little bit. The subtext was this: socially conscious work is only relevant as art, but art that is made as a part of and a contributor to a campaign and its actions really can help (you just have to compromise your work to an external objective if you want it to matter politically, which will inevitably make it less credible artistically).
If you want to make art (or creative work) that fits into a campaign, we could use you.
In fact, I’m going to get really real here for a minute, and I might just piss some people off. We could really use more artists who do a good job of communication to low-literacy communities.
We Organizers draw up a lot of fact sheets and text heavy fliers. It isn’t even that we lack the skills to make more visually driven fliers and handouts, necessarily. We don’t have the time for it, and it’s that simple. We all type fast so we type and we change some fonts and slap our logos on and run them to Kinko’s, you know?
Screenprinters, draughtsmen, graphics designers, comic artists — we could really use you guys in the movement. If you could help us make materials that we can give to people directly on the street that communications the issues in a less text heavy way, it could be very good.
There are good groups out there doing some nice work. The Indy Media effort is really growing by leaps and bounds. One of my favorite things that I see the Indy Media folks doing is making a lot more video. This is good in campaigns where you reach a lot of people who have breached the digital divde (and more and more folks are breaching it every day). They are making a lot of great YouTuble’able and Email’able videos.
Still, though, the best of organizing is still face to face and you don’t want to sit someone in front of computer screen during a first time housemeeting. We need more old media, 8.5″ X 11″, duplicatable media that we can just hand people. That grabs them or makes them laugh.
That’s the art that could really help the effort to organize people into larger campaigns that mean something.
It’s not that artists aren’t contributing now, but the Organizer sees most of them contributing to the political efforts with hipster cred. Efforts like the anti-war movement, vegetarianism, bicycling… all good stuff, all important stuff. I can’t remember the last time I saw an artist really getting involved in helping turn people out in a poor people’s campaign.
As an organizer of the poor and disenfranchised, the Organizer is going to argue to his friends in the arts community that we need you more here than the hipster causes do. We need you to help communicate the complex economic issues to the folks with the least education, to help them see the need to turnout and speakout against the force that degrade their neighborhoods.
The vegans and the bike couriers all have a copy of “The Beat Reader” in their shoulder bags, you know? Those efforts just don’t need your skills as badly as we do.
Find us. Help us communicate. If you come to the cause and plug your art directly into the campaign, you can help. You really can.
Filed under: tools-of-the-trade
It’s a small thing, a very small thing, but I’ve seen every kind of Organizer make this mistake. It’s always embarassing. Always frustrating. It always makes your base question your leadership abilities.
Audio-visual equipment. Whether it’s speakers for a rally or a TV/VCR at a meeting or a data-projector up on the wall – it never works right if you don’t test it thoroughly ahead of time. You have to get everything set up in advance and try it before the actual event. Or it won’t work. At least not for a while. I promise.
Especially when you consider that so many of our events are put together with borrowed equipment, it’s amazing to me how often Organizers fail to try things out in advance. The mistake we often have is that we’ve used a lot A/V equipment in the past, we’re tech-savvy, it always works fine, so what’s the problem? The problem is that it never works when people are watching.
So it’s a small point, a very small point. It’s so small it’s silly. Except you look silly if you don’t take it to heart: so please always test your equipment before you go out and use it. Set it up in the space where you plan to use it and get it running long before your people show. You will be glad you did.
Final note: when you’re running video, don’t forget to have a sound plan as well.
The Organizer Recommends: The ODB.
The Organizers’ Collaborative has been around for several years, and the creation they are best known for is the completely free Organizers’ Database. The Organizers’ Database is a great little platform for keeping track of your people, your contacts with them, money they give you and what they care about.
The interface is a little weird. For example, I used it for quite a while before someone showed me that I could keep track of conversations and events by enabling the “notes” function.
You’ll get used to it, though, and it’s definitely the best software of its kind out there. Unless you’re a complete whiz kid, it’s also better and more stable than any weird Access database you might build for yourself (having some experience here in ones I have built and ones that others have built that I used, I’m speaking from experience).
Here’s that link to the program’s website again: go get it.
