It works on a grand level: you are never going to make change because your cause is right. You are never even going to make change because everyone would be better off if you won. You are going to make change because you mobilize power on your side.

It works on a mass media level: you will never fascinate reporters because the public needs to be educated about something useful. Reporters want conflict and drama.

It works on the level of leadership development: no one will ever learn from you because they respect your past experience and expertise. They will learn from you because you help them see things for themselves.

You must understand the world as it is. To understand the world as it is, you must keep careful track of your expectations and your outcomes. These will help you discern your faulty understanding of the world as it is and as it should be.

Here are some more examples: you want to reach out to the Unions in your city, so you think that you should go to the labor boards or the AFL body in your city and ask them to help you. They will say they will help you, only you will never hear from any other Union leaders and never see any other Union leaders. Why is that? Because the power of the local AFL is based in its ability to guard access to the members that support it. It is already asking enough of its leaders. Why should it add what you need? [This rule goes double for Councils of Churches].

Your working in coalition with a bunch of other groups. You want to do further outreach. Normal organizers would get the group together as one and brainstorm other groups to reach out to and then charge individual members of the coalition with doing that outreach. Makes sense, but none of the work will ever get done. Worse, you’ll feel like you can’t ever follow up with the people on the list because someone else said they would do it. It’s far better to call your coalition partners, brainstorm individually and then do the outreach yourself. Unless you’ve really managed to Organize someone into a reliable actor.

It’s not just that people are unreliable (though a lot of adults are really unreliable), it’s also that sometimes a person has a reason to protect someone that someone else thought of from joining the coalition. So they volunteer to do the outreach to make sure it doesn’t get done.

You want to get a bunch of volunteers in to do a bunch of kinds of work for you. So you design one flyer with really broad appeal. “Good stuff, lots to do!” You print up a billion and pass them out all over town. No one calls.

It’s far better to design fewer fliers, put more time into several designs that focus on specific needed tasks. Why? Because people don’t want to see that you need all sorts of people. Individuals want to see that you need them.

The world does not work the way it should. You need to go out and do things that you think will work, state your goal before you start the work, right it down and when you finish the work see if you accomplished what you set out to or did you accomplish something else. Or nothing at all.

By evaluating your strategy against your goals, you can discern your faulty assumptions.

And your assumptions are faulty, trust me.

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.

The Organizer believes that this book, especially the main supporting character “Mac,” really captures the mind of the very best Organizers. It’s a disturbing portrait, one in which you care so much about justice for everybody that you’re willing to use individuals as if they were no more than tools.

That said, The Organizer believes that this coldness is necessary against the overwhelming forces of power and riches that are used against the people.

It’s worthwhile for people considering this life to read this book and consider Mac’s worldview. Accept it or reject it. Say it’s the only way or it’s crazy. Either way, you have to confront this approach. Whatever you believe about how Mac works, his way has been the way of real revolutionaries before him. Even if you don’t like it in these pages, you probably admire some of the real world accomplishments by past Organizers who approached the work this way.

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?

Email The Organizer.

This is our work. This is what we do, as Organizers. While our leaders often really mess our campaigns up with the crazy stuff they say and they are frequently totally off message, getting them to do it rather than us is more important than making sure it’s done right. It may be quixotic, but never mind that. If you are called to be an Organizer, the real deal, then you are called to empower normal folks. Being an advocate, an expert, a politician yourself – that’s all different and your priorities will be different. But if you’re an Organizer, then our work is building leadership first and foremost and running campaigns second.

Nothing makes me more miserable in my work nor more elated than preparing leaders to enter the public sphere. You never know what’s going to happen once the mic is released to them. I had a great experience with this at a major event a week ago, when one of our new leaders spoke on the same stage as a major state official in front of dozens of advocates and dozens more members of our organization. He did great. He told his story clearly and succinctly, and in a way that spoke to the points we were trying to make.

I felt good.

But I can’t tell you how many times a leader and I have sat and talked at great length about what they would say. They listen. They nod. They say it back to me. They tell me they understand. Then they get on stage and I listen and I think, “What are they talking about?”

There are three ways that I think our leaders frequently lose the thread when they get in front of the public. I don’t have solutions for these problems. I write them here mostly as a meditation, but partly as an aid. The truth is, there is no quick fixes when it comes to preparing members. The best thing you can do is look for the smart ones, help them get the importance of what they say and understand that they are a leader and not just a cog in the machine, that what they say effects other people and work with them. You can also understand the ways the leader you are working with is likely to go wrong, and focus your preparation on countering it.

Here we go:

1. They make no sense. This is probably the most common. They just babble. They start talking about Newt Gingrich shutting down the federal government or some crazy crap they read in a newspaper a homeless person sold them. Some of our leaders can have pretty strong minds, but they haven’t been trained to assess the sources of what they read and hear as well as the content itself. This can lead to pretty incoherent thinking and some really nonsensical public statements. Remember, this sort of leader isn’t stupid. They’ve got too much in their head. You have to help them focus. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Ask them a lot of open ended questions that help them distill the point of what you are trying to do with a given activity.

2. They don’t understand that they are spokespeople and not individuals. Ever had a member go off on their private gripe about the issue you are working on? For example, you’re protesting a rate increase at the water department and your leader starts kvetching about how the repair people never get there on time for ten minutes in front of TV cameras? These folks have to understand that they didn’t get the mic because they are so great individually, but a whole organization built up the clout to earn that mic, and they are not there for themselves but a whole group of people. That’s why they need to focus in on the broad need of a group of people and not take the opportunity to add their own pet peeves. I’ve actually had members attempt to add whole new demands to our campaigns just because they individually thought it important (and in one case, I can think of a plank that was completely misguided and all the other leaders understood it — but that aside).

3. Blaming the wrong people. So you’ve got crime running rampant in your neighborhoods. Is that really the cops’ fault for not coming out there, or are they just spread too damn thin? It can go either way when you’re talking about cops, I know, but I’ve certainly run campaigns where I was trying to help a government department but all my leaders knew to do was complain about it. Their complaints were well-founded, but they were due to larger bureaucratic neglect and not really the fault of the people on the frontlines trying to serve them. It wasn’t helpful for the campaign to villify the department itself, when it was really the higher levels of government at fault. But my leaders don’t know the higher levels of government. They are an abstraction. They know the people behind the counters that are curt with them.

Email The Organizer.

I’ll tell you what you can do: give them a role to play at the event. Even if it’s a small role, they will feel a little more obligated to show up if you give them a specific task. A mistake The Organizer has made dozens and dozens of times is waiting until just before the event to start parcelling out roles. This is a mistake for a few reasons: first) because you’ve usually got so much to do at that point that it’s hard to get to everyone you need to get to in the last half-hour before things get started (and you never do a good job of tasking things out that way), second) if no one has a role to play in advance, they’ll all show up barely on time or late! How are they supposed to get to work in a helpful way if they’re late.

Most importantly, though, if you’ve got a bunch of people who’ve said that they will do this or that, then you’re turnout is more secure.

You should sit down and brainstorma bunch of roles on a sheet of paper, and then come up with a few names next to each role. The names are of leaders in your organization who might be game for taking on a role.

Here are a list of roles to have people take on. I’ve listed them in order from the things you are most likely to do ahead of time to things you are less likely to do ahead of time. Remember, the point of this post is that if you do ALL of it ahead of time, your action will be less chaotic and you will guarantee that you actually have enough people.

Roles you can ask Joe Citizen to take on:

Master-of-ceremonies
Press spokesperson
Speaker
Person-to-confront-Target
Theatrical Roles (someone to playact as your Target in an action, for example, if your organization is a little on the wilder side)
Canned Questioner
Marshal (this one is really hard to train people for, but they need to get the crowd in order – especially important on marches. Best to roleplay this on a retreat)
The Door (Are you invading a building? It’s usually good to put someone in there ahead of time to open the door for you when the crowd comes)
Press sign-in (pick someone who knows how to look for reporters — this person should also have the press packets)
Backdrops You’ll want to have a few folks managing the backdrop of your speakers. Whether it’s one big sign or lots of little ones held by individuals.
Public sign in (you’ve gotta have a sign in sheet)
Photographer (don’t hand your camera to just anyone – most people take lousy photos)
Videographer (hey, it’s the YouTube age! Get a digital camera)
Important Person Liaison(have a big shot coming? Someone might need to watch out for them)
Sign Distributor
Member spotter (sometimes it’s good to station a few members a ways out from your event to look for other members who might be struggling to find you)
Yellers/Applauders(train people in your crew to act enthusiastic. Others will follow their lead. I often find our members are too solemn and nervous at public events)
Leafletters/Petitioners (if you’re out on the street, you might as well have some people distributing literature to passers by)

I’ll try to update this list as I come up with more stuff. There are lots of roles people can take on. The more people you get to agree to do these things in advance the better your turnout will be, plus folks will have more ownership and learn more about public life.

A word of caution, though: many of these roles take more skill than you might think. Remember that public actions are uncomfortable for most people in our organizations. They might act tough, but I’ve seen very small things really stymie people. You can’t just tell someone to be a marshal and herd your crowd, you have to really train them in it. People will tell you they understand, but they often don’t or they just don’t have the nerve.

For example, The Organizer once led a bunch of people into a major legislator’s office. We knew the look of the office before going in, but a lot of the people didn’t. I told the people at the front of the crowd to file past the front desk when they got inside so that we could fill up the office and everyone would get in. They nodded, but when they got inside, they stopped at the front desk as their mommies and daddies had done for them for years before. That’s just how people normally behave… you have to really get someone ready to break those symbolic boundaries that we’ve all grown so accustomed to obeying.

You can’t just say, “Yell at the end of speeches.” You have to get a group of people together to take on the Yeller role and make them practice it together. Practice YELLING. And then make them spread out around a room and watch each other and practice it. Give one some sort of small signal so they will yell and the others will watch that one.

You have to do stuff like that because our people need to be developed into leaders, and that takes more than just asking someone to do something.

1) you’ve realized that there is some mistake you always make that you need to work on
or
2) you’ve rationalized some mistake you perpetually make so that you honestly believe it’s the right way to do the work.

The Organizer has observed both.

Here’s an example of an ongoing mistake The Organizer makes: I often feel guilty about making my best leaders sit down with me to prepare for some sort of public activity. Some part of me feels (and I use that word strategically — I feel this way; I don’t think this way) that prepping a leader is somewhat insulting. Especially if it’s a smart articulate person.

What I’m about to write will sound a little arrogant if taken the wrong way, but I have to be honest: I think this feeling stems from the fact that my mind has always thought politically. Thinking about clear messages, targets, strategy has come as naturally to me as breathing. It took very little learning. Some people have an easy time with math. I could run meetings from the first time someone handed me the metaphorical gavel.

But I’ve met men and women with PhD’s who could not come out with a clear political objective without heavy prepping. I’ve met people with Ivy League educations who haven’t the foggiest what politicians really care about.

So a part of me feels guilty sitting down with smart people and making them think about what they want to say or how they are going to run a gathering.

Yet time and again I find they really, really need it.

Moreover, there is no person who is so good they don’t need preparation in advance. The most skilled politician in the world should go over his message with someone who understands public life before actually entering that sphere. Every single time. We all need it. It always helps us.
I know this, yet time and again I convince myself that I don’t need to prep people who’ve been good before, or who are generally well-spoken.

It would be easy to rationalize this. It would be easy to say that I should trust my leaders and that if I just give them voice they’ll understand what really needs to be said better than me. I’ve heard longtime organizers spout pabulum like this again and again.

I could tell myself that I’m imposing a mainstream viewpoint on oppressed people.

I could tell myself that prepping people makes them feel put upon by the organization, so I should do as little of it as possible.

It’s all wrong. If you fail to prep leaders, they will know they did a bad job and they will move further away from the Organization for it.

Countless times, when I was doing my job right, I’ve fought good leaders to sit down with me in advance of some public activity. Frequently, I fail to get them as square on the presentation as I should, but they knew and I knew that they did better than they would have because they spent some time thinking about it in advance.

I can’t tell you how many leaders have told me they were ready to go when, come showtime, they clearly weren’t. It’s not just bad for the Organization, but it’s going to make the leader feel bad, too. Leaders tend to think that preparation is giving time to the Organization that they just don’t have, but it’s also about their own pride and feeling of self-worth. If it’s going to be their face representing the organization, then they need to take time to get ready.

Even if leaders appear seriously annoyed with you, they are better off if they spend some time preparing with a seasoned organizer.

So I say all that to say this: in the heat of this work it’s easy to convince ourselves not to take certain steps or not to do certain things the write way. This work is so subjective that you can convince yourself that any course of action is the right course of action. At least, until time and tide show it isn’t. But by then enough will have occurred that you can either a) blame something else or b) never really evaluate what went wrong so you never have to know it was you.

You’ve got to take the time to figure out your repeated mistakes. Become conscious enough of them that when the opportunity to make that mistake arises again some part of you will remember and say: “this is where I always go wrong.” Then you will do what needs to be done.

Your organization will win.

And the world will be a little more just.

Email The Organizer

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.

Email The Organizer.

Are you frustrated by that? You should be. That’s just sort of how groups work. Groups are naturally conservative — that is, groups don’t like change. When a group gets comfortable with an approach, that’s what it does.

So if you’re frustrated, you’re just going to get more frustrated if you go to meetings of the group and suggest change their. During meetings, people don’t function as individuals, they function as members of a group. They will be guarded about saying things that others will disagree with. They will tend to think in terms of B.T.W.W.H.A.D. (BUT THAT’S WHAT WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE). In fact, it’s better to say “it will tend to think” because at meetings, most people function as members of a group mind.

So if you want to get your group to do something different, you need to plan ahead.

The next time you know you’re group is likely to take action on some issue and you don’t want to see it do the same old thing, I recommend the following action steps:

1. Brainstorm the course of action you’d like to take and why.

2. Make a list of members of the group that tend to listen to you or that others listen to.

3. Pick several of them to talk to before the meeting, then call them up. Try to talk to them face-to-face if possible, but over the phone can work, too.

4. Tell them you foresee the need for the group to tackle some issue, and you wanted to brainstorm about solutions with them ahead of time.

5. Try to guide them to come up with your new strategy, but try to be open-minded about ideas he or she comes up with, too. You may find that when you speak to others individually that they will have ideas for new tactics as well. Their idea might be better than yours. If so, buy in and affirm their idea. Encourage them to speak up about it.

6. Try to get the other person to broach the idea first, and decide on an appropriate time in the meeting for them to bring it up.

6.5 Try to have the same conversation with other people and lead them to roughly the same conclusion.

7. When they bring up the new tactic in the meeting, chime in your support.

8. If your allies don’t bring it up, then you should.

9. Guide the conversation to logistics ASAP, so that people start taking on tasks. Follow up with those people to help them get their tasks done. It will be harder this time because your group has not done it this way before!

I can’t promise it will work, but I can promise it will get you further than springing all new approaches on a group in a meeting. Eventually, you’ll get thought of as a sort of loose cannon, or at least someone who has “wacky ideas.”

Generally speaking, different problems do call for different tactics. And, at the very least, groups learn from trying out different approaches, so it’s worth doing anyway. The question is, how do you bring the group around.

Email The Organizer.

I’ve worked in coalitions in towns across America. I’ve seen them work. I’ve seen them fail. I’ve seen very powerful people convene them and go nowhere. I’ve seen near nobodies eventually win everyone to their table and rock the house. A big difference is whether or not they keep it loose.

You can’t control coalitions entirely. They are ungainly monsters who don’t stay on message or consistent or follow perfectly. To win them over and win their trust, you have to keep it loose. You have to permit members to follow courses you are unsure about, you have to let multiple things happen at once, you have to let people argue. As long as it all stays civil and loose and you keep reaching out, it will grow.

You don’t often see business leaders joining progressive coalitions, even when it’s in their interest. I think it’s because on some level they can’t stand the loosey goosey nature. You know, in the business world, when something needs doing, you tell someone to do it and it’s done. In the coalition world, if something needs doing and no one volunteers, you’re sort of out of luck (of course, that’s sort of your fault, as the leader, for not anticipating it and asking someone quietly to consider doing it before the meeting).

There’s a lot of talk in the political world about being on message, staying tight, clear tactics and a well-honed agenda. I see a lot of young people try to bring these ideas to the table when they launch coalitions. It’s bogus. If you’re going to work with a bunch of people who don’t have to be there with you, then you have to keep it loose, open and flexible or you lose them.

Email The Organizer.