Reflecting on Stand Up for Ohio’s Partnership with Team

In recent election cycles, there has been a transformation in the ways voters, particularly young Democrats, associate civic engagement with technology.

A “new wave of startups focused on helping volunteers catapult progressives into office” has been fundamental in changing the way communities are contacted and embedded into the political movements that affect them the most.

By harnessing the power of relational organizing, Team helped facilitate these personalized conversations between voters and campaigns across the country in a political landscape where mass texts, robocalls, and spam tools are increasingly distrusted. Through features like friend-to-friend outreach, conversation tasks, and Team Chat, over one hundred campaigns, non-profits, and unions were able to Take Back the House using Team in 2018.

Continue reading “Sharing Kindness through Social Media” →

Coming out of the 2016 Presidential Election, political organizers were forced to confront a reality that advertisers have understood for decades: attention capture is the key to successfully convincing people to pick a product or a candidate. The frustrating truth is that Donald Trump commanded an outsize level of attention across media and became president, in large part, because of it.

The exponential nature of technological proliferation has made the halcyon days of 2008 with its micro-targeted Presidential campaign bus ads feels like it was far longer than a decade ago, and the unique ability of the Trump campaign to demand eyes and ears and clicks, has forever and absolutely changed the arena of political attention jockeying. It is easy to see trends in the data that would convince even the most skeptical old-media believer that the future of political organizing is online. And this is especially true for Democratic candidates with the opportunity to harness organic digital advocacy outfits.

Continue reading “Political Attention Hogs and How to Be One” →