How Team Warren Organized Everywhere

22 min readJul 30, 2020

Intro

In just five short months, the Warren for President Distributed Team; made up of fifteen staffers, hundreds of volunteer leaders, and tens of thousands of volunteer callers, event hosts, relational organizers, and texters, built one of the largest organizing programs in American politics.

All told, the Warren for President Distributed Team sent more than 40 million text messages, made more than 20 million calls, carried out tens of thousands of relational touches, and hosted over 12,000 events.

To elect Democratic candidates and advance our progressive movement, we should be organizing everywhere. But in practice, no campaign has the resources to hire the staff necessary to lead a true national effort.

Distributed programs start to answer the question: how do you hold conversations with voters across the country given limited resources? The three principles that defined the Warren distributed program’s solution, and that have, generally, defined large-scale distributed programs that over the past cycles are:

Volunteer leadership. Volunteers must be given meaningful work, provided with training to do that work, and above all, trusted to do the high level work that, on many campaigns, may be delegated to full-time staff. If you do not trust and empower volunteers to lead, your distributed program will fail to develop the scale of volunteer organization necessary to organize hundreds of millions of people.
Geographic irrelevance. Distributed programs seek to take volunteers from every possible location and put them to work. Volunteers aren’t physically near staff, the voters they’re contacting, or fellow volunteers. Because of this, distributed teams must make sure volunteers feel connected to campaign staff and to fellow volunteers. Where traditional field operations can rely on shared physical space to foster culture, distributed organizers must work to create community across distance using online tools.
The adoption of new digital tools. Where conventional organizing can rely on paper walk packets and in-person conversations, distributed programs rely heavily on digital tools and the automation of as many processes as possible. In order to build a nationwide organizing program, distributed programs must be ruthless in their adoption of digital tools to help the program grow, and experiment with new tools and tactics as they arise.

While the following learnings are likely most applicable to national organizing efforts, the same principles and tactics the Warren campaign used to grow our program are now all the more important for campaigns everywhere to adopt, as COVID-19 has disrupted so much of traditional organizing.

In order to win in 2020, Democrats must organize everywhere. Here’s how the Warren Distributed Team did it.

Volunteer Leadership

The most important feature of a distributed program is volunteer leadership. The Warren Distributed Team was made up of nearly 25,000 volunteers. Staff alone could not have provided the training, guidance, and support necessary to build the type of organizing apparatus that a national campaign should.

Beyond volunteer-led voter contact, volunteers were instrumental to the day-to-day functioning of the distributed program. Volunteer leaders carried out complex tasks, including building text campaigns, editing and testing phone banking scripts, moderating and approving every one of the more than 12,000 supporter-organized events that went on the ElizabethWarren.com events page and were sent out to the campaign’s email list, and helping to drive adoption of our relational organizing program. Volunteer leaders held roles including, but not limited to:

Slack Moderators to answer volunteer questions
Volunteer Onboarders, volunteers who direct messaged first-time volunteers to greet, welcome, and guide new members of our team to the right Slack channels as they entered the slack community. This team was led by Samantha Day.
Event approvers, volunteers who edited, moderated, and approved every supporter-organized phone bank, canvass launch, community canvass, friend bank, debate watch party, house party, and more that went live on events.ElizabethWarren.com and was sent out to the campaign’s supporters via email, P2P, and broadcast SMS. This team was led by Emma Friend, Nadia Semmar, and Beatriz Martinez-Godas.
Event support/outreach, volunteers who made calls, sent texts, and used online channels including Slack and All In for Warren (the campaign’s online community) to confirm, reshift, and chase volunteer hosts, as well as to provide ongoing guidance and support to make volunteer led events successful.
Events data entry volunteers, who entered sign-in sheets to the campaign’s databases from volunteer led distributed events. Volunteer event hosts took photos of their sign in sheets and texted the photos to the campaign’s shortcode number, following which, data entry volunteers received the photo in the volunteer Slack through a custom integration between Slack, Twilio, and Google Docs.
Helpscout Events volunteers, led by Nadia Semmar, who answered emails and provided support to distributed events hosts, attendees, and other volunteers who reached out through the events@elizabethwarren.com email.
Trainers, who helped run daily, live trainings to show new volunteers how to use direct voter contact tools, with key support from Samantha Day, Grace Scoggin, Nakia Stephens, Eliza Wiant, Jack Arnheiter, and the Warren for President National Training Team.
Helpscout Dialer volunteers, led by Sara Ellingrod, who provided live, technical support to phone bankers who asked questions through our chat widget on ElizabethWarren.com/Phones, and who responded to email requests from phonebankers sent to the Distributed Team volunteer inbox.
Reach leaders, led by Lainie Ferguson, who helped produce training materials, provide app feedback, and supported users of the campaign’s volunteer relational organizing tool, Reach.
Text Sweepers, led by Nakia Stephens with key, early support from Katherine Swanson, who responded to any P2P SMS that went unanswered by a volunteer texter during their volunteer shift, and combed through hundreds of thousands of messages sent out by volunteer texters to provide feedback to help volunteers develop their ability to engage with voters over text.
Text Assigners, an entirely volunteer led effort, with early contributions from Katherine Swanson, of leaders who monitored the Slack channel where volunteers requested new text batches and assigned those volunteers texts to send out on our texting platform.
Text Campaign Builders, led by Spencer Neiman and the entire text team, who built P2P SMS text campaigns.
Volunteer Organizers, led by Jack Arnheiter, with early support from Ravenn Triplett, who worked to confirm and recruit additional phone bank volunteers.
Phone Bank Script QA’ers, led by Shoshanna Israel, who troubleshot our predictive dialer scripts to make sure our dialer program’s intricate branching logic displayed correctly
Campus leaders, led by Nadia Semmar, who recruited and coordinated students on campuses across the country to participate in the program’s efforts to increase the number of volunteer hosted events.

An example of Spencer Neiman’s P2P Text Leader Signup Sheet, indicating the role, the shift, and the staffer on call

One of the most important parts of running a distributed program is to proactively ask volunteers to take on more responsibility within the organization. On the Warren campaign, volunteers led much of the distributed program.

The impact of radically empowering volunteer leadership over the distributed program, and the campaign, is to create an army of campaign ambassadors, who represent the campaign over the course of their day to day lives. This is relational organizing at its best. Volunteers are the best messenger for any campaign, who demonstrate, through their passionate work, the importance and significance of the campaign.

The ownership volunteers have over this work makes them feel more deeply connected to the campaign, and those feelings of meaning, community and empowerment spread through their communities and social networks. Deep feelings of ownership can turn a Saturday morning phone-banker into a grassroots donor, a volunteer-leader, a community event host, and an agent of political change in their community.

Distributed program volunteers and volunteer leaders have more conversations with voters than nearly any political staffer in the country. Because of that, distributed volunteers can oftentimes share insights that staffers, who eat, sleep, and breathe politics might miss. Volunteer leaders would often recommend P2P SMS suggested reply ideas, help provide edits to phone bank scripts, and provide feedback on persuasion messaging in ways that could speak more directly to voters than what any one staffer could cook up in an office.

If a half dozen volunteers flagged that they were seeing the same question pop up in text conversations with voters, for example, Spencer Neiman, who led the P2P SMS team, Eliza Wiant, and Samantha Day, who drafted the overwhelming majority of the Warren campaign’s 80+ page master P2P voter contact script, knew immediately that we needed to draft new suggested replies to help volunteers answer the questions they were seeing.

In order to achieve the necessary scale of volunteer leadership, we relied heavily on existing volunteer leaders to help recruit new volunteer leaders. For example, under the guidance of Grace Scoggin, text team moderators, at the end of each volunteer shift, would flag volunteers who they thought would make an effective volunteer Slack moderator themselves. When the campaign needed more volunteer leadership than was present, volunteer leaders pitched in to help identify new members of the team ready to step up.

The Warren campaign’s biggest Distributed need was to build a national Get out the Vote program, and for the Distributed team to serve as one of the campaign’s primary voter contact teams. To that end, we focused on recruiting volunteers who could help lead voter contact efforts. But distributed programs can and should be open to the entirety of the campaign, to help with any area where the campaign has a need. Distributed volunteers can, for example, help translate voter contact scripts, transcribe debates, cut door knocking turf for GOTV programs, or any other repeatable, trainable process requiring a significant investment of time and labor. The only limitation is in the campaign’s creativity.

Indeed, even distributed touches that seem, at first, not directly linked to voter contact, can pay major dividends. For example, while the Distributed Events Team, led by Emma Friend, Nadia Semmar, and Bea Martinez-Godas, encouraged supporters to host direct voter contact events, the team sought to intentionally encourage volunteer leaders to, within certain guardrails, host any type of community event volunteers wanted to host.

This led to supporters hosting house parties, debate watch parties, and happy hours, and creative events like dog meet-ups, drag bingo fundraisers, and Stitch ’n’ Bitch events. When possible, the team worked with these often-organic event hosts to incorporate voter contact (e.g. make calls before the debate, or learn how to use Reach, the campaign’s relational organizing tool, at the dog park and ID five friends), but ultimately, even without this additional voter contact, these community events proved to be such effective entry points to the campaign.

For example, during the first presidential debate of the cycle, in June of 2019, Warren supporters hosted over 1,200 watch parties across all 50 states and Puerto Rico. From this, the Distributed Events Team worked to activate a massive new base of volunteers — who then went on to host voter contact events, start organizing local phone banks, and become volunteer leaders with the Warren Distributed Team themselves. The low-pressure, peer-to-peer culture of these events regularly turned casual event hosts into voter contact event hosts, one-time hosts into recurring hosts, attendees into hosts of their own, supporters into volunteers, and voters into supporters.

Staff alone cannot run a successful, national distributed program. Only by radically empowering members of a shared community to participate in the project at hand can we accomplish our goals.

Geographic Irrelevance

The most obvious feature of distributed programs is, of course, that members of a distributed organization rarely, if ever, interact in person. By contrast, traditional field organizing occurs through one (or many) offices, where staff and volunteers regularly meet in person.

What may appear at first a weakness becomes a strength, as through a distributed program, volunteers in Bozeman, MT can call voters in Waterloo, IA. The core strength of a distributed program then, is the ability to quickly recruit volunteers wherever they may live.

The Warren campaign recruited volunteers across the country using P2P SMS, email, blast text (shortcode SMS), social, and direct phone calls. We asked campaign donors and supporters who signed up online to make calls, send texts, host events, attend events organized by other supporters, and reach out within their communities. There is perhaps no organizer in the country who has recruited more volunteer shifts than Jack Arnheiter, who led volunteer recruitment efforts for the Distributed Phones Team. Where many national campaigns preserve their supporter lists for fundraising efforts, and conventional organizing programs reach out first and foremost to local volunteers, the Warren Distributed Team leveraged the campaign’s national channels to quickly build a volunteer force of motivated volunteers throughout the country that wouldn’t have in-person, staff-led volunteering opportunities available to them for months, if ever.

The Warren Distributed Team relied not just on the individuals we asked to get involved, but on the thousands of people across their country who raised their hands. It was our job to make it as easy as possible for these volunteers to join the effort. We worked with the campaign’s Web Tech Team, with incredible leadership from Nina Vyedin and Vishal Disawar, to build ElizabethWarren.com to display different volunteer opportunities based on where someone was located. If someone was located in an early state, or in an area where the campaign had a physical footprint, the volunteer would see a way to get involved locally. In areas outside of the early states, volunteers were shown opportunities to join the program.

Crucially, because volunteers can come from anywhere, we made sure to offer opportunities for volunteers to get involved at almost every hour of the day. Resources to help volunteers plan their event or to relationally organize their own networks were live 24/7, and our voter contact tools, thanks to Team Data who diligently helped us prepare voter contact lists separated by time zone, were live 10am ET — 9pm PT seven days of the week.

By making resources and volunteer opportunities constantly active, the Warren Distributed Team sought to bring people into the distributed program at a volunteer’s first moment of activation. While we’d still ask people to commit to shifts around major moments, particularly Get out the Vote and Caucus efforts, we didn’t rely on people to shift themselves. We asked our volunteers to take action right now, harnessing the rush of inspiration that encourages a person to make calls to strangers on a Saturday evening into meaningful action, in real time.

Because volunteers are separate from staff as they engage with the distributed program, Distributed programs must prepare remote training opportunities for volunteers to quickly learn how to participate in the program. Accordingly, our distributed team prepared volunteer guides, videos, sample scripts, and step by step instructions to help onboard new volunteers and ran daily, virtual training sessions for new volunteers multiple times each day. This allowed volunteers who wanted more hands on support the opportunity to participate, and allowed volunteers to ask live questions about the program and tools.

The tools we use on distributed teams can represent serious barriers to get involved for some volunteers with lower technical literacy, and robust (live) training programs can help address this issue. Volunteers who feel well-supported and are comfortable with our tools will make more calls, jump into slack to answer questions from other volunteers, and in our case, provide nearly half of our live trainings themselves.

To provide more support to our volunteers as they began using distributed tools, we stood up live support chat on ElizabethWarren.com, regularly P2P texted event hosts and other volunteers to check in, offered the ability for event hosts to book a time to speak with an organizer, sent emails during each volunteer shift offering help if necessary, and, most importantly, leveraged our digital field office, Slack, to made it easy for volunteers to ask questions and receive near-instant help.

Since volunteers don’t volunteer in the same physical locations, distributed staff have to think that much more intentionally about how to build relationships to create the camaraderie and feeling of purpose that builds in a field office, which ultimately keeps the program growing.

As with many distributed programs, and as alluded to above, Slack was the primary way by which our program built culture and community. Slack was a place for organizers and volunteer leaders to share guidance, including notes about the calls and texts for the day, volunteer help, and messages of support and encouragement. But the role of the Distributed Slack shouldn’t just be to build relationships between staff and volunteers, but also, across volunteer members of the organization.

To that end, distributed staff held leader calls, created celebration shout-out conversation channels, and connected volunteers to each other, working to empower shared, volunteer ownership over the program, and the community. In the lead up to the Iowa Caucus, for example, Distributed Events Manager Emma Friend held a nightly all vol appreciation call with special guests from the campaign to celebrate volunteer achievements.

“It’s time to send some texts,” one of the Distributed program’s favorite GIFs

Community groups formed within the Warren Distributed Slack persist to this day, including Parrots for Warren, a group made up of some of the earliest Warren Distributed volunteers, named after one of the group member’s pets.

What distributed programs lose in direct, neighbor to neighbor contact, we gain from drawing upon a larger, and nearly professionalized, volunteer network. Groups like Persist Brooklyn, Napa Valley Democrats, Water for Grassroots, and more, who work with campaigns across the country, often provide trained and experienced volunteers ready to hit the ground running and help national programs scale, oftentimes more quickly than could be done with first time volunteers in a given geographic area. Many of these groups too were formed for the first time through other distributed programs, creating a virtuous cycle, where activists engaged from previous campaigns through a distributed program, can help train new volunteers to engage in their own, community based organizing, who can then train further volunteers themselves.

Where traditional organizing programs organize volunteers from one geographic area to contact voters within that same geographic area, distributed programs organize volunteers to contact voters in the areas where those contacts are most needed. The Warren distributed program made dozens of passes through our voter contact universes in the first four primary states, as well as full passes through many of the later states, with particular emphasis on the Congressional Districts deemed most important by campaign leadership.

What this meant was that organizing teams in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina had the ability to prioritize organizer call time on supporter and volunteer leads pre-qualified from the national distributed team, and that, as organizers were deployed to new states, the distributed team was able to provide organizers with already active and identified volunteers ready to dive deep on local organizing efforts. The distributed volunteer host or phone banker in 2019, for example, who became the volunteer Get out the Vote Captain in 2020.

There is not, as is too often presented, a strict tradeoff between running a traditional, state organizing program and a national distributed program. Both state organizing and national distributed programs work best when they work together.

Where distributed programs can go nationally wide, they free up local organizing resources to go deep. A distributed program, for example, that Democrats deploy in 2020 to activate, mobilize, and identify likely supporters in Madison and Milwaukee, frees up local organizing resources that empowers state teams and communities to do deep organizing in Racine and Green Bay, and ultimately, help the campaign win.

Digital Tools

Of course, no distributed program would be possible without the help of digital tools. The Warren for President team used:

P2P SMS tools, including (Warren)Spoke, ThruText, Hustle, and TextOut.
Community tools, including Slack and Mobilize.io (All In for Warren).
Predictive dialer tools, including ThruTalk and Hubdialer.
Distributed canvass tools, using MiniVan and MobileCommons.
Event tools, particularly Mobilize America.
Chat support tools, particularly HelpScout, Calendly, and YAMM (Yet Another Mail Merge).
Volunteer recruitment tools, including Mobile Commons, previously mentioned P2P SMS tools, email, and social media.
Custom built tools, including, “The Hopper,” which used an event prioritization waterfall to generate text lists to help our P2P team quickly build for in-person events all across the country in the same text campaign; Switchboard, a web-based platform that let volunteer leaders and event hosts access and call local volunteer leads; a best event algorithm to help our email organizing team match (and invite) the right supporter to the right event; a text configuration to allow event hosts to take a photo and send their event sign up sheet directly to the campaign; and more.
Web tools, to help volunteers join our Slack community and sign up for volunteer shifts
Project Management tools, including AirTable.
Relational (and high traffic canvass) organizing tools, primarily Reach.
Data tools, using Civis to help manage the incredible volume of voter contact lists the distributed program needed to keep running at all hours of the day.
Google docs and Google sheets. No distributed program would be complete without helpful GoogleDoc guides and resources, and our teams heavily relied on Google Sheets to coordinate work with volunteer leadership teams.

The need for significant tech and data support to run a successful distributed program should inform staffing choices too. On the Warren campaign, the distributed program was lucky to benefit from the wisdom and support of Vishal Disawar on the tech innovation side, and the help and guidance of a half dozen different data staffers, most significantly, Rachel Wishnie-Edwards, Olivia Robinson, Amit Mistry, Ben McGuire, and Joshua Matfess. Given the national organizing goals of a distributed team, it’s important to make sure staff resources exist to run the program, beyond the team of people working with volunteers and managing tools.

One of the core takeaways from any distributed program is the need to automate as many processes as possible (H/t to the Bernie distributed team for a great writeup of the principle). Where a manual process that might take a few minutes is a workable solution in a field office where the process might be utilized a few times a week, the time cost becomes exorbitant for processes repeated tens of thousands of times.

That said, while the Warren campaign sought to use digital tools to automate our processes and increase our efficiency, we also relied on volunteer power and manual processes to accomplish much of we did; like the all-volunteer effort led by our Distributed Events team (managed by Emma Friend with core contributions from Events Team Organizers Nadia Semmar and Bea Martinez-Godas to manually approve over 15,000 Mobilize America events on events.ElizabethWarren.com, or to perform data entry on hundreds of sign in forms collected at those individual house parties, phone banks, and canvass launches.

Distributed teams, and campaigns more broadly, face decision points on which tools to develop internally, vs. which tools to purchase. Given limited development resources, the campaign generally tried to first use vendor tools when possible, first, developing tools in house only when absolutely necessary, or, when significant cost savings could be had by developing a tool on our end. What that meant then was that as the campaign scaled and the Warren campaign gained capacity, we built out more and more of our own tools.

For the distributed team, the most significant internally developed tool was the Warren fork of Spoke. Spoke is an open source P2P texting tool developed by Saikat Chakrabarti and Sheena Pakanati while working with the Bernie Sanders campaign, and currently being maintained by MoveOn. While the campaign cycled through most P2P SMS tools on the market, including TextOut, ThruText, and Hustle, the decision to build our own P2P tool was ultimately an easy call.

Warren Spoke was developed over the course of a single month from the incredible Warren Tech Team (with Spoke development led by Matteo Bannerjee, Nora Harris, Patrick Higgins, Susan Goldblatt, Julia Schultz, and Ben Weissman, and product leadership from Spencer Neiman on the distributed program side), and deployed on the campaign in the leadup to Super Tuesday. Warren Spoke cost the campaign 1/32 of what it would cost to purchase P2P SMS messages from previous vendors, and saved the campaign more than $580,000 in just the few weeks before Super Tuesday. For more on Warren Spoke and its development, check out this fantastic writeup from the Warren for President Tech Team.

In addition to cost, Warren Spoke was built for a distributed team. Traditional P2P tools are built with a staff driven model in mind, where staff build text campaigns and, more often than not, send text messages. Thanks to the insight and wisdom of Spencer Neiman and the entire text team organizing force, who helped guide product development from the user’s perspective, Warren Spoke was built with a distributed model in mind. That meant, using Warren Spoke, the team could quickly onboard thousands of volunteers across the country, with links that allowed volunteers to onboard and assign themselves to the correct texting campaign, build in texter instructions on the “front page of Spoke,” and use Warren Slack accounts as the means to log onto the platform.

One of the highest impact texts, and certainly one of the highest response rates, the Warren Distributed Text Team sent were the texts sent inviting supporters to local events. But, with a national campaign, that hosted thousands of events across the country, the P2P team couldn’t build enough unique campaigns to invite attendees to every event across the country.

To solve this problem, the Warren for President Tech and Data teams developed, “The Hopper,” which used a “Best Event” logic to append a staff or volunteer created event field to the day’s list of volunteer targets; defined through another set of criteria, designed to ensure every supporter in our universe were included in volunteer recruitment efforts, while no supporter would be invited to take action every day.

The Distributed team faced a similar decision point around the predictive dialer tool selected by the campaign. Because call pickup rates have fallen significantly cycle after cycle, and pre-COVID, contact rates had fallen as low as 3%, the campaign needed to adopt an automatic dialer tool to increase the rate at which calls could be made. ThruTalk, a front end interface built on top of a software product called LiveVox, fit the bill. ThruTalk (and LiveVox) have the ability to call cell phones at predictive dialer speeds.

Because federal law prohibits using automatic tools to call (or text) cell phones, LiveVox functions much like a P2P tool, and requires “Clickers” to manually click to add numbers to call into a queue to dial. ThruTalk operates as software and service, clicking on behalf of the campaign, so as to allow for an automatic dialer-esque volunteer experience. Because more than half of Americans don’t own a landline phone, Thrutalk was a necessary tool.

To support our remote callers, the distributed phones team used a number of tools, in addition to Slack, to provide troubleshooting and caller assistance. The Distributed phones team used HelpScout to offer chat help to anyone who visited ElizabethWarren.com/Call, the main landing page for our dialer program, as well as to manage the text, phone, and distributed events volunteer inboxes, where volunteers would frequently email questions. In addition, during GOTV shifts, the team used YAMM (Yet Another Mail Merge) to email volunteer signups to offer help if needed during the call shift. Thanks to Lainie Ferguson, we found that many of our volunteers weren’t completing their shifts due to technical issues with the dialer tool, and that emailing with support help at the possible moment of confusion drastically increased the number of volunteers who completed their shifts.

Thanks to the Web Tech Team, the ElizabethWarren.com Call program landing page displayed dynamic content based on who, and with what internet connected device, visitors reached the page. Since our dialer tool didn’t work on mobile devices, visitors who reached the page on a phone or tablet, or, who reached the page outside of calling hours, were asked to sign up for a future volunteer shift, which allowed our distributed volunteer organizing team to send reminder texts to make sure potential volunteers followed through with their promised commitment. By contrast, users who visited the page on a laptop during valid calling hours were prompted to begin calling right this second, at their moment of maximum excitement. Ultimately, this dramatically increased our calling capacity.

In addition, callers generally needed to read through the script several times before they felt comfortable making calls for the campaign. Because of this need, the Warren for President tech team built a calls page to automatically update a “script preview” window with whatever call script was live at the time. This allowed callers to preview the script exactly as it would appear on their screen when they logged on, rather than a generic example of the script.

The distributed team’s relational and distributed canvass programs, led by Lainie Ferguson, relied on Reach and MiniVan respectively. From the relational perspective, the campaign worked hand in hand with Reach and the company’s development team to add on new features to support a caucus-heavy relational organizing program, and to empower supporters across the country to track outreach into their own networks on behalf of the Warren campaign.

To run a distributed canvass program, the distributed team, with help from Amanda Robinson, the Warren Campaign’s Shortcode Manager, used the blast SMS tool, Mobile Commons, and MiniVAN, the most commonly used Democratic canvass app. Where traditional canvassing efforts require volunteers to coordinate directly with a staffer to provide up to date lists of voters to canvass, the distributed program worked by regularly refreshing a nationwide universe, that let volunteers, “Check out” the closest turf to them by texting LIST to 24477. In this way, we enabled any volunteer, anywhere outside of the first four states, to canvass anytime they wanted.

The Warren events program relied on a smaller tech stack than the other distributed teams, because of the necessity to regularly check in with hosts. The events team used P2P SMS tools to check in each week with event hosts and make sure event hosts had the tools, resources, and support they needed to make their events a success. The events team prioritized individual host check in with first time hosts more than the use of any one tool, and to that end, used Calendly to allow hosts to book time with events organizers directly and talk through their specific hosting questions.

But few volunteer hosts are able to invite to every Warren supporter in their area by themselves. To that end, the campaign, led by Jason Katz-Brown on the tech end and Josh Matfess on the data team, built an algorithm to match supporters on our email list with their best event. The best event logic prioritized factors like, proximity, the type of event (direct voter contact events were prioritized), timing of event (weekend events were prioritized), and how full the event was to capacity. Events in rural areas, e.g., would be served to a wider radius of supporters than events in dense urban centers. This allowed the campaign’s email organizing team, led by Keira Thompson, to send weekly invitations to our supporters to join the campaign at a volunteer hosted event near them.

Inviting people subscribed to the campaign’s email list to volunteer led, “unstaffed” events is an unusual method, but when that became a cornerstone of the distributed events program. Knowing the campaign would provide support to help volunteer hosts with their events caused hosts to to feel greater buy in from the campaign, and encouraged would-be first time hosts to take the leap; creating avenues to get involved with the campaign in person for supporters in states without staff presence, yielding tens of thousands of extra shifts.

Finally, to make sure sign in lists from events were input back into the campaign’s database, so the campaign could follow up with supporters, we asked hosts to take a photo of their event sign in sheet and text it to a special number linked with the campaign. Upon texting the number, the image of the sheet would automatically post to the distributed team’s Slack, upon which, data entry volunteers, under the guidance of Emma Friend and Nadia Semmar, would type up the sign in sheet using the campaign’s forms to preserve the attendee list for future host and campaign followup.

Conclusion

In order to scale a nationwide organizing program to reach out and have deep, meaningful conversations with hundreds of millions of Americans, distributed organizing is necessary. There is no alternative. Only by trusting volunteer leadership, from wherever those volunteers may be, to use digital tools to persuade and mobilize those within their own communities and across the country, will Democrats be successful in 2020.

We share this knowledge so that Democrats can build stronger, more resilient organizing networks to do the deep organizing work that is necessary to take on Trump in 2020.

Most importantly, we share this knowledge so that Democrats win.