Have you ever thought about how terrible the lit-piece was that local candidate put out, and how you could have done a much better job with 30 minutes of your hand at Photoshop? What about that pathetic website (or lack of website!) the candidate had that you could have helped her with?
The fact is, campaigns need creative and technically skilled people, but they only use volunteers for stuffing envelopes and knocking on doors. Most of us have some sort of professional skill, whether it's writing, graphic design, web design, acting, comedy, or something else. These are the people that campaigns need, but they never ask for help with this stuff, instead they simply have an intern do it or pay market-rates (way too much) for the work. The problem is that they don't know where to look for help from us.
Wouldn't it be great if there was some way to match campaigns up with people who can provide professional for free or very low costs?
Now there is...
CreativeProgressive is a new project with the purpose of doing just that. Creatives can go to their website and tell them what skills they have and would like to volunteer for a progresive candidate. When a progressive candidate needs help, they can go to the website and request to be matched up with someone to help with their website, or make a lit piece, or write a press release, or whatever.
To match you up, CreativeProgressive will email potential matches the information about the candidate. If the person agrees to volunteer for that candidate, they'll put you in contact with the campaign and off you go. If you don't like the candidate, you can simply ignore or deny the request for help.
As CreativeProgressive notes, while the right-wing may be the "money people," progressives are the "creative people." We can't always buy our way to victory like the Republicans can, but we have the skills and the passion to achieve it anyway. If you ever volunteered for a campaign and were put to work stuffing envelopes when you know you could have been much more valuable doing what you do professionally, CreativeProgressive is for you.
According to some of the Demographic Tuesday diaries that DrSteveB has done here, a good chunk of us work in the Creative and Computer fields, and almost half volunteer or work for campaigns on a paid basis.
Please go to their site and volunteer your skills. It is essential that they create a large pool of volunteers so they can match people up when campaigns start going to them for help. I strongly believe the progressive movement needs an organization like CreativeProgressive to make that connection, and I think it can go a long way towards helping us get progressives elected at all levels of government.
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with CreativeProgressive, but I found out about it last week and thought it was a great enough idea that I had to share and spread the word about it.