This is a complicated diary to write, but I think it bears saying. I may have to meander a bit, so please bear with me.
If you haven't already already read littlebrudders diary on this topic, please check that out first.
To begin with, let me say this. My first political job was as a canvasser. I did it for three years, and about two years later, I founded a canvass-based local political organization that completely transformed the local politics of the area where I live. We ended up with some of the most progressive environmental and land use policies in the nation, and elected majorities on most of our city councils when I left my position as executive director after 10 years.
So I have canvassed, I have run canvasses, and I have managed canvassers, field managers and the whole ground game of clipboard-and-shoe-leather organizing. And I've been doing nonprofit fundraising in modes other than canvassing (grants, major donor, direct mail, events, etc.) for a long time now, too, so I see canvassing in the context of effort required vis a vis funds raised.
More on the flip
Now, before you can really draw a conclusion about littlebrudder's diary, you need to know some things about canvasses.
Canvassing is hard work that involves a lot of rejection and raises very little money in relation to the expense of paying a canvasser and keeping an office open. Especially if the job offers benefits--some do, and I always worked to make that a priority--the amount of money raised door-to-door cannot pay both a comfortable salary to the canvasser and provide the net percentage back to the organization running the canvass to pay necessary managerial and fixed costs. That's just reality.
This is why my adamant philosophy has always been that canvassing must be for more than just money. The canvasses I worked for and ran used the canvass as a self-sustaining means of doing political organizing: distributing voting records of elected officials, mobilizing letters and cards to officials, and campaigning for candidates. There are whole canvassing networks out there (GCI may be one--I don't know--but CLEC is certainly another) whose entire focus is on fundraising and who only measure their accomplishments, both individually and organizationally, in terms of money.
That's a profound mistake, in my experience. For one, it leads to a culture of excessive aggressiveness on the part of canvassers, who must do or die to keep their jobs and are under enormous pressure to raise sometimes unrealistic amounts of money. The worst offender in this regard in my experience is the PIRGs. Canvassers call canvassing after a PIRG canvasser has gone through a neighborhood "PIRGatory", because the rudeness and lack of training of PIRG canvassers hardens residents against canvassers.
Groups like the PIRGs have a turn-the-crank mentality about canvassers: recruit 'em, get 'em out there, use 'em up, burn 'em out, get some more. They have shattered the idealism of untold thousands of committed young people who might have become future political leaders, and turned them cynical about activism as some kind of scam. I know this, because I've seen it. In my many years of running canvasses, I never had a prior PIRG canvasser successfully complete training to achieve a staff position in my organizations. Their poor training was too entrenched, they were too apt to become pushy, and they were all about the money, nothing else.
Now, bear in mind that fundraising isn't a bad thing. A donation in politics isn't just money: it's votes. A new member adds weight to your organization's influence and is likely to vote as you recommend. Canvass-based political organizing is incredibly powerful and can handily defeat opposition with three or four times as much money to spend on other campaign modalities. Never underestimate the power of person-to-person contact. All I'm saying is that the fundraising is a means to the end of political change in terms of grassroots lobbying (letters, etc.), votes, power of numbers in membership, etc. If you are fundraising enough to keep the lights on and meet your budget, that's enough.
The reality is that canvasses can't pay very much. And I'm here to argue that that's okay. I made my bones carrying a clipboard for the California League of Conservation Voters in the most expensive housing market in the country outside of Manhattan, starting at $180 a week (in 1986). It was hard work for lousy pay, but I learned about messaging, about polling, about fundraising, about management--in short, I learned big chunks of what I needed to know to be effective at what I've done since.
What I've noticed in my many years of politics since is that quite a number of the people I knew back then are still in politics. They're executive directors, they're elected officials or state agency officials, they're campaign managers. They learned their basics and used them to move on. And what I notice about these people is that they remember ordinary people in ordinary neighborhoods. They know how to talk about issues in a way that resonates for a moderate, nonideological voter. They don't have inflated ideas of themselves, having been a grunt and not begun their political lives wearing a suit. They're the kinds of people I want running the country.
So I would argue that if the GCI issue is just about salaries, forget it. Canvassing pays lousy, and nobody can help that until people can find a way to routinely bring home $300 per night from any neighborhood they canvass, and leave the donors feeling that warm glow of having contributed to a better future. So long as the important basic canvass operation principles I list below are being met, I say it's okay to ask people to work for peanuts at the political entry level.
I suspect that fundraising is the be-all and end-all at GCI. Why do I suspect that? Because canvassing networks operate by taking a percentage off the top of funds raised by the canvassers, leaving even less to compensate them and the organization for which the money is being raised. I personally feel that no group except a national organization should contract with a network. It's better to find an experienced field canvass director and hire her/him to build an office than to be constantly bled by a network.
So here they are, my standards for ethical and effective running of a canvass:
1. Remember you're investing in future political leadership. That means training. DO NOT just throw people out to represent you and your cause after a rudimentary volunteer observation night. Training should happen daily, not only in canvassing skills, but in briefings on policy issues and political technology, and if possible, in internship positions with campaigns being supported.
2. Shoot for long employment. The average canvass employment length at the organization I ran was 3-1/2 years. For most canvass organizations, it's 3 MONTHS. People stayed because they were appreciated by both staff and board, saw the results of their work and got credit for it, knew that we were compensating them as much as we possibly could, and provided them with experiences that added to their skills, provided some variety, and kept reminding them that they were the backbone of the organization.
3. Set and enforce performance standards for political production as rigorously as for fundraising. Some organizations do letter campaigns as a means of adding credibility to their fundraising, but don't seem to care much if a canvasser never bothers to bring in many letters. That's wrong--canvassers will know that if something isn't demanded, it isn't important.
4. Think long term. There are some canvass fundraisers out there who raise tons of money and piss so many people off that they're steadily poisoning the ground for important causes. Those people should be fired. It's very hard to fire a good fundraiser, but I've done it, and a canvass manager should be ready to do so. Relations with the communities you canvass are our long term strength as progressives.
5. Continually connect the dots for canvassers between their productivity and advancing the cause they're working for. Show them the numbers! Drag in the political director or the executive director to report on the latest lobbying meeting or hearing. Keep them engaged. And when you hold your annual fundraising dinner, give them free tickets, and have them stand up for a round of applause during the program. They're doing the work--they need the acknowledgement.
6. Use the fact of the canvass in the media. When a canvasser reads in a press story that "Citizens for a Better Everything organizers have spoken with more than 3,000 residents of Bedroom City who wrote letters to the governor urging him to support the bill", that canvasser knows that s/he is making history and making policy, and it makes your organization look strong and effective.
7. Canvassers need a voice. People that become canvassers are political. They do not sit well with being disenfranchised. My organization had a canvass representative sit on every endorsement interview panel, and one came regularly to our board meetings.
An organization that runs a canvass on these principles will succeed in its political goals. What it probably won't be able to do is pay a fat fee to a management network or a comfy salary to its non-canvass staff. But that's okay! Canvassing should be thought of as a zero-sum political tool that pays for itself (including its management) and its fixed costs. Everything else requires fundraising from other sources. Your program staff's salary? That has to be raised by the board from major donors and events.
My final point here is that expecting a canvass to pay $15 per hour plus benefits is not only unrealistic, it's unreasonable. Such an expectation will only kill one of the progressive left's most effective organizing tools. But there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. Mostly, what I've seen out there is the wrong way.