Welcome back, Saturday Campaign D-I-Y’ers! For those who tune in, welcome to the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic campaign. Each week, we discuss issues that help drive successful campaigns. If you’ve missed prior diaries, please visit our group or follow Nuts & Bolts Guide.
Over the years, I’ve used this group to talk about practices you can implement in your campaigns, your county and state organizations, and even how the national party works. If you’re reading this series, you are doing so in large part because of our platform. Daily Kos as a progressive entity is not just a website to read about the latest news from a progressive perspective. It also exists as a tool to help your efforts to turn out your vote and win, to inform your candidates, and to connect you to resources.
This week, I want to cover how you can use this platform—and associated tools—to help improve your activism efforts.
University of Life
College textbooks and your experience getting a bachelors, masters, or Ph.D. certainly provide you a baseline of knowledge and give you the tools to help define your career. In the political world, though, there are some things that you can’t learn in a textbook that matter heavily for success. Among those are lessons on how to build friends, communicate, share personal stories, and filter between something that is politically important news and something that is socially powerful narrative.
Every day on Daily Kos, our community lets you see that happen. Whether you know it or not, participating in a site like this helps you understand why some narratives have an impact—and some fail to catch on, even if both are important news.
Call it the school of hard knocks. Call it the University of Life. Maybe, just think of it as people-watching. But Daily Kos in many ways works a sounding board for progressive ideas. The community represents a sample group that can inform you about how the larger progressive community feels about the issue of the day, and how intensely they feel about those issues.
Creating a repository of research
The New York Times and Washington Post are likely to cover the crazy actions of a U.S. senator or the president. When it comes to your local state house, state senate, or school board member, the major papers of the day aren’t likely to write frequent stories about their activities.
That is where Daily Kos as a community can become a major piece of your activism efforts. Do you have a state house member or a state senator you know is doing the wrong thing? Write. Write frequently. Write about bad votes, ridiculous town halls, and dumb statements in the state house. Follow their career and keep track of what they are doing.
Your content doesn’t have to reach the “Recommended” list, or get thousands of shares. Just writing up these events gives any future candidate easy access to research why, exactly, an elected official needs to be replaced.
I’m always excited to see a new writer discuss statehouse, county, school boards, or any legislative issues. These entries improve our activism and election attempts every year by giving us a headstart on the topics that motivate voters in a district—and the research into a candidate that can help us win.
More than just the page
What you see on Daily Kos every day represents content written by staff and members of the community. It’s a bit like looking at the newspaper. Behind the scenes, though, members have opportunities to make connections that go beyond the page and into the real world.
Local groups formed in part through Connect! Unite! Act! help users take their activism from the website and put it into the real world. Thought CUA, you can build groups of known activists who can become the reporters, the advocates, and the leaders in local community efforts.
When they take those efforts and report back here as to their work, we continue to inspire others to take that step and go beyond the page.
Beyond just CUA, though, on the community side, we continue to work on building connections between our community and elected officials, candidates, and party leaders. The more information you have, the more empowered you are to speak with some insight on what is happening in your local community, and the easier it is for you to speak with authority and work to influence the vote in your community.
We’re here for you and your candidates.
No matter what race you are interested in or what level of campaign you have, there are people in the Daily Kos Community who care about the outcome. Need a sounding board to ask a question? Are you unsure of what might help or hurt a candidate or cause? Over the years, the Daily Kos community has helped build up powerful voices on local issues, and empowered campaigns not just with money and resources, but also by offering insight from voters. Sometimes, just a shot of encouragement or a welcome message is what a campaign needs.
Through our community team, I spend a large part of my day responding to email and talking to candidates, campaigns, and activists about how they can both use our platform and become more successful in their organizing efforts. All of us work to help connect our community members, outside candidates, and activists to others that can help make their efforts succeed.
If you’ve got a question, or you need help, I encourage you to reach out and ask: How can Daily Kos help our campaign/efforts? Because I’m glad to say this is a community that cares deeply about making sure that response is: “Let’s see what we can do … ”
Next week on Nuts & Bolts: Bowing out with grace