If you haven't already, you're going to hear a lot about relational organizing this cycle. There are so many great (and some not great) tools already out there and more popping up all the time. One of my favorites is Team, a product made by the Tuesday Company. I interviewed co-founder Shola Farber to tell us what it's all about.
1) Who are you? (Tell us a little about yourself and how you got here)
My name is Shola Farber and I’m the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of The Tuesday Company. While serving as a Michigan-based regional director for the 2016 Clinton Campaign, I saw how traditional organizing methods like phone-banking and door-knocking prevented us from reaching large groups of voters. This mid-20th century approach is impersonal, fails to account for the modern ways that Americans consume information, and leaves many citizens out of the political process.
I co-founded The Tuesday Company to bring the best practices of community organizing online. Our mobile app, Team, allows campaigns, nonprofits, and unions to build digital communities that reach more people, increase civic engagement, and help movements build power.
2) What is relational organizing and why is it important?Frankly, I believe all good organizing is relational. Relational organizing is simply friends talking to friends about the things that they care about. It is the natural way to build relationships with members of your community, which is exactly what organizers do! Plus, it’s proven to be more impactful than outreach by strangers. Think about it: we’re more likely to try restaurants or check out new TV shows if recommended to us by friends and people we trust. Why wouldn’t it be the same with civic action?
3) Where/how has it been done well in the past?
The Obama ‘08 and ‘12 campaigns used relational organizing to harness the excitement of President Obama’s supporters and encourage them to talk about him in their own communities. The campaign provided the personal attention, helpful instruction, and exciting motivation that used relational organizing to transform supporters into President Obama’s brand ambassadors. As a result, volunteers were ready to share why they supported Barack Obama when they visited friends and called neighbors. Additionally, faith-based community organizations, workers rights groups, and environmental advocates have been doing ‘relational organizing’ for decades.
4) What is Team/The Tuesday Company?
The Tuesday Company brings the best practices of community organizing online. Our mobile app, Team, opens up direct communication between organizations and their supporters to build a home for your organizing effort..
Team’s efficacy rests on its ability to digitally scale trust-based relationships - and especially the sense of community and belonging these relationships create - so that organizers can activate supporters to take meaningful action. We have organizations of all sizes that use Team for rapid response, to assemble and deploy online armies of retweeters, and to expand their reach beyond target contact lists.
5) Why is it particularly important this cycle?
In our experience, digital community-building and friend-to-friend contact on Team leads to engagement rates of over 80% and can be 20X more effective than traditional outreach methods, particularly among low-income, millennial, and minority groups.
In our time of super close elections, it has never been more important to engage every single voter. Tech products like Team allow organizations to engage more people at once in a trackable, scalable way. Also, by meeting people in the digital space we’re increasing the total number of supporters contacted by field programs and diversifying who is engaged.
Team isn’t just being embraced by organizations, but also by the supporters themselves. People are craving ways to take immediate, tangible action for the campaigns and causes they care about. A supporter using Team is 250x more likely to share content than a Facebook follower. This is because they feel engaged with the organization and know they are an integral part of that organization’s success, rather than being a passive follower of a page.
6) Who is involved?
Entrepreneurship, politics, and tech are industries notoriously dominated by white men. From Day 1 as our COO, I insisted we institute HR policies to ensure we could recruit the best and the brightest - from all walks of life. To give you some context:
50% of our technical employees are women, 75% of our sales team are women, and 60% of our Director-level staff are women. Our software engineers are 100% immigrants or people of color. Approximately 25% of founders and staff identify as LGTBQ, and our CTO is a military veteran.
These stats are pretty astounding for any company, let alone a political tech company. We believe that the best technology is built by people who are as diverse as the communities the tool seeks to serve, and we’re proud to walk that walk. I truly couldn’t be more proud of the team behind Team.
7) What are some examples of the best ways to use Team?
During the 2018 Midterms, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) deployed Team nationally to help flip 40 of 41 seats in the House of Representatives from red-to-blue. In Illinois’ 6th Congressional District, Sean Casten for Congress turned every supporter into a digital influencer. On one memorable night, hundreds of supporters attended house parties across the district because they were invited by their friends – via Team. At these parties, attendees met the candidate via live stream and downloaded Team. Before leaving, each one of those supporters received a personalized greeting inside the app from a campaign staffer. These messages strengthened bonds between organizers and supporters and increased long-term engagement.
However, Team isn’t only for electoral campaigns. In fact, some of our best use cases were from issue advocacy organizations like Stand Up for Ohio and unions like AFSCME Council 5 in Minnesota. Team works with these organizations’ already existing field programs to make an impact on a meaningful scale.
Now, four major presidential campaigns are using Team to amplify their messages during live debates and to combat misinformation online. We are really excited for how these campaigns will weave Team into their national field programs.
8) If folks used Team last cycle what will they find new and different this time?
One of our biggest innovations last cycle was the introduction of Team Chat - a community feature that connects organizers with volunteers. This feature allowed organizers to build relationships with volunteers, and to transform these relationships into action-oriented digital communities.
Since the last cycle, we’ve expanded our set of community-building features. We made it possible for supporters to talk to each other on Team Chat through a group function, allowing organizations to foster a sense of community by connecting supporters together.
Another fantastic new feature came from feedback of organizations like yours: Team’s Share Drawer allows supporters to share content through their personal accounts on virtually any digital platform including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram DMs. In fact, a supporter using Team is 250x more likely to share content than a Facebook follower.
9) What new features or partners are you excited about coming up (if you can tell us)?
We are finishing up a feature that allows supporters on Team to reach people in their community without needing a phone number. They can canvass anyone, anytime, anywhere! Often called ‘street canvassing’, the idea is that an LGTBQ advocacy org could send its supporters out to canvass at a Pride Parade or a labor union could send its members to canvass members from other locals who they don’t know at the state convention. Street canvassing empowers Team users to take action that supports the organizations they care about, even without much guidance from their organizers.
We just recently updated Team’s content sharing features. Now, organizers can upload anything (eg a petition, a video, a fundraising link - you name it) and supporters can create a post on their platform of choice with that content and script as the basis. This opens the door for supporters to drive conversations as trusted messengers on Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, GroupMe, Snapchat, Facebook, and more.
In terms of partnerships this year, we’re excited to be supporting many advocacy organizations working around the 2020 Census. We’re also supporting lots of long-term organizing efforts for both state parties and nonprofits. Finally, we’re thrilled to be helping labor unions engage their members and grow their membership.
10) What else do you want our readers to know?
We live in an era of fake news, expansive voter suppression efforts, and unbelievably large sums of money in politics. We are also living in a moment when hundreds of thousands of people are marching in the streets, tens of thousands are becoming first time candidates, and many millions are being raised in small amounts from everyday people looking to make an incremental difference.
We built a tool for the organizer who wants to build a community of active, passionate supporters. Team is a resource for the supporter who wants to take meaningful actions and have conversations with their friends about the causes and candidates they care about. It enables a rapid response on social to share the amazing stories of candidates and supporters. With Team, users join a community of supporters, bring more voices into the discussion, and empower others to take action.
At The Tuesday Company, we are creating technology to build a more connected, inclusive world. I can’t think of a higher or better use of my time!
Thanks so much, Shola! You can find out more about Team/The Tuesday Company here.
