The craziest thing about leading comms on a campaign is that despite overseeing a multimillion-dollar messaging operation, most comms staffers spend more time on Twitter than they do talking to the voters they’re trying to persuade and mobilize. And if they’ve moved to the state for the campaign, their only regular conversations with their new neighbors might be with the barista at the coffee shop nearest campaign HQ.
That’s kind of a problem!
And it’s one reason NGP VAN General Manager Chelsea Peterson Thompson thinks comms people should spend more time listening to local organizers knocking doors and building relationships with voters.
NGP VAN powers the technology behind Democratic campaigns’ field, fundraising, compliance, and digital operations. And with Election Day just one day away, I’m excited to share my conversation with Chelsea about hiring local, why conversations at the doors should inform campaign messaging, and why we’ve gotta do a better job taking care of campaign staff after November.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
This is ON BACKGROUND
5 short questions, 5 quick answers featuring the wisdom of NGP VAN General Manager Chelsea Peterson Thompson.
Looking at this election cycle and future cycles, what’s your biggest takeaway for Democratic communicators trying to reach voters?
Whether it’s in person at events, at the door, by phone, text, email or social media, it is harder to engage people. And as AI becomes more prevalent, people are looking for trusted sources. Deep community organizing and relationship-building will be more important than ever, this election and in future cycles.
When you’re asking, “Is that a real article? A real picture? A real video?” and you stop trusting what you’re seeing, you look around and ask: “Who do I know? Who do I trust? Who in my network can I talk to?”
For the last few years, we’ve all been looking at podcasts and other ways of reaching people across new channels. Building audiences online is important, but people are still looking for a reliable source – someone they know or trust.
Investing more in year-round organizing is especially important in a time of massive disinformation. We need to know what people are saying and hearing online but we can’t only respond there.
If we only combat online information with more online information, what happens when people genuinely don’t know what to believe? Who can they have a conversation with and say, “I heard this, but I also heard that. I saw this post, but then I saw this weird picture”?
I talk to my grandparents, my parents and other people about this all the time. They see things on Facebook and elsewhere and can end up assuming either that it’s all true or that none of it is true.
We need to do some soul-searching about the methods we’ve tried and think about what is working and what isn’t. There are some channels of engagement that have been very successful in the last few years but now we’re seeing engagement in those same channels completely crash. Building trust in a digital world is incredibly hard.
Real face-to-face interaction and relationship-building in communities is the best way to build trust and engage voters, now more than ever.
How should field work inform communications and messaging, and vice versa?
I would like the feedback loops between organizing and comms to be tighter.
Over the last 20 years or so, we’ve seen a massive shift toward top-down, nationally driven campaigns. That’s true of communications and advertising strategy, but it’s also true of organizing.
Organizing Directors in states often don’t make their own budget decisions, decisions about scripts or resources, or have the autonomy they once did. We need to move away from that.
I grew up in South Dakota. My first elections were for Tim Johnson and Tom Daschle, and anything coming from D.C. just didn’t resonate with South Dakota voters.
Partisanship in South Dakota has changed dramatically, but those were two senators people knew and trusted deeply. They had real connections to their communities. They were South Dakotans first and Democrats fifth or sixth on the list.
People in those states know their communities. Candidates often know their communities better than consultants do.
A state communications director should be able to say, “No, this is the message that works in Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, Tennessee or Georgia.”
The same is true for organizing. I’ll admit that I live in a bubble sometimes. When I go home and talk to people, I realize how much of a bubble it is.
When organizers are hearing at the doors that a message isn’t resonating, or that everyone wants to talk about gas prices, insulin costs or a hyperlocal issue, that information needs to get back to communications staff.
Digital, communications, organizing and the other campaign functions should be speaking directly to each other and sharing information in real time. It’s why we’ve built out tools like voice-to-text notes and will be launching Organizing Insights soon to help close the gap between teams. Then the communications team can respond and give organizers some air cover.
If you could give a communications director, digital director or media consultant one piece of advice, what would it be?
Trust the people on the ground. Trust the people who have been there and done the work. Treat them with respect and as one of your most valuable resources.
There are people who have been doing community organizing for generations and have deep relationships.
Talk to the people who have done that work, whether around a particular issue, a presidential campaign or a local candidate. It’s critical when you’re thinking about messaging or engaging people online and offline.
Rural communities and urban communities with younger voters may be very different. You need to understand and genuinely listen.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve worked professionally for 10, 20, 30 or 40 years.
These are the people who live in those communities, drink the water, attend services and send their kids to school there.
We have smart, passionate people in the Democratic Party and progressive movement, but we can’t parachute into a community and assume we know everything about what’s happening there.
Respect the people doing the work every day.
As a comms person, I love being able to tell a reporter that we’ve knocked 50,000 doors or spoken to X number of voters. How does that push for big numbers translate to effective field work?
I grew up in the big-numbers era too.
We’d say, “We knocked 10,000 doors today,” or “We made five million phone calls.”
That worked better when people answered their doors and phones more often. People didn’t have Ring or Nest cameras or caller ID in the same way. That world has changed.
What we’re trying to do with the data in our systems and from partners is make it easier to contact the right people at the right time, have quality conversations and capture richer information about them.
One tool we released this year is voice-to-text notes in MiniVAN.
When you’re walking between houses, you can record a note about a great conversation, an issue someone cares about or a request for more information.
Better notes can capture whether they mentioned a podcast, want a yard sign or are interested in volunteering, and give you a fuller picture of the interaction.
We’re also thinking about when people are actually available.
My wife and I work from home, but that doesn’t mean we’re available whenever someone knocks.
Our family has activities during the week, and we’re often out on Saturdays.
But on a typical Friday around five, we’re winding down and hanging out at home.
When canvassers knock at the right time, we’ve been able to talk, give them water and granola bars, chat with them about MiniVAN and give them a Lefty.
If a campaign knows not just that they’ve contacted us, but when we’re likely to be available, it can have better conversations instead of knocking on the same doors at the same time every Saturday.
Is there anything you want to shout from the rooftops?
Look behind you and see who is trying to come up in this industry – and help them level up.
I was fortunate to have a strong community of people investing in organizers. Steve Hildebrand was training the next generation of South Dakota organizers in 2002 and 2004, and brought many of them to Obama in 2007 and 2008.
There were institutions like Wellstone and RootsCamp, and we did national recruitment trainings when I was at the DCCC. A lot of that infrastructure doesn’t exist in the same way anymore.
I talk with friends in this space about how people find opportunities to make this a career, how we help them grow and how we make sure they can afford to stay in the movement.
I came to NGP VAN after a campaign ended because I needed health care, money and a way to pay rent. I’d used the tools for years and thought I’d work here for a year and go back to campaigns.
We need to make sure people are taken care of between campaigns.
Who is going to have our jobs next, and how do we help them get there?
We can’t just expect a bunch of rich kids to do this work. We need to make this a sustainable profession.
People can’t be expected to work every 12 to 18 months and somehow save enough to make it to the next campaign. That’s not possible, especially in this economy.
And today I’d be terrified to go even a month without health care, because one emergency could financially destroy you.
We need to recruit, grow and support the next generation of professional campaign staff for the progressive ecosystem. Pay them a living wage, give them benefits, train them, and help them find the next big thing every cycle. We have so much talent and passion in our communities – we should do everything we can to make sure they have great jobs that allow that to grow. I can’t think of anything more important as we head towards the critical election cycles ahead.
Thanks for your time, Chelsea.