I’ve always followed politics to one degree or another, at least since I was in High School. I didn’t start taking a serious interest until the Clinton years (Bill, that is) when I first started to realize that there wasn’t exactly a right choice for me politically. Since then, I’ve been alternating between outrage when the Republicans are in change and disappointment when the Democrats hold power. This culminated in the 2016 presidential campaign where it was hard to respect anyone through the entire process. I watched as Republican after Republican failed to understand what Trump was doing. I watched the DNC and other Democratic leaders force a deeply flawed candidate onto their party.

What it did was make me want to get actively involved. It was late in the cycle before donating my valuable time became an idea I was comfortable with. As such, it was too late for 2016. I’ve been on a slow political burn since then and that led directly to this blog. This is an outlet for me to share my feelings and observations and I hope someday will provoke some polite discussion in the comments.

Now that the 2020 cycle has started (way too early, in my opinion) I knew I wasn’t going to sit out and watch and maybe send money here or there. I wanted to get involved. I’ve thought about running for local office here and there, but I have no idea how to start, let alone win an election. The best way to get involved and learn how to get started on my own political career (still a long shot) is to volunteer with a campaign. So I did.

In “The Volunteer Experience” series of posts, I’ll be sharing a behind the scenes look at how these things are run and how easy or hard it is to get involved. I’m not going to talk politics in these posts – they’re about the experience of being part of a campaign not the campaign itself. I know I’ve always been interested in how campaigns are run so here’s my attempt to shed some light on that for others.

Texting for the Future

All I’ve done so far is volunteer to text for the campaign. This entailed taking a short online lesson on tools involved and the do’s and don’ts of representing the candidate. Then I signed up for the Slack channels for texters and the tool used to send mass texts. Then I was ready to request my first assignment.

Basically, you request a number of texts to send (500 is the intro number and is considered small). The campaign staffers then assign you a list of numbers to text. You never see these numbers, you just get a button that says to send the texts and lets you enter the text you want to send. Click the Send button and off they go. Neither you nor the recipient ever sees any phone numbers involved, it’s all handled by the tool. Once the initial text is sent (usually a hello with your name and the reason for the text) you just wait for any responses to come in. Then you get to have a conversation with anyone that seems interested. Maybe they have questions, maybe they ask how to donate, maybe the ask to be taken off the list. You respond back and forth with them until the logical conclusion of the exchange. At each step, you get the choice of using a canned response from the tool if it’s applicable or writing a response yourself. The canned responses may seem impersonal, but when you have to answer the same questions dozens and dozens of times with each batch, they are incredibly handy. And since those canned messages are maintained by the campaign staff, they’re sure to have accurate and approved information.

Sometimes people respond and want to have a conversation about policies and various candidates. This is encouraged as it’s a great way to get the message out to people that may not have heard it yet, and it also gets solid insight into people’s views who aren’t on board with your candidate. Every conversation is read by a campaign staffer, so certain levels of quality and decorum are maintained by the volunteers. And the Slack channels (chat channels dedicated to the texting volunteers) are always active with people asking and answering questions under the careful guidance of campaign staffers. Everything runs from 9am to 9pm with the text sending tool shutting down outside those hours. It’s a pretty efficient operation.

Next Steps

I’m looking into volunteering in more capacity. Maybe I can get into a campaign office if there’s one nearby. Part of the problem is I don’t know what sorts of tasks are available, let alone what I’d be good at. I know I don’t want to call people on the phone or go door to door, but maybe that’s what I’ll need to do to get started. We’ll see and I’ll be sure to share it all here.

If you have any questions about what I’ve said or something you’d like me to look into, let me know in the comments.