Harvard Kennedy School prof and long-time U.S. community organizer Marshall Ganz is on a short tour of speaking engagements in Canada this week, and I happened to catch him in Ottawa. Ganz played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in designing and building the ground organization for the Obama campaign, and was in town to pass along some of its underlying principles and best practices.

Many people associate the Obama campaign with its contributions to the use of Web 2.0 technologies in running election campaigns. But to Ganz that is not the whole story. The technology itself would not have mattered without, first of all, the story of hope woven by their candidate; and it would have constituted mere tactics that could not necessarily replicate the same result elsewhere without forming part of a larger strategic context.

Finally, he argues, the technologies themselves are insufficient without the teaching of leadership skills. American politics had become an exercise in advertising and marketing (the approach of the status quo), he claimed, and had lost the skills of organizing not utilized since the 1960s.

Ganz outlined 5 Best Practices for building a ground organization:

* Motivation Through Narrative: The sharing of personal stories was used to bring people together around shared values, what Ganz calls "values-based organizing". This approach allows folks to set aside their issue silos, find common issues and common interests and then agree on common strategies. If you conflate your issue with your identity, you risk fragmentation of a bigger potential movement. The Obama organization taught people how to translate their own experience into a story that can engage others around common and shared values.

* Relationship Building: Their campaign also sought to teach skills of relationship-building around shared commitments, so that the organization became more than simply an aggregation of individuals, but recast individual interests as common interests thus allowing resources to be be diverted towards common endeavours. Building relationships was key to creating a commitment to work together on common interests.

* Structure & Team Building: Ganz argues that many advocacy organizations have attempted to function nominally without a structure, but in fact all organizations have a structure whether explicit or not. Where the structure is not explicit, too much energy is wasted trying to figure it out, and a very "passive aggressive" and unhealthy situation ensues, he says. Ganz and a colleague have done a lot of academic work on how to structure groups so that they work, and concluded that the best practice was to form self-governing, interdependent "volunteer leadership" teams, with clear roles, norms and structures. Ganz argued that volunteers will stay volunteering if they learn and grow, which requires that an organization learn to structure the work that way, in order to create a resilient, accountable and motivated voluntary team.

* Strategic Focus: Related to the team building discussed above, Ganz argues that many advocacy groups have suffered from a lack of strategic focus, or simply too many strategic goals. In the Obama campaign, volunteer leadership teams were given responsibility for a goal of X numbers of voters, and given the resources and tools to accomplish their goals, but with a lot of local autonomy. He cited Richard Walton's work on the two kinds of organizations (Command organizations vs. Commitment organizations), and said to build the latter means giving away some responsibility and control at the centre. To him, the measure of the success of this latter approach was finding at the end of the campaign that people were saying "great, what next?", rather than "great, thank goodness that's all over now".

* Translating Outcomes into Measurable Accountable Results: Attention to detail, says Ganz, is the requirement of excellence in anything. It's not enough to say the meeting hall had a great feeling in it, you must know how many people were there, and where they came from. Because of the Internet, the ability to share information is greatly enhanced, and the Obama campaign achieved a level of transparency previously unheard of in Democratic Party politics when it shared the voter file with volunteers, and granted them realtime access to information, in return for accountability for the goals their group was to achieve.

Ganz credits the unique confluence of historical (especially economic) conditions, and Obama's ability to communicate a narrative politics of values, rather than a marketing campaign of policies and issues, with bringing about an election that really was different than any other in U.S. history for moving beyond the politics of race and racism. "Sometimes, hope and history rhyme," he concluded, adding that freedom is something each generation must achieve in turn and rebuild once again.

For more on the importance of narrative in building advocacy organizations, read "Why stories matter" by Marshall Ganz.

For more on a values-based approach to politics, read Frank Luntz on "Words that Work" (from a conservative perspective; the link opens a talk he gave on National Public Radio on his book) and George Lakoff's "Don't Think of an Elephant" and "The Political Mind" (the progressive response to Luntz, which became very influential in Democratic Party circles in the recent election cycle; the link opens a lecture he gave on "How Liberals and Conservatives Think").

Finally, here is an in depth account of the on-the-ground Obama organization in Ohio from the online Oxdown Gazette.

While I'm recommending U.S. sources, I just got my hands on "How Barack Obama Won", a compendium of the NBC exit polls from the 2008 Presidential Election, annotated by NBC Political Director Chuck Todd and Elections Director Sheldon Gawiser in full state-by-state detail. Talk about electoral geek heaven!

Labels: Campaign Techniques