Welcome to Headquarters

Your campaign headquarters is your home, and you have guests—volunteers—coming over every day, so you need an inviting place where people want to be. Secure a campaign headquarters as a gathering place for staff and volunteers, as well as a visible location to gather in your community. In this episode, we will cover headquarters management, and how to have a volunteer and intern program while matching volunteer interests with the needs of your campaign. Listen to hear how you can have a buzzing headquarters with volunteers! 

Learn more about Organizing to Win: The Art & Science of Running for Office - including free downloadable guides - by visiting OrganizingtoWin.com.

Transcript

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You're listening to the audio version of Jimmy Tickey's book Organizing to Win: The Art and Science of Running for Office. This book will teach you how to enter the political arena, manage a campaign, and run for office.

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Welcome to headquarters. Moving into the fall, secure a headquarters as a gathering place for staff and volunteers, as well as a visible location to gather in your community. Rather than your team working out of their living rooms and cars, your campaign headquarters signals you have an official place in town where anyone can show up, pitch in, and help. Your campaign should always be prepared to welcome a volunteer and give them a task at headquarters. Having a hub for this kind of activity and connection is helpful with year-round organizing, which we will talk about later. Center of activity. When you picture a campaign headquarters, you might imagine a dark office with papers strewn everywhere, empty coffee cups on the table from who knows when, and pizza boxes on the floor. Ah, the smell of a campaign. I don't know about you, but I need a clean headquarters, no mess with proper furniture. To achieve this, think of your process. Is the campaign data entered at the end of every day, and then those papers shredded? Who is responsible for cleaning up each night? Do you have a key person to handle operations? Your campaign headquarters is your home, and you have guests, volunteers, coming over every day, so you need an inviting place where people want to be. Select a headquarters with good parking and lighting so that one feels safe. You want volunteers to feel comfortable when making calls and spending time organizing. Just a few decorating tips can go a long way. Lamps, rugs, plants by the window, a table with coffee fixings, a small fridge so volunteers can store a snack, and a stocked bathroom. I have even seen headquarters with shelves of books, serving as a book swap opportunity for volunteers. You can also add art from local students to transform a space. Make it a goal to take your headquarters from a messy dungeon to a home away from home where people want to gather. Your headquarters should have a dedicated, trusted person in control at all times. You may call them an office manager or coordinator, or it may even be the field director overseeing voter outreach. Make a schedule and post it on the wall so volunteers, interns, and visitors see the daily activities, from nightly phone banks to the weekend canvases. During the day, the candidate may be raising money or meeting people in the community in between professional commitments. In the evening, the headquarters should be prepared for volunteers to come in and contact voters. At the end of each day, be sure your office manager cleans and locks up, ready for tomorrow. Volunteer and intern program. If someone were to walk into your headquarters and say, Put me to work, what would you do? First, you'd want to get their information by having a clipboard close to the entrance so you can sign them in. You can even have a tablet device with your website volunteer form so they can provide their information with options for ways they'd like to help, like this volunteer sign-up, name, email, phone number, address. I'm interested in helping. Host a campaign event, make phone calls, canvas door to door, spread the word on social media, compile data and research, write postcards or letters, host a lawn sign, make a donation. Connecting volunteers with opportunities of interest to them is important so you can match tasks with volunteer preferences. Volunteers intrinsically want to help, so give them a valuable task that matches their skills. When they finish, thank them and ask, when would you like to come back? From a voter perspective, hearing that the person contacting them is a volunteer makes a difference. This is someone giving of their time to reach voters because they believe in the candidate. Over time, dedicated individuals will show themselves, and you can elevate volunteers to oversee certain areas like postcard writing, phone banking, or preparing packets for canvassing. I call these repeat volunteers super volunteers. For example, if someone enjoys phone banking multiple nights a week, then ask them to lead the phone banking nights. Grow your volunteers into super volunteers by having them own and improve a part of your campaign. Always treat your volunteers with the utmost respect and feed them at headquarters to thank them for helping. We could not do this work without them. Young people may need an internship to count for school credit, so work with them to establish a schedule and develop expectations for a formal internship. I would develop an intern program on campaigns I managed, and it was a win-win. We had someone working regularly for us in various campaign departments, and they secured credit as a part of their school requirements. Many interns who worked with me went on to serve as campaign managers and run for office, too. Be creative with volunteer opportunities, thinking through ideas with your team for new approaches, especially if they come with little to no financial cost. What are new ways to recruit volunteers? What tasks around the headquarters could we use help with? What VIP, very important person, could we bring into headquarters that might help draw more volunteers? These are the ideas the team should think of to keep the operations fresh and fun. As a campaign manager to a major race, you will not only be aiding that one campaign, but interacting with the other same party candidates. Many will call it a ticket or a team of candidates who are running for different offices from the same party because they share a line on the ballot. When I was managing that congressional campaign in my early 20s, I would pop into headquarters across the district and thank volunteers who are making phone calls for candidates. And other times I met teams of volunteers in neighborhoods to kick off canvases and doorknock myself. Spending time in the field with people who are carrying out this work is beneficial as you will see and hear what's happening on the ground for yourself.

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