The Future of Progressive Training The next year and a half holds serious challenges to the progressive community. The influx of technology onto all types of campaigns promises to both make them more effective and efficient, but also to create technological barriers at all levels of the campaign. Staffing campaigns that rely so heavily on new technologies and tools presents the obvious questions – who is going to train them and what are they going to learn?

There are two parts to meeting the challenges we are facing in the next two years - retraining existing progressive managers and staff as well as bringing in new technology-enabled campaigners. The NOI is one key component in this equation. All parts of campaigns must now adapt to changes in technology – these affect not only the "IT Department", this affects everyone on the campaign. Traditional communications staff must venture into the website, blogs, email communication, and social networking sites. Traditional fundraisers must take on the questions about online fundraising. Field programs now have sophisticated voter contact tools that weren't available just three years ago. Modeling and microtargeting have changed the way field directors and campaign managers do their targeting and resource allocation.

Are you scared yet? Don't be. There are a ton of brilliant people working on this, and a lot of them are part of the NOI network of trainers, mentors, and professionals. But there is a lot to do…

The 'Internet Team' is no longer functions as a separate entity at campaigns. Their work is integrated into all aspects of campaign operations, fundraising, voter contact, and activist mobilization and the significance of this change must be conveyed to senior management and decision-makers. Campaign staff must be trained on the implementation, but candidates, campaign managers, and directors of programs must also be educated so they understand the significance of the changes taking place and can effectively work with their staff to most effectively use it.

Key areas the progressive community must begin to address immediately:

• Update and write new curriculum. We must rewrite the curriculum currently used by all progressive training programs for all aspects of campaigns. The new curriculum must incorporate the technology components and related techniques – NOI is a unique resource in the progressive community as a network of the most experienced political technologists and online organizers who are ready and willing to work on this.

• Retrain existing and recruiting new. We must both retrain existing progressive campaign and organization staff, but also bring in new technology-enabled campaigners – paying particular attention to the gender, race and ethnicity of our recruits – access to technology only makes diversity problems worse, but new organizing gives us new tools to use to reach the right people.

• Training and Using Activists. The amount of activists and volunteers who will want to participate in the 2008 election will no doubt be enormous. Training these activists on tools they can use to help reach into their communities to take positions of real-work political leadership, as well as using technology to create programs that can harness their energy most productively.

• Progressive training groups must work together. We must convey to every donor, organization, party committee, and decision-maker who is planning to win in the 2008 elections that while significantly more people and organizations are taking seriously the investment in progressive training, to be prepared for 2008, many more trainings will need to be held than are currently even being considered, which leads us to…

• Scaling up training. To scale the trainings to reach everyone we need to train, DC and state-based trainings are both necessary. Distributed curriculum packages and long-distance/online training should be a key focus when developing curricula and training plans. Organizing this type of distributed, scalable training infrastructure will itself rely heavily on online tools to coordinate and direct.

The New Organizing Institute is using the next few months to build an extensive trainer network, design pilot programs, and plan a comprehensive training and outreach program for the next two years. But we can't do this alone, all training programs must take seriously the challenges and opportunity to fundamentally alter the effectiveness of all people working on campaigns through training. We believe that technology and sound project and data management make it possible to not only grow incrementally, but to have a radical effect on the political environment in 2008.

Labels: 2008, training

  ¶ posted by Judith Freeman @ 1:59 PM 1 comments links to this post