Rules for Revolutionaries by Becky Bond

Author:Becky Bond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2016-10-24T17:33:25+00:00

Don’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Big

• becky •

If you want to be perfect, your reach will be limited by your budget. To go big you need to hand over control of key work, education, and management processes to volunteers.

The organizing we did on the Bernie campaign wasn’t big just because it was a presidential campaign. It was big because we built the distributed arm of the campaign to allow volunteers to scale up their own work.

After the Democratic National Convention, Zack and I attended a meeting in Berlin for organizers fighting fascism across Europe, in Scandinavia, and as far away as in India, New Zealand, and South Africa. They had all followed the Bernie campaign with keen interest. We talked with them about how they could take some of the lessons from the Bernie campaign and fight smarter and bigger in their own countries. We talked with them at length about two rules: “Get on the phone!” and “Barnstorm!” Both of these rules are about engaging volunteers and putting them to work. This idea intrigued them. Avijit Michael, a cofounder of the Indian grassroots campaigning organization Jhatkaa, asked what was seemingly on everyone’s mind. How could he trust volunteers not to do something to tarnish the grassroots brand he and fellow staff were painstakingly trying to build into a trusted force for change? What if the volunteers messed up and it made the organization look bad?

I’d already connected with Avi the day before when he made a point of telling me that the first online action he’d ever taken was with CREDO. I told him that I understood how scary it was to put your brand in the hands of volunteers because we were also hyper sensitive about our brand at CREDO, especially because we were a company with a product the revenue from which supported our social change work. If customers thought we were doing a poor job based on something a volunteer did, it wasn’t just an end-of-year donation we were putting at risk. Our customers paid their CREDO cell phone bills every month—that’s like a huge recurring donation!

I explained that at CREDO and at Bernie we used this rule. I explained that you have to make a decision. Do you want to be perfect? Or do you need to be big? Sometimes you need to be big in order to win. If you want to be big and you can’t afford to pay everybody you need to get there, you have to accept that giving volunteers responsibility means that things won’t always turn out exactly the way you want them to all of the time. That said, by scaling with volunteers doing valuable work, you’ll get far more work done, and that will mean a large net gain even when all the work isn’t perfect.

I suggested doing what we did at CREDO when working with volunteers: manage to an 80–20 split. That means 80 percent of what you do has to be good or great.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.