On October 28th, 2021, Panelists Jamie Harris (Senior Data Manager at Color of Change), Lizzie Heyboer (Organizing Director at the California Democratic Party), and Ted Corcoran (Digital Organizing Manager at All On The Line) joined us for a webinar to discuss how they  make the most out of their “digital stack”, the tools they use, and the role Mobilize plays in helping their programs succeed.

In the panel discussion led by Mobilize Enterprise Client Success Manager Jocelyn Strauss, our panelists shared valuable insights and expertise from the political and advocacy organizing space, and discussed the digital tools they use to run their organizing programs and campaigns.

Key Takeaways

• Utilize multiple communication channels to recruit for your events, including ways to increase your volunteer base. Bonus: Mobilize has built in recruitment tools! 
• Mobilize is a key tool in building a strong digital stack, especially when used in tandem with VAN (EveryAction) due to the robust integration Mobilize has with EveryAction.
• Centralize the data you collect, and use it to leverage your digital tools, from recruitment, engagement, and volunteer opportunities.

Our panelists had even more to say! If you missed the webinar, you can check out the recording here or read the summary below:

Digital Strategies Shared

On recruiting for events, Ted Corcoran (Digital Organizing Manager at All On The Line) speaks to using multiple channels, “…we have our existing pool of contacts in our email list… social media to bring in some new contacts, that we may not be directly in involved with in our email campaign or they may not be in our VAN, and then also text campaigns. We use that strategically, what are our rapid response events, who are our best contacts, let’s make sure they are aware of what’s going on… I am a huge fan of Mobilize, there is a recruitment factor built in already. We will always go in and have the refer a friend, additional events that are coming up, it keeps people within that universe and makes recruitment a lot easier.”

Jamie Harris (Senior Data Manager at Color of Change) shared some of the strategies used at Color of Change, “we also do a lot of work with the url generator that comes built into Mobilize to create customized websites and landing pages for people so they see only the types of events that really fit the particular demographic we’re recruiting for… we will also leverage facebook ads, we’ll often use mirror audience to kind of bring out a larger list of people who are similar to people who are on our existing list for recruitment.”

Lizzie Heyboer (Organizing Director at the California Democratic Party) speaks to building out a digital toolset, “if you are in the process of building [tool infrastructure] I would say the number one thing to have is Mobilize… when we talk about the [volunteer] pipeline we use VAN for our volunteer database, our emails, our fundraising.. and all of our phone banking… simply having Mobilize and VAN and [utilizing] that integration has been huge, and helped us build a pipeline and allowed us to target better. Because, once we get folks in to Mobilize and we can track how many times they’ve attended something, how many and what actions they have taken. It allows us to then leverage the other tools that we have.”

Ted Corcoran discusses how All On The Line uses their digital tools with their CRM, “[a] good way of describing this it’s kind of like a web. It’s where I’m trying to get in as much information about my contacts as possible… VAN is where we’re basically managing all of our people out of. Everything’s coming into a centralized source and Mobilize is almost kind of like a second piece to that centralized [source], because a lot of information is coming in and going out.”

Jamie Harris closed us out with how they use Mobilize in tandem with their CRM, “we also use VAN  within our workflow and I want to say that Mobilize in particular has been a real game changer for making [VAN] an even more effective resource for us, because it enables us to have a friendly external facing website and platform where people can see not just one event, but many events,  stay connected with our broader movement… also because everything funnels into VAN, it gives us a very user-friendly place for us to navigate the details and nuance of that [data in VAN]. So seeing what event types people have gone to in the past, being able to easily pull this [data] to tap them again, being able to bulk apply activist codes to people who have returned to certain types of events,  and then be able to pull that really quickly for a follow-up message, for a virtual phone bank…has been really really effective for us.”

In case you missed the webinar, here’s the link to watch on our Youtube channel.

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