Planting Liberally

About a month ago, I wrote that small dollar fundraising is the best way to build the liberal movement. In part, my claim was based on the apparent inability of the Democracy Alliance to invest in ground-breaking, innovative new political organizations, as reported by The Nation. My belief is that small dollar fundraising will not only help support the kind of organizations which are most likely to be effective, but that it is far more democratic as well. There's a great organization which aims to do just that: the New Progressive Coalition (NPC). NPC is the brainchild of Deborah Rappaport, and was founded in San Francisco. Most of its mission and methods appear to be directly adopted from the entrepreneurial and risk-taking ethos of San Francisco's dot-com industry. Angie Schiavoni, the group's membership director, contacted me in response to my "Building the movement with small dollars" post and encouraged me to poke around the site, which I did this weekend. NPC is a meeting between political investors and political organizations. The central meeting point for the two is the Marketplace, where organizations post proposals for funding, and investors chip in - or don't - as they see fit. In a sense, the Marketplace is exactly the ActBlue for liberal organizations which I proposed in late September. The major difference, as far as I can see, is that NPC's Marketplace is intentionally not amenable to the sort of low-information mass-market appeals that are the hallmark of campaign-based fundraising on ActBlue. (Not to disparage these types of fundraising drives, of course: I think they're great. But donors on ActBlue, I'd wager, are doing considerably less research on candidates than investors in NPC's marketplace are doing on political organizations.) The idea appears to be for investors and organizations to come together and discuss strategy in-depth; investors provide their wisdom and organizations gain valuable ideas. Whereas the Democracy Alliance could fund a $200,000 project with a single investor, and a DailyKos/ActBlue-style fundraiser would perhaps require 2,000 contributors each chipipng in $100, NPC appears to be shooting for a middle range: 10 investors each putting up $20,000. To serve that end, NPC has a series of forums for online discussion, as well as a very well-stocked resource guide for organizations and investors, called the NPC Wire. The wire tends to favor organizations in its advice-giving: there's a steady stream of brief but well-linked answers to questions like "How do we screen volunteers for those who will add value to our organization?" and "How do we set up a basic accounting system?". There's also an extensive resource library on topics including legal issues, earned income, and volunteer management. The result is something like So You Wanna for progressive political entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, resources for investors are limited to a relatievly short list, dominated by 30-page guides to such non-profit-theory topics as how to measure effectiveness, and sprinkled with a few basic guides to political topics, such as 2006 Hard Money Limits on Individual Contributions (PDF). NPC also offers investors customized services including strategic political investment planning, politican investment research, and collective investment opportunities. At least according to its website, NPC plans to become the Charles Schwab for the progressive investor class. Tying it all together, NPC also offers conference calls and networking opportunities and working groups for organization leaders and investors to talk about tactics ("NPC Fundamentals: How to Raise Thousands with Email") and goals ("Expanding and Mobilizing 2006 Constituencies"). In the works for 2007 is a project aimed at measuring the effectiveness of political groups, dubbed the Political Return on Investment (PROI). The project is aimed at streamlining the evaluation of investment opportunities for investors, and helping political organizations evaluate themselves. It appears that the project is headed towards defining PROI in terms of things like number of volunteers mobilized, number of voters registered, and that sort of thing, per dollar invested. The project looks well-intended, but it makes me sort of nervous, for two reasons. One, political effects are very complicated, and it's often difficult to ascertain why a particular goal was achieved or not. Two, sometimes you just choose the wrong metric. A famous example is the Dailykos fundraising record for 2004: most of the representatives endorsed by Dailykos lost but, at least as far as kos argues, the effort was a success, because it forced Republicans to play defense in normally friendly territory. To begin with, is it true that Republicans had to play defense because of the kos fundraising effort, or was there some other unseen factor at play? Further, what was the appropriate metric in this case - seats won, or Republican dollars spent? On the other hand, you've got to start somewhere. When dollars are scarce, as they necessarily will be in the progressive movement for the next few years, accountability is very important. Money spent on a project that never gets off the ground, or doesn't manage to do what it sets out to do, is as good as wasted, and would be better spent on other projects. So I applaud the PROI project. For the most part, I think NPC has assembled a very talented team and a rigorous methodology to tackle a monumental problem. I am glad that they're doing what they're doing, and I think they're doing more than just about anyone to facilitate progressive investing. The NPC is not perfect, of course, and I think there are many things that could be done (either by NPC itself or some other group), to make the group more successful. Here are some thoughts along those lines:

• Lower the barrier. NPC right now appears to be focused on investors who are serious about investing, and organizations which are serious about organizing. These are people who are ready to go the mile in building or investing in an organization. That is great, and we definitely need to support those people. But there is a very large group of people who are less serious about investing, and less serious about organization-building, but who are politically valuable nonetheless. These are folks who would toss $50 to the Still Speaking Initiative as a way of signalling their appreciation, and folks who post one half-crazy idea or another in DailyKos diaries to see what will float. I am one of these folks, if you haven't figured it out by now. For a variety of reasons, many people with good ideas can't get too serious about organization building - they're tied down by careers, they don't have enough money to jump in, and so on. But they have a truckload of good ideas and are willing to take a cracy at some problem or another. They should be let in the door, somehow or another. My ideas for an ActBlue for political organizations and an idea incubator for movement builders, both suggested here, was aimed at these folks, and I still believe it's important to give them a seat at the table.
• Make more investors. NPC is aimed, partially, at making the political investment forays of the progressive investor class successful and effective. But what is this progressive investor class? Where are they coming from, and what motivates them to invest? Are there enough of them to fund the kind of projects that need to be funded? Unfortunately, grassroots activists do not appear to be terribly motivated to invest in the progressive movement. While various fundraising efforts - notably the late-August DailyKos fundraising push - have been remarkably successful at raising money for Democratic candidates, efforts to fund the blogosphere, including recent efforts on MyDD to fund BlogPAC, have lagged substantially. To be sure, we can attribute part of the difference to the sheer size of MyDD as compared to DailyKos. But the bar for this fundraiser was set comparatively low - $15,000 for BlogPAC, compared to well over $1 million for the netroots candidates - and BlogPAC still faced difficulties. The question is, why? Why aren't grassroots activists motivated to invest in their movement? I have a couple of ideas:
  • It's not easy enough to invest. As noted repeatedly on this blog, there is no specialized donation-making mechanism for political organizations to compare with ActBlue for candidates. Of course, ActBlue does support donations to political organizations, and it was the mechanism for the BlogPAC fundraiser, so I think this is probably not a sufficient explanation.
  • It's thought of as a job for big donors. I think the mythology surrounding George Soros and ACT is largely responsible for this one. A few stories about how billionaires like Soros got together to fund ACT and America Votes in the 2004 elections captured the imagination of the netroots; many assumed that these magnanimous billionaires would be in it for the long haul, and the subsequent stories about the Democracy Alliance and Rob Stein's Powerpoint-palooza only fed that assumption. With princely sums like $10 million and $100 million on the table, many activists assumed that their dollars weren't needed or wouldn't make much difference. Making matters worse, most progressive organizations, with a few exceptions, let that kind of thinking take hold, by not aggressively courting small-time donors the way candidates routinely do. So far as I know, there were very few fundraising bats for movement organizations or week-long fundraising drives for movement-building purposes in 2004 - 2006. ActBlue's effort on behalf of its state-level fundraising pages and the StillSpeaking Initiative are two noteworthy exceptions to this trend. In a way this is a chicken and egg problem: organizations don't ask, so donors don't donate, causing organizations not to bother asking. Something must be done to break the cycle. Hopefully, 2007 will be an ideal time to do so: grassroots activists are unlikely to be united behind a single Presidential candidate, and very little else will be going on in electoral politics. So there will be time to tinker with the movement and ponder its future, and grassroots activists are likely to be amenable to small-dollar movement-building appeals. On the other hand, the Democratic party is likely to be holding a lot more power, and wonks of all stripes will likely be duking it out on any number of policy battles.
  • There is no transparency, and no "win" moment. Movement builders do not win or lose elections like candidates. They do not get to vote on bankruptcy bills or scold errant cabinet Secretaries on the floor of Congress. They do not, for the most part, get appearances on the Colbert Report where they may, if it suits them, admit to snorting crack because it's a fun thing to do. Consequently, donors to movement building groups don't have a whole lot of transparency, and certainly no clear sense that their organization is "winning" in the same way that candidates win. There's no payoff and no fun, just a vague feeling that something good is being done. I'm sure that the PROI project is aimed at this problem in a way, but ultimately I think this problem is just hard to shake. After all, movement builders don't win and lose. They just keep going. From time to time lightning strikes, and they get Dan Rather fired or they get Scholastic to refrain from distributing a stupid docudrama in the high schools. But those cases are few and far between. For the most part, movement building donors will just have to settle with limited payoff.
• Guide the investors. Reading through NPC's list of resources for investors, my sense is that NPC assumes that its investors will have a very sharp idea of how they want to invest their money, and what types of causes they want to pursue. Perhaps that is true, but I wonder if a bit more targeted guidance might go a long way. How will the progressive movement establish itself, and how will it try to change society in order to win support for its ideas? NPC has implicitly answered these ideas in the way it organizes its member organizations. Members are sorted into six sectors: advocacy/organizing (issue-specific, and non-electoral reforms); electoral work (GOTV, fundraising, voter registration); idea generation/dissemination; infrastructure/capacity (tools/services/technology); leadership (recruitment, retention, development); and media. These sectors are a very good way to organize groups whose purpose is expressly political, and the answer to the question "how will the movement establish itself?" appears to be "by founding lots of groups that successfully address each of these key challenges". I would like to think that Planting Liberally has a few things to contribute to the discussion in this vein. I have been arguing for at least a year or so that this kind of expressly political work is not enough. For the most part (with the exception of the idea generation and media groups), these groups do not address our political ideological environment. With 34% of voters identifying as conservative, and 21% identifying as liberal, the political ideological environment is stacked heavily against the progressive movement. Changing this environment is a massive long-term project, and that is exactly what the folks at NPC say they are ready for. Along these lines, I would encourage NPC to encourage its investors and organizations to take aggressive steps to change our political ideological environment. In addition to trying to make progressive ideas a big part of the media landscape, NPC members should: a) support innovative union organizing strategies and tactics; b) support efforts to build a social movement around liberal religions, and to build up membership in those liberal religions; c) build cultural institutions that support liberal family life, by helping liberal parents raise children, helping liberal teenagers and young adults start careers and establish healthy relationships, and by helping liberal senior citizens retire gracefully; d) make liberal ideas prominent in the education of teenagers and young adults, particularly in the 15-to-30 age range. This program is a very tall order, and one which will, in all likelihood, never be complete. But it is also vitally important to our success. Without a strong social movement to promote and spread liberalism, all the GOTV and fundraising in the world won't do much to change the fact that we are 13 percentage points behind conservatives. Yes, we can tinker at the margins, and we can do a great deal to improve our chances. But as long as conservatives are gaining power in academia, have a well-organized religio-political machine, are outdoing our efforts to integrate liberal values into family life, and are slashing the tires of the union movement, we will be fighting short-handed.
• Leverage the money. My guess is that this item is already fairly high up on the NPC list, so this is a quick hit: don't just make grants, make loans as well. Loans are a terriffic resource for organizations which can earn their own income; a little bit of start-up capital can be leveraged into an aweful lot of movement-building power. I hardly think NPC needs a lesson in this arena, but I do think it makes sense to steer organizations into the income-earning arena as much as practically possible, in order to maximize the utility of the investment capital.

Hopefully, some of these ideas are already kicking around NPC headquarters, but it's not necessary for NPC to carry them out: the organization is already doing what it does well. For the good of the movement, though, we will need to bring more investors and more entrepreneurs on board, and we will need to start making serious inroads into the ideology defecit.