Helping Take Back the U.S. Senate & White House

With canvassing greatly curtailed due to the pandemic in 2020, phone banking became one of the key tools for directly reaching voters. Our focus was to build a national virtual action center leveraging the power of relational organizing and virtual engagement. We hosted hundreds of phone banks in community-building Zoom rooms, many featuring special guests. We partners with over 200 organizations co-hosting ongoing phone banks week after week, where they could gather with their own members in specialized breakout rooms, where we provided training and tech support. We developed a robust training program for every kind of device volunteers used, and launched a Postcard-to-Phone-Bank program, focusing on people less comfortable with phone banks. At our peak, we ran 40 hours a week of specialized phone banks over Zoom to Get Out the Vote in October. To make the process easy for all, we also developed state-specific toolkits that provided individual volunteers and organizations with all the resources they needed to make calls on their own. When facing down the final 100 days of a campaign radically transformed by the coronavirus pandemic, we helped instigated and co-host Training to Win, a three-hour marathon training event featuring workshops, seminars, and discussions aimed at preparing Democratic activists to meet the challenges of organizing in 2020. It was a smashing success. We were the impetus and central organizer of the event, bringing together national partners like Indivisible, Sister District Project, SwingLeft, and Women’s March Action. More than 3,000 activists learned about virtual tactics, deep canvassing, and relational organizing, helping them build relationships for victory.