Organizing Together 2020 (OT2020) was a coalition designed to bring together partner organizations from across the progressive spectrum to begin talking to communities and voters earlier than ever before in a Presidential Election. A community-based and volunteer-driven organization, OT2020 was a home for anyone committed to holding the administration accountable for Trump’s agenda even before the primary process was over.
Beginning in January 2020, before a single vote had even been cast in the primaries, OT2020 began the process of hiring and training staff in six states that were ultimately decisive to the path to 270: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. While primary voters were still deciding who the Democratic candidate would be, the OT2020 team started the process of building relationships, recruiting volunteers, talking to voters and listening to their concerns, monitoring disinformation in these states, and laying the groundwork and building the infrastructure for a general election campaign.
Organizing Together While Flattening the Curve
By March 2020, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, OT2020 already had 100 staff on the ground in battleground states including alumni from the Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and Beto O’Rourke campaigns. It was thanks to the dedication and commitment of these talented, diverse, and seasoned professionals that OT2020 was able to continue under unprecedented circumstances.
Despite the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, OT2020 continued to recruit, train, and mobilize local volunteers and activists. Leaders and organizers in states did what they do best – adapt to meet the moment. States did not simply leverage new tools or approaches for the sake of working remotely, they adapted their organizing objectives to improve the volunteer experience and meet OT2020’s shared objectives and goals: trained local organizers and volunteers in communities who are empowered with the tools and resources to organize online and offline. Organizing Together 2020 set the tone for organizing in this general-election-like-no-other through innovative tactics to meet the moment:
- Online Training: OT2020 worked closely with partners at Arena to transform their best-in-class national training program into an online training academy to train volunteers to be effective digital organizers.
- Distributed SMS & Dialer Communities: As in-person volunteer and voter contact became limited, OT2020 trained & mobilized volunteers to reach out to neighbors via virtual phone and text banking.
- Online Offices: State teams created online communities, called “online offices” to build familiarity and community with the same individuals in a town or region who would have walked into a physical office.
- Virtual Volunteer Engagement: Organizers who would have engaged in one-on-one leadership development meetings in person with volunteers at a local coffee shop or in the office conducted those same meetings via video chats or on the phone to continue to build relationships and foster volunteer leadership development.
- Online Voter Registration Education & Engagement: OT2020 shifted voter registration tactics online to ensure people were utilizing online options to register or update their registration. They also used this as an opportunity early on to educate voters on how to vote by mail in primaries and ahead of the General Election.
Organizing Together to Vote By Mail
As the country quickly learned, Vote By Mail (VBM) was the safest option this year for voters to make their voices heard and keep the risk of catching COVID-19 low. OT2020 worked in its six targeted states to organize VBM programs to address the realities of COVID-19, part of a larger effort to educate people on voter registration and all voting options.
The program, launched in April 2020, was uniquely positioned to act with the urgency needed to build wide scale trust and understanding of the VBM process. OT2020 was one of the first large programs to begin that process by:
- Creating an easy entry point for volunteers and harnessing volunteer energy towards a unified mobilization while traditional campaign tactics were inaccessible.
- Talking to more voters at home, who were responding at higher rates to digital, text, phone, and mail outreach.
- Adding voters to the general election vote-by-mail rolls early and creating momentum not only in these states for voting by mail, but also creating momentum across the country – “vote by mail, everyone is doing it.”
OT2020 educated voters early in the spring and summer by: hosting online volunteer trainings where volunteers learned about their state’s VBM program, partnering with Priorities USA to create digital advertising and organic content to educate and inspire voters about VBM, using the latest in campaign tools like CiviTech to empower organizers and volunteers with the VBM program, and executing a traditional press and earned media plan.
Organizing Together 2020 Impact
By the time the Democratic primary was finished, OT2020 had more than 575 staffers across the country unified in the fight against Donald Trump. Together, they recruited 67,000+ volunteers and had nearly half a million conversations with voters about the general election.
On top of the organizing infrastructure built in communities and the innovative leadership OT2020 showed around organizing in a global pandemic, hundreds of staffers from OT2020 were ultimately hired by the Biden campaign, including key positions on the national campaign staff as well as leadership positions in states, in addition to the organizers who continued doing the hard work of building relationships in their communities.
“As the former organizing director for the 2016 Clinton campaign in Pennsylvania, I joined OT2020 as the PA Campaign Director because I had learned from lived experience how critical it was to invest in grassroots infrastructure building early in the cycle. At OT2020, our staff were some of the first nationally to organize virtually during the pandemic which meant they were able to test and hone innovative ways to engage volunteers and build teams – tactics which would later become the core of the general election strategy. In June for the Pennsylvania primary, our team ran the first Vote-by-Mail GOTV effort in the Commonwealth’s history, paving the way for an even more successful mobilization for the 2020 general election. The organizing experiences at OT2020 paired with the investment in staff training and professional development equipped everyone from organizers to our senior leadership team to excel in future roles to help win back the White House in 2020. “
– Chelsie Ouellette
Former Senior Advisor to the Coordinated Campaign in Pennsylvania
Former OT2020 PA Campaign Director