Ritti Singh: A Door Knocker Is Not Hitting 250 People

So in your recent piece, you wrote that communications is organizing and that it's a significant departure from the way most campaigns and advocacy groups are structured.

What do you mean by that? And what changes when an organization starts to operate that way?

Sure.

I mean, I think, like I said, I started as like a pretty traditional building organizer.

So I learned how to do a really classic one on one that you might do in a union or in a community organizing conversation or tenant organizing conversation, which is, you know, you get the issues, you lay the blame, you lay out a plan to win and you make a call to action.

And to me, those are also the fundamentals of really good messaging, right? Is we state the issues, we state who's responsible for it, why it's happening.

We lay out like the solution and we invite people in to help us get there.

And I think, you know, a digital platform, One-on-one, it's one-on-one, right? And it's going to go deeper and you're going to have like a longer time to like dig in.

But I think like social media, TV, any channel where people are getting information, those are actually opportunities to think of ourselves as having an organizing conversation at a massive scale, you know, potentially having that conversation with same conversation, but with tech.

thousands of people or tens of thousands of people or hundreds of thousands.

And in those cases, sometimes that, you know, that conversation at scale may immediately move someone to action.

Maybe it's going to just like prime the waters to, you know, shift how someone's seeing both like the world, but also what their role in it is and be primed down the line, maybe for an ask or be primed over time to take, take an action.

And I think like, I think we saw this a lot very vividly in Zoran Landani's communications for the 25th mayoral primary.

His communications program was deeply integrated with a field program where people were hearing about it online.

Maybe they weren't even being asked directly and they would sign up for a canvas because they felt that excitement.

or somebody who just went to Canvas would then share the content online.

And there was a huge door-knocking operation, but not every single person who voted for Zoran had been door-knocked.

The door-knocking was a huge part of the scale, but also they'd been reached through comms that were not just telling them what to believe, but inviting them to take an action and to vote.

And so I think...

Yeah, we're really trying to bring people into a worldview.

We're trying to, but also bring them into a movement and using communications to do that.

So, I mean, that doesn't sound that different from how campaigns have traditionally done it.

You've got the in-person elements, you've got the online elements.

I mean, what is it that made this particular campaign so different? Just thinking about...

being and engaging people in the online space to repeat a message over and over again.