[GPSCC-chat] registration drive challenge, Re: Agenda for Jan. meeting

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

Our registration efforts over the last ten years have been
impaired by an inability to collect and organize and retain
contact information.  New people write their names on a clipboard,
and it sits in someone's garage for a year or two, and
we discard it.

Normal political organizations use computer software for that
task.  But we are not a normal political organization, we
are uniquely reluctant to use computerized tools,
Facebook, Gmail, and SMS notwithstanding.
(The reasons *why* Greens prove uniquely averse to computer literacy
are irrelevant, we just are, and we're not going to change.
It took enormous, sustained, pervasive peer pressure to get
us on Facebook, Gmail, and SMS.  That peer pressure doesn't exist
for other network services, and there's peer pressure to *avoid*
any service you have to learn about or understand to use well.)
At the local campaign, county, and state levels, free tools
have been provided and no volunteers found who would
actually learn and use them.  I didn't even use the systems I
installed, and neither did anyone else, not the custom system
we had ten years ago and not today's world-wide standard, civicrm.
Our state and national parties use commercial service bureaus
instead, and that's expensive and risky.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing
over and over and expecting a different result.
Any renewed registration drive for our county must be
designed for pencil, paper, voice phone, and photocopies.
If our tablers have to touch a computer to record a new
volunteer, that volunteer will be lost.  If our volunteers have
to learn to use *any* software tools, they will drop out of
that part of the project.  We would be insane
to insist we're going to respond any differently this time.

Best,
-Cameron in San Jose





>Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2012 08:13:41 -0800
>From: Wes Rolley <wrolley at charter.net>
>User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64;
>	rv:9.0) Gecko/20111222 Thunderbird/9.0.1
>To: Post South SF Bay discuss <sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org>
>Subject: [GPSCC-chat] Agenda for Jan. meeting

>As a political party, it is incumbent on the GPCA to protect its ballot 
>access.  In recent years, that has fallen drastically.

>With a GPCA target of 100,000 new Greens to be registered, each county 
>needs to take on it's share.  If you divvy up that large number based on 
>current registration, Santa Clara County needs to register a little over 
>4,000 new Greens by the November election.

>While Santa Clara County GP has an active tabling program, I don't see 
>that this will bring in 4,000 new Greens... based on past history.  So, 
>how do we get to that number?  I suggest that it needs new ideas and 
>some organizational structure for getting beyond our tabling efforts.  
>At least, we should have a committee to refine those ideas and agree 
>that part of each monthly meeting should be a simple report on the 
>current status of the effort... how many new Greens have been 
>attracted.  Maybe, if we measure progress, we will have more progress.