1. Perspective: voter, problem: no integration:
Voter: “Hello?”

Jacquelyn: “Hey, this is Jaquelyn with the Bernie Sanders campaign, we’re having an event this Thurs-”

Voter: “I ALREADY TOLD DAVID I’M BUSY ON THURSDAYS I HATE BERNIE NOW”

Jacquelyn: :(

Right now, the voter gets different texts, different calls, asking them to do different things. In the future, their experience with the campaign will feel like a conversation with an individual. Since we’ll be passing around the conversation context, and not just the person’s number, we’ll be able to do that.

2. Perspective: state field organizer hiring and creating a new city office and staff, problem: overly broad permissions.

Alright, time to open up a new office in Southeast Miami! We can get started as soon as I give Jeff, Rachel, Michaela, Kyle, and Priscilla accounts to VAN, Hustle, Callhub, Actionkit, Ground Control, and add them as collaborators on the GSuite and train them not to mess with any of the Northeast Miami campaigns which are only distinguished via a naming convention! Also after I train them to use the naming convention, and fix all of the ones Jeff just creating using the wrong naming convention, and delete Kyle’s VAN, Hustle, Callhub, Actionkit, and Ground Control accounts and remove his GSuite access because he’s voting for Andrew Yang now, and create accounts to VAN, Hustle, Callhub, Actionkit, and Ground Control to our new hire Cesar.

Right now, a state field organizer, upon hiring a new person, has to a) Give the new staff accounts on every system that is in use. For each tool they could give them access to, they either have to train and trust them to not mess up or delete other data, or withhold access to them, and then the field organizer is overcome with requests to take minute administrative actions within electronic systems, and they become a bottleneck.

3. Perspective: volunteer event host, problems: overly broad permissions, no integration: Right now, a volunteer event host must be given event host tools. These host tools let me send emails to people who have signed up, but if I want to text them, I have to type each of their numbers in my cell phone! I wish I could use the campaigns texting platform, but I understand they can’t give everyone admin access. I asked my local field director to set me up with a text confirmation campaign – I need to remind everyone to bring their laptops to phone bank! – but he’s too busy, he’s getting so many requests! The last time he did it for me, but he got my address wrong in the texting script, and I couldn’t get him to change it for 2 days!

4. Perspective: state data director, problem: complex workflows: It’s GOTV, and I want to make sure that we talk to every voter in this list cut I cut at least twice. It’s 5 days before election day, and I have to wait until voter contact is over, at 9PM my time, until I can start cutting my lists for the next day. Tomorrow we’re going to canvass and call, so I’ll cut three different lists. I don’t have any information on whether canvassing or calling would be better for each person, and so to avoid contacting someone twice, I’ll just split it up, so that we’re canvassing half and calling half. I want to make sure that we’re canvassing people first who haven’t been attempted before because at least we left literature, but I have to recut all of the turf anyways, because we need to exclude people we already talked to. I know that we canvassed more downtown yesterday, so I can just tell Kyle that we should hand out the downtown lit last. I know that the dialer will run through the list in the order I upload the CSV in, but even though VAN can export lists directly to the dialer, VAN doesn’t have the option to add a sort order to its lists, so I export two lists, one with the attempted ones, and another with the non-attempted ones, and I join them in the order I want, but it’s too big to fit in Excel, so I spent 30 minutes trying to write a script to do it correctly in Python, and then upload the list to the dialer. Ok, now time to go to sleep at 2AM because even though everything I did was completely predictable, I couldn’t get started until 9!

Tomorrow, Kyle passes his job along to Brenda because someone else told him that actually he’s supposed to be in Springfield today, and Kyle didn’t relay the message to Brenda, who handed out all of the downtown turf first and 25 volunteers left a bunch of palm cards on doorsteps with palm cards on them.