During an intense week-long training program put on by the New Organizing Institute (NOI) last week, my Wonder Woman campaign team took out the competition in our mock election for Mayor of DC! Throughout the week, camp attendees worked on building buzz for our DC comic candidates online while we learned from experts in the industry on messaging, field plans, data, online outreach, and getting out the vote (GOTV).
By the end of the week, we campers were not only well-trained in all things new media, but inspired to use our training to help further the progressive movement. NOI did an incredible job of combining hands-on practical training with big-picture discussions. For instance, we worked with experts to draft a comprehensive field plan one day and heard from Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz on “Organzing and Social Movements” another. Overall, this combination made for a transformative and enlightening week.
The Wonder Woman campaign earned a total of 1,188 unique votes to win the election and in total, the 8 campaigns at BootCamp garnered over 6,000 votes! That’s the population of Wasilla, Alaska, where Sarah Palin only earned 909 votes in her incumbent mayoral race. And to think – our campaigns only had 5 days – it’s pretty insane.
Some other interesting Wonder Woman factoids:
- in 5 days, our email list grew to 424 subscribers.
- we attracted 366 supporters on Facebook.
- we created two campaign advertisements – the one I made, “Lasso of Truth,” has currently been viewed 794 times on YouTube!
- NOI was taking footage the whole time and captured one of our team discussions on film.
- there’s also this hilarious example of how the Super Man team employed a flawed Get Out the Vote strategy and how awesome our website was at attracting people to vote for us! A must-see!
- Our campaign and the whole NOI BootCamp program received press mentions (thanks to our own outreach to bloggers and the news media) on DailyKos, Epolitics, NPR, Femeniste, Fire Dog Lake (FDL), Greater Greater Washington, Huffington Post, Wonkette, RI Future, and countless others!
I had an incredible experience and must thank my wonderful, bright Wonder Woman teammates, without whom this would never have happened: Erin Mazursky, Mohit Shewaramani, Josh Bolotsky, Awais Khaleel, Dan Borntrager, and Stephanie Chin. You can read more about all the BootCamp attendees here.
Finally, if you didn’t get a chance to check out our website during the campaign, visit www.WonderWomanforDC.com to see our work! Many thanks to the good people at the New Organizing Institute (NOI) who put on our fabulous BootCamp program, which I recommend anyone interested in learning about incorporating online strategy into progressive/activist campaigns apply for. The absolute best part of this week of training was that it was absolutely FREE!