“ Conversation Campaign” Creates Path To Victory

May 2013

“CONVERSATION CAMPAIGN” CREATES PATH TO VICTORY 2

Grassroots Solutions is proud to have been part of the consultant team

for Minnesotans United For All Families in its victory for love, freedom

and marriage in Minnesota during the November 2012 constitutional

amendment campaign.

Grassroots Solutions cofounder Dan Cramer was a key strategic advisor

to Campaign Director Richard Carlbom, and Grassroots Solutions Senior

Project Manager Monte Jarvis consulted on the campaign’s massive field

operation and took a leave from the firm to run Minnesotans United’s

statewide GOTV efforts. Senior Project Manager Bridgette Rongitsch

also took a leave from the firm to serve as Director of Program

Development at Minnesotans United for the whole campaign. The entire

Minnesota office of Grassroots Solutions was part of the extraordinary

volunteer corps built by the campaign, helping lead the state to an

historic win at the ballot box in November 2012, and opening a path to

legalizing same-sex marriage on May 14, 2013.

What follows are some of the highlights from the story of the 2012

constitutional amendment campaign, in which Minnesotans United for

all Families succeeded where none had won before and, in the process,

created a blueprint for a new kind of issue campaign.

“CONVERSATION CAMPAIGN” CREATES PATH TO VICTORY 3

Learning From The Past Research conducted after the defeat of Proposition 8 in California in

2008 revealed that rights-based messaging about gay marriage – that

same-sex marriage was a human right – didn’t resonate with most

undecided or conflicted voters. This was a major disruption to the

LGBTQ movement, which had historically relied on a rights-focused

platform in advancing policy change.

The post-Prop 8 research showed that voters resonated far more

strongly with values-based messaging about why marriage mattered

– love, commitment, and personal freedom – not a rights-based

message. The research also highlighted the power of the Golden

Rule” – treating others as you would wish to be treated – in

messaging about marriage, which emphasized empathy and the idea

that “love is love” for everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.

These kinds of values-based messages about marriage were found

to be even more powerful when delivered in individual, personal

conversations with friends, families, and colleagues. The lessons

from the research were not just about what to say, but, just as

importantly, how to deliver the message. For Minnesotans United

for All Families, this research was embraced as the core of a new

approach to campaigning for gay marriage – moving from an arms-

length, cerebral and more political message frame and delivery, to

a heart-led, personal message frame and delivery.

Aware of the stakes and the struggles of the many campaigns

before them, Minnesotans United for All Families also looked

closely at the structures and core strategies of other previous

state marriage campaigns. Most shared the core characteristics of

traditional electoral campaigns, focused on transactional contact

with voters and on winning on a tight timeline. Very few, if any, of

these campaigns had made the large-scale investment in personal

conversations that new research was suggesting would be essential

to make winning possible.

The Conversation CampaignIn reflecting on these tough experiences and the lessons learned

from them, Minnesotans United for All Families decided that the core

of a winning strategy in Minnesota would have to meld the best of

head- and heart-led organizing. The campaign’s chief strategists put

forward a clear and inspirational vision: they would run a campaign

where conversations with voters were at the center of everything,

conversations that would saturate the state at an unprecedented

scale, and conversations that would be designed and explicitly

executed to be both personal and measurable.

Minnesotans United For All Families was all about conversations

and it was all about winning but not just in its approach to doing

field. Conversations were integral to every piece of the campaign:

• in the ways traditional and digital media were used to spark

hundreds of thousands of conversations

• in the massive number of fundraising house parties that were

held where people got to know one another (including more

than 300 in one day in October alone)

• in the ways in which relationships were deliberately built and

strengthened among faith communities, communities of color,

LGBTQ communities, young people, and in a coalition of more

than 700 organizations and businesses across the state.

May 22, 2011 The Minnesota State Capitol is normally a quiet place late on a Sunday night. On May 22, 2011, however, the debate under the dome was heated.

The Republican-controlled state legislature was debating whether to place a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage on the Minnesota ballot in November 2012. At 11:40 p.m., the legislature approved the motion, with votes splitting mainly along party lines.

The ballot initiative was a significant victory for state Republicans. For them, the outlook appeared promising—since the late 1990s, 31 states had voted to ban same-sex marriage. In all cases, voters approved the measures, which were also used to increase turnout for Republican candidates.

On that night in 2011, Minnesotans United for All Families was launched as the lead group opposing the amendment. The clock began to tick on an 18-month grassroots “vote no” campaign. Its unprecedented success would help change the way marriage campaigns are won, and would set new terms for inspiring and connecting voters to one another on issues that are so often emotionally divisive and politically polarizing.

“CONVERSATION CAMPAIGN” CREATES PATH TO VICTORY 4

“Deeply relational, highly accountable, and massive scale” became a mantra for the campaign’s approach to conversations with voters. It was a mantra that was designed to bring the most effective aspects of electoral and community organizing approaches together, and it acknowledged the imperative of creating a massive pro-marriage movement in order to win in Minnesota.

This mantra was a guide star for Minnesotans United’s conversation campaign over the course of an intensive 18-month sprint to Election Day. “Deeply relational,” “highly accountable,” and “massive scale” were tenets that the team revisited regularly to check their assumptions about their campaigning choices, and to make sure that they were being true to their most essential goals.

Sometimes the three tenets seemed to be in tension with one another, as the campaign struggled to make highly personal persuasion tactics measurable and replicable, or as they had to move away from tactics that may have been successful on certain terms but that didn’t move voters at the scale required. Balancing these tensions was a critical part of the Minnesotans United experience and kept the team from taking too much for granted. While the tensions were occasionally frustrating, balancing them contributed to the campaign experience being unusually disciplined and creative at the same time.

A New Winning FormulaThe campaign set a goal of having hundreds of thousands of conversations across the state before Election Day. The field plan that was such a critical element in driving this “conversation campaign” was characterized by a number of core assumptions about relationships and campaigning that included:

• Have longer and deeper conversations with voters (usually up to 10 minutes) to allow for time to explore their feelings about the freedom to marry rather than the more transactional “in and out” contacts that tend to dominate traditional electoral organizing.

• Ask every voter who feels strongly about the issue to be an evangelizer for the campaign, to multiply and decentralize the conversations – in grocery stores, at backyard barbeques, online, at church, etc.

• Invest early in developing volunteer leaders and volunteer teams and keep on investing in them, because scaling up to have hundreds of thousands of conversations is very people-intensive.

• Create easy ways for people to use their social media networks to evangelize to their friends and family members, and help them target those online conversations to people who will make a difference at the voting booth.

• Invest in building and nurturing real and mutually accountable relationships inside the campaign with staff, leaders and volunteers, to create a campaign culture that applies the same values and approaches externally through its voter contact efforts.

Leadership Development In order to build a “conversation campaign” of Minnesotans talking

to Minnesotans about why marriage matters, the Minnesotans

United For All Families team recognized that they would need to

make a major investment in developing the people who wanted

to get involved. This was done by knitting a culture of leadership

development throughout the fabric of the campaign.

When volunteers came on board, paid staff initially worked

alongside them. This ensured that volunteers received training

and support, but it also helped staff identify and move talented

volunteers into higher-skilled leadership positions. Staff members

entered volunteer experiences into a tracking system – and the

next time a volunteer stopped by a campaign office, they were

assigned tasks that best fit their personalities and skill sets. The

campaign devoted the summer months to training volunteers and

developing leaders from the volunteer corps, investing nearly as

much in developing people as it was investing in voter contact.

By the end of the campaign, many volunteer leaders were as

deeply trusted as staff, having built skills that allowed them to

manage press events, get-out-the-vote opportunities, and large

volunteer operations. The investment in developing leaders paid

huge dividends in enabling the campaign to go to scale. Volunteer

leaders actually ran the phone banks, and they ran the canvasses.

The campaign’s reach and the number of completed conversations

expanded exponentially as a result.

The Minnesotans United team also carefully considered what

leadership development meant in terms of campaign culture.

Campaign offices were structured in ways that encouraged

people to linger and talk with one another. The Minnesotans

United campaign broke from the warrior traditions that dominate

many field campaigns, providing explicit support for time out to

exercise, healthy foods in the campaign offices, and support for

sick days and personal time (within reason). Staff leaders were

also encouraged to hold personal check-ins before work check-

ins, with both paid staff and volunteers.

These less visible but important pieces of the campaign culture

helped sustain people through many intensive months during

which they were asked every day to engage neighbors on

emotionally fraught terrain. It also helped keep volunteers in the

open spirit needed to have the personal conversations that were

the signature strategy of the campaign. The campaign’s deliberate

choice to mirror its external relationship-building goals by creating

a conversational and open culture internally was an essential

element in the campaign’s leadership development strategy.

“CONVERSATION CAMPAIGN” CREATES PATH TO VICTORY 5

Grounded in these core assumptions, Minnesotans United For All Families built an historic “conversation campaign” that broke ground in many ways that will likely influence campaigns for years to come. In the process, the campaign learned some important lessons about what the key ingredients in the field program were that made this new “conversation campaign” approach successful – some obvious and some less so.

People, Stories, Data, InnovationThe most obvious and essential key ingredient in a successful “conversation campaign” is people. To meet the “massive scale” tenet in the campaign mantra, the campaign team was diligent about hitting their goal of having hundreds of thousands of conversations. This meant inspiring and organizing an army of Minnesotans in every corner of the state to co-create the campaign with them. The Minnesotans United campaign was not just about the campaign team talking to voters, it was about voters talking among themselves – one-on-one and through their networks.

Over the course of the 18-month campaign, Minnesotans United counted on hundreds of volunteer leaders as the captains of this new army of evangelizers – essential assets in taking the campaign to scale. The Minnesotans United team also was meticulous in refining its targeting strategies throughout the campaign, so that the growing movement of evangelizers spent its conversation time wisely – with voters identified as “persuadable” who could really influence the outcome at the ballot box, and with highly-focused organizing programs in the youth and faith-based communities. The Minnesotans United campaign built more than a dozen action centers across the state, determined by where it had large pockets of volunteers and where its key targets lived.

The second key ingredient in a successful “conversation campaign” is stories, the main tactic that underwrote the “deeply relational” tenet of the campaign’s mantra. Minnesotans United didn’t just give its army of people a list of talking points and then task them with using them on the phones, online, at events, and at people’s front doors. Instead, the campaign developed flexible and more

Re-Imagining Campaign TacticsIn a “conversation campaign,” every traditional voter contact

tactic is re-imagined with relationships at their center –

from phone calls, to door knocks, to events. Minnesotans

United for All Families quickly learned that there were three

essential characteristics of successful conversations in the

campaign: 1) They were longer and interactive, not just an

opportunity to broadcast talking points; 2) They focused on

quality interactions, not just the quantity of them; 3) While

story-sharing is somewhat improvisational by nature, they

had to also reflect research-tested message frames that had

been proven to work.

At the beginning of the campaign, all staff and volunteers were

trained in how to build powerful stories and how to elicit

and share them through individual conversations. They were

encouraged to spend as long as 10 minutes with each voter,

more than three times the length of time spent on traditional

phone calls or door knocks. Results overwhelmingly showed

that longer, personal conversations work.

In addition to asking volunteers to think about how to share

their stories of why they or their parents got married, the

trainers helped them learn comfortable ways to ask questions

of the voters they would be in conversation with. Phone scripts,

for example, were not filled with talking points about the

institution of marriage or gay families, they were largely made

up of questions about the voter’s own marriage, their own

relationships with gay people, etc. The challenges of putting

this deeply personal approach into practice in Minnesota were

not to be underestimated, as native son Garrison Keillor has

popularly remarked about Minnesotans’ less than effusive

personalities, “an extroverted Minnesotan is a person who

stares at someone else’s shoes instead of his own.”

Those first important lessons were then used to train

more volunteers before every phone bank, canvas, or event

throughout the campaign. This commitment to ongoing

training at Minnesotans United was unusual – both because

it was built into the campaign throughout its 18 month cycle

– and because the trainings were themselves often longer

and more in-depth than traditional trainings. It was a major

investment that paid dividends in terms of how deeply the

staff and volunteers internalized the ways traditional voter-

contact tactics were being re-imagined.

“CONVERSATION CAMPAIGN” CREATES PATH TO VICTORY 6

open-ended scripts that allowed people to share their own stories and journeys on the marriage issue, to be personal in their approach to voters, and to spark a conversation. The campaign gave volunteers intense training, they gave them message points based on research about what had succeeded and failed elsewhere, and then they encouraged them to tell their stories and ask voters to share their own. For a deeply personal issue like marriage, story sharing was one key ingredient that made the campaign rise.

For the “highly accountable” piece of the “conversation campaign” mantra, the essential ingredient is determining ways to measure the success of different conversation tactics and having accurate data. In both Obama’s re-election campaign and the Minnesotans United “Vote No” campaign, 2012 was a turning point in how data is collected and used to adjust strategies and campaign actions in real time. In Minnesota, healthy tensions occasionally arose between the “deeply relational” tenet of the campaign mantra and the “highly accountable” tenet of the mantra, as hard-boiled electoral organizers wrangled with data-heads about some community organizing tactics where the immediate-term ROI was often harder to quantify.

The last key ingredient in a successful “conversation campaign” is surely innovation. Constant evaluation, testing and learning was embedded in the campaign DNA. The leadership of the Minnesotans United campaign strove to model learning in the way they developed their campaign strategies, in how they captured lessons, and in the ways they shaped their internal structure and culture. The campaign created a program development shop that was dedicated to testing and pushing out new campaign ideas across the campaign. They took a holistic approach and incentivized inter-departmental collaboration across the campaign, where lessons learned in the field could immediately result in adjustments to fundraising activities and media strategies, and vice versa.

Let Your Friends Know ProgramThe research conducted after Prop 8 showed that many

LGBTQ people, and their closest friends and family members,

hadn’t had conversations with other friends and colleagues

about the ballot initiative. When asked in 2008, LGBTQ

Californians said that they’d believed that their friends, families,

and colleagues “knew them” and wouldn’t vote against their

interests. Unfortunately, this didn’t prove to be true – because

many friends, families, and colleagues of LGBTQ people hadn’t

heard much about the amendment in advance, they either

voted to pass the ballot measure or didn’t vote at all.

The “Let Your Friends Know” social media program was

designed to address this challenge, helping LGBTQ volunteers

to have conversations with their social media networks about

why “voting no on the marriage amendment” mattered to

them. Volunteers were encouraged to sign up for the program

and commit to holding a specific number of conversations

before Election Day. An online tool was used to match a

volunteer’s Facebook network with the campaign’s targeting

system, giving volunteers targeted lists of people they knew

and who the campaign believed could be persuaded. When a

volunteer held a conversation, the results of that conversation

could be fed back into the campaign’s voter database and used

to refine the campaign’s persuasion universes.

The “Let Your Friends Know” program initially worked well.

Anecdotally, the conversations facilitated through the tool

were persuading people at a 50 percent higher rate than the

conversations held through more anonymous phone banks and

door knocks. Still, the tool wasn’t without its challenges. The

user experience wasn’t as intuitive as originally envisioned,

sometimes frustrating volunteers and causing them to use the

tool less often.

Despite these technical glitches, the “Let Your Friends Know”

strategy of leveraging personal social networks continued

to be a fundamental persuasion tactic in the “conversation

campaign” and was used continuously through Election Day.

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A Highly Targeted Get-Out-The-Vote ProgramGiven Minnesota’s typically high turnout, particularly in a presidential year, targeting GOTV was a critically important piece of the winning strategy for the Minnesotans United campaign, and the campaign’s laser focus on its targeting strategy through the 18-month cycle was a critical piece of its “highly accountable” mantra.

It was decided that Minnesotans United’s GOTV program would focus on those voters who had been identified in the GOTV targeting model as “high support but low propensity” voters, i.e., people who were likely to vote against the amendment but who would be less likely to show up at the voting booth without encouragement. This universe of targeted voters included young people on campuses, residents of some urban precincts, and other supporters ID’d through the model.

A majority of the campaign’s extraordinary volunteer capacity in the final weeks was focused on campus outreach, door knocks in targeted precincts, and phone

calls to voters ID’d through the targeting model. The Minnesotans United campaign managed 10 different GOTV action centers in geographically strategic locations, each with many dialer lines and mobile lines, and often both.

The targeting analysis showed that there were more votes on the table on campuses across the state than in any other geographic area or demographic group. The Minnesotans United campus GOTV program employed multiple tactics such as campus street teams, dorm storm operations and others, which required more than 4,500 volunteers to cover the 23 precincts targeted for GOTV.

The door-knock program for the Minnesotans United GOTV push was highly targeted, knocking every door in targeted precincts, minus an exclusion list of known amendment supporters. One of the primary goals of the door knockers in those precincts was to increase same-day registration on Election Day – which

the targeting model had estimated at a

potential gain of 105,000 high support/low

propensity households. The program called

for a total of three knocks on every door

over the course of the GOTV push, with

at least one of the knocks on Election Day.

Phone calls during the GOTV push aimed to

reach high support/low propensity voters

multiple times. Approximately 187,000

unique phone numbers needed to be called

almost three times—nearly 410,000 dials.

The GOTV push lasted eight days. In total,

more than 28,000 volunteer shifts were

filled during that push, far more than any

other campaign in Minnesota history.

More than 900,000 volunteer dials were

attempted, including final persuasion calls,

confirmation calls, recruitment calls, and

nearly 500,000 turnout calls. Over 400,000

door knocks were recorded, surpassing the

campaign’s goals for door-knock capacity

during the GOTV push.

“CONVERSATION CAMPAIGN” CREATES PATH TO VICTORY 8

Making HistoryAs the final weeks closed in on Election Day, the polls on the constitutional amendment were deadlocked. Turnout was going to be critically important for Minnesotans United For All Families and would likely decide the race.

November 6, 2012, was a long night of anxiously watching the results come in from across the state, with the Minnesotans United team holding their anticipation in check. Hennepin County (Minneapolis) was one of the last sets of results to come in, and, even though the campaign team knew they had Minneapolis solidly behind them, nerves were still strung tight. At 1:45 am, however, the end came suddenly and brilliantly: Minnesota became the first state in the nation to defeat a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

The Minnesotans United for All Families ballot initiative campaign was groundbreaking by nearly every measure. By leveraging the best of electoral and community organizing techniques, the campaign created a highly accountable structure that also inspired deeply relational connections among voters, and achieved a massive scale by Election Day. Every part of the campaign apparatus and its strategies – from field, to advertising, communications

and fundraising – was designed to spark conversations. This was accomplished through a major investment in leadership development and continuous volunteer training, a commitment to experimenting with new strategies and tracking the effectiveness of every tactic tried, and the willingness to trust staff and volunteers to create the campaign’s story by sharing their personal journeys on the issue and drawing out voters’ own feelings and experiences.

As other campaigns tackle issues that demand significant shifts in opinions – marriage, gun control, climate change – this approach is inspirational. Minnesotans United For All Families’ internal analyses show that Minnesota’s “campaign of conversations,” grounded in its mantra of “deeply relational, highly accountable, and massive scale,” contributed a critical three- to five-point margin in the state’s historic victory for freedom to marry.

“The people who were on this campaign learned they could change the world,” said Dan Cramer of Grassroots Solutions. “Like the Wellstone campaign was for a generation of organizers, the people who had this experience together will be a gift to the state [of Minnesota]. The campaign was an organizing moment. The gift of people who will organize for change in years to come is huge.”

Update: Minnesotans United for All Families continued their groundbreaking campaign into the 2013 legislative session, pushing to legalize same-sex marriage for Minnesotans through the state legislature. Grassroots Solutions was proud to partner with Minnesotans United for all Families on the legislative campaigns as well. The bill passed and

was signed into law on May 14, 2013, making Minnesota the twelfth state in the country to legalize same-sex marriage.

Links To Additional Reading

Gay Marriage Marching Along Ahead of Supreme Court Justices’ Ruling Washington Post

Eighteen Months To History: How the Minnesota Marriage Amendment Was Defeated – Money, Passion, Allies Minnesota Public Radio

Shifting Public Opinion: Minnesota The Latest State To Recognize Same-Sex Marriage United Press International

State-by-State Breakdown Freedom to Marry

Photos courtesy of:

Minnesotans United for All Families

Terry Gydesen Photography

Anna Min – Min Enterprises

Rebecca Jean Lawrence Photography, Copyright 2012

Grassroots Solutions

For more information about this campaign or how you can ensure the freedom to marry in your state, contact:

Grassroots Solutions

MN | NY | DC | ME

dan@grassrootssolutions.com

www.grassrootssolutions.com

612.465.8566

“Conversation Campaign” Creates Path To Victory

©Copyright Grassroots Solutions 2013