So how’d we do it? Simple, we let our values guide us: 1) We put our people first, offering time off and additional pay to prepare for possible shelter in place the second week of March nytimes.com/2020/04/13/us/…
2) We invested in additional digital tools and infrastructure to complete the pivot to 💯virtual organizing and voter contact - video conferencing, org wide digital workspace, rvp tracking tools, dialer, etc. (all our organizers are already issued laptops)
3) We provided members and volunteer action teams 100s of hours of free training on digital organizing and basic virtual literacy all while closing offices a week before #SaferAtHome
4) We decided early that under no circumstance would we be asking voters to vote in person, which allowed us to focus 💯 on #VoteAtHome applications and ballot chase
5) We built a world class voter protection operation earlier than ever before in Wisconsin, staffed it fully and fought (and are still fighting!) for voters safe access to their ballot all the way to the SCOTUS
6) We held :: a lot :: of town halls, grassroots video chats, and all staff calls to keep communicating the best information we had in an incredibly scary and rapidly changing environment — we held space for folks to breathe, cry, laugh, and be their beautiful human selves.
7) We continue to care for our folks with socials, hype calls, wellness channels, zoom movement classes, and frankly a mess of small things we often forget in politics like asking what folks did to make themselves happy in the last 12 hours and sending reminders to eat
8) The weight of COVID was lighter for our team bc we already pay well above the living wage for all jobs at DPW (go look, we post our salaries 😘 wisdems.org/get-involved/j…), and we pay 💯 healthcare regardless of family size/tenure (plus other benefits like cell stipend for all!)
FINAL This election was a real life trolley problem created by the GOP in an attempt to suppress votes. Instead of asking voters to chose between their health and their vote, @WisDems built a whole new safe track and we won. This is how #WiMarchForward all the way to November.
