Training and Communication for Legislative District Democrats

Training

Effective organizations train their members. They provide a bootcamp, specific training events, educational materials and newsletters, and trainers or mentors. Does your legislative district offer any of these. If not, appoint a training officer (backed by an education committee), prepare and disseminate materials, schedule regular or specific training events. Especially for new members, training demonstrates that you take your mission and activities seriously. More important, you accomplish much more when your members are trained and effective. At least 15 minutes at each regular meeting might well be directed to training. Another 30 minutes might be devoted to sharing thoughts concerning basic values (as our 5^th LD is doing) and priorities.

Assuming you have created plans which include various activities, training is needed for most of these activities and may well begin when the planning occurs. Planning workshops should include brief training lectures before each of the Vision, Obstacles, Strategies and Tactics sections. These should then be followed by a Training Section and a Reflective Celebration for completing the work.

Important general training topics include (1)how to plan, (2) how to organize activities, (2) how to lead, and (3) how to work cooperatively. Other topics may include (4) membership recruitment, motivation and training; (5) precinct organizing (including especially canvassing); (6) fund and resource raising; (7) event planning; (8) database management; (9) candidate recruitment and training; (10) outreach collaboration with democratic party and other political groups, and more depending upon your activities.

Formal training may include lectures (even 3 minute short courses), seminars in which participants jointly study papers or audio-video presentations, and role playing. Less formally, every member could be assigned a mentor who is responsible for assisting that member’s success. As we all have experienced, training makes an enormous difference in motivation, skill and effective performance.

Communication

Regular communication with the most politically interested of the identified likely Democratic voters is an excellent way to train and motivate them to become active. They should be asked for their email addresses so they can receive a regular (monthly or even bi-monthly) newsletter to train and motivate them to become more active. In our 12 Lake Hills precincts, 500 (30% of our 1700) identified likely Democratic voters receive our weekly email newsletter. For a typical legislative district, the newsletter might be sent to as many as 7500 subscribers, if 2500 likely Democratic voters have been identified.

The LD newsletter (and website) should contain basic information about our values and history, how to apply our values to situations to derive priorities and policies, and our political strategies. It should provide commentaries which reframe erroneous conventional wisdom and provide important information not provided by our commercial media. It should present the LD’s objectives, achievements, activities (including a calendar of events), and opportunities for involvement.