Breaking through echo chambers with digital organizing
Samantha Steelman on integrating effective storytelling across campaign functions
Welcome to Campaigner, a weekly newsletter exploring the tactics that drive winning political campaigns and highlighting the players pushing the buttons. Produced by Arena & FWIW Media.
Political campaigns, especially large ones, too often operate with teams that are siloed by different functions. Rigidly separating teams like fundraising, organizing, and digital can have unintended consequences for a campaign’s ability to reach voters with one cohesive message. In this week’s Campaigner, we spoke with Samantha Steelman, co-founder of Triptych Strategies, who shares her take on why campaigns should do things differently - especially when it comes to breaking through echo chambers and integrating story-telling into everything that they do in order to better reach audiences online.
Q&A with Samantha Steelman on breaking through echo chambers with digital organizing
Campaigner: Thanks for taking the time! Just briefly, how did you get your start in politics & campaigns?
Samantha Steelman: I begged my parents to take me to my first phone bank when I was 13 years old, and honestly, I feel like I never left that phone bank. I was just so into it. I really enjoyed talking to voters and hearing about other people's stories and helping them realize how their story connected to policy. That is really the heart of what I care about. I didn't necessarily see organizing as a career track, which is wild to think about now. I just thought that this was a fun thing that I did on the side. So while I was in college studying my other passion of art and animation, I was also volunteering on campaigns and I got my first paid political gig in 2006. That sort of just created this path for me where I realized, wow, talking to voters all day and every day, and being able to connect stories to policies - that you can actually do that for a living. Ultimately I got disheartened by seeing how connecting stories to policy just isn't really happening or second nature on campaigns. That brought me to founding Triptych, and making sure that we are able to connect those dots a little bit better.
Campaigner: We’re told you’re building a really unique combination of storytelling and organizing - can you tell me about what you're working on with Triptych, and why there's a need for it in this space?
Steelman: Sure! We founded Triptych in the summer of 2020, sort of in response to what we were seeing at the time. Obviously, the pandemic was hitting. My business partner and I met working on a campaign during the presidential primary that year.
Once the campaign was over we were trying to figure out what the heck we were gonna do next. Both of us kept having these conversations with each other about how we didn't want to stop what we were doing on that campaign, finding ways to tell stories and use those stories as organizing tools to bring people into the fold.
One thing led to another where we decided, you know what, let's just give this a try. Let's try to figure out if we could make this into a thing so we created Triptych. I'm really happy we did because rather quickly we realized just how much the space was in need of a digital shop that's truly focused on storytelling and organizing, and how to weave those things together to help campaigns break out of the molds of these cookie-cutter programs. For example many traditional programs are just so focused on these clickbait emails that really focus on the short term instead of the long term. What we try to do is to help campaigns and organizations break out of that headspace and really focus on the long term.
Even if you are in a campaign where it's a contested primary, the work that you do now can have a ripple effect for cycles down the road. Why not do the job well? Our theory of the case is if you do the job well, with a focus on the long term, the short term will follow. And honestly, we are seeing that in multiple areas. For example, I talk to my friends that are in the digital fundraising space, and everyone mentions how hard it is to raise money online right now. But at Triptych, we're finding the opposite. We're finding that audiences are engaging more and our engagement rates are increasing as we start with clients. We're finding that we are bringing in new folks that have been on a list, waiting to be engaged in the right way. All of a sudden they're becoming new donors.
We hope our approach will have a ripple effect, but right now we're just trying to do our jobs well and really be focused on the “end user” - the voter - and making sure that campaigns are serving them well.
Campaigner: Can you give me an example or what it looks like to integrate effective storytelling into an organizing program or storytelling into a fundraising program, whether that's something that you did on [Pete for America] or something that you're doing now?
Samantha Steelman: I think that's something that we did really effectively on Pete [Buttigieg]'s presidential campaign, and honestly the reason why my cofounder, Carrie Gooch, and I created Triptych. Carrie was running the video department and I was in the organizing shop with Greta Carnes. Carrie, myself, and others were communicating and collaborating behind the scenes. We weren't asked to do it, but we saw how content can push organizing and organizing can push content. Through us back-channeling together on that campaign, we were able to break down silos between content and organizing that typically exist.
Campaigns often just have fundraising teams focusing on fundraising, organizing teams focusing on organizing, digital teams focusing on digital, and so on. But what that does is creates an environment where you're leaving the end-user, or the voter, confused and disconnected.
In organizing, you are taught early on that you take someone on a ladder of engagement, and if someone says no to the first “ask,” you layer that ask and you go to the next thing. I always thought that it was odd that we wouldn't always do that on campaigns. If I have someone coming in the door that I'm talking to with an organizing apparatus, but they don't have the time to organize, but they have resources, why am I not layering in a fundraising ask? If it's somebody who may be introverted with a following that builds community online, why am I giving them metrics that are just door knocking and phone banking? Instead, I should be tailoring my approach to be able to meet that voter or supporter where they are.
At the end of the day, the more people we bring into the fold and the more we meet people where they are the better off our campaigns are gonna be and the better we will serve the communities we are looking to represent.
Campaigner: You’ve alluded to how folks are often doing things traditionally or in a cookie-cutter way. Heading into this year’s midterms, how specifically do you think campaigns should be getting better at organizing your communities online?
Samantha Steelman: That's a great question. You know, going back to what I've said before: digital shouldn't be siloed. Also, organizing is organizing. We need to stop putting that additional word to organizing - either digital, relational, distributed, traditional - no one understands what that means when it comes to everyday voters - organizing is organizing. If you're having a conversation either online, at a door, on a phone, at an event, at a fundraiser… that is organizing. Every single time your candidate is doing call time, in essence, that is organizing. Yes, the end goal is to raise money, but they're also using that opportunity to be able to persuade somebody to give.
What I think we really need to do better is stop thinking about things as: how do I build better community online, or how do I build better community on the ground, and actually just look at how do you build better community. What do we need to do to lower the barrier of entry for a volunteer on a campaign or provide opportunities for voters to see themselves in the campaign?
Something that we really focus on with our clients at Triptych is how do you teach the end user to have a conversation about politics? We grew up in a society where we're taught from an early age that you don't talk about two things: religion and politics. And if that's the case, no wonder we're having a hard time building volunteer bases because we are talking to them in a vocabulary that they may not fully understand or feel confident enough to replicate.
We have to lower the barrier to entry completely to be able to have these conversations and help the voter realize that just simply having a conversation or mentioning a candidate or being online and sharing content from the campaign, just hitting that retweet button, is organizing! We should applaud when someone just does a retweet. We should applaud it because when you applaud it and make them feel good about taking that first step, they're more likely to do the next one. And then the next one, and then the next one – you can continue to bring them up that ladder of engagement.
This means campaigns have to shift their focus and really look at content as building community, building a story, being able to have a cohesive thread of a narrative on online spaces, through the use of static images, video, virtual storytelling, and doing it in a way where it's really engaging and providing that toolkit to supporters to be able to organize their own spaces.
When it comes to organizing in general, we know relational works. We know that the messenger matters. So why in the heck are we building these bloated, old-school organizing programs that are not training supporters to be leaders, build community, and organize for themselves? We already know that that's most effective, so we need to build organizing programs that are grounded in leadership development that empower our volunteers to actually become leaders and organize!
Campaigner: You just reminded me of our conversation with your former colleague Stefan Smith who talked about using things like “digital hugs” to build online community on the Pete campaign.
Samantha Steelman: Yeah. It's really important. Those “digital hugs” go such a long way. Not to sound like Pete - but there's a crisis of belonging within this country. So if we do all that we can as Democrats to give people that sense of belonging, all of a sudden supporters feel seen and heard. They begin building friend groups and community surrounding political activities and shared values. And the best part – this builds an infrastructure that outlives an election cycle and is constantly bringing new people into the fold.
Campaigner: Alright last question: what's something that doesn't get enough attention in Democratic politics or the campaign space that you think should?
I think it’s the echo chamber that we all exist in as political operatives. No matter how hard we try, we are bound to be out of touch with how politics and the world are viewed by most voters. Far too often, we're not breaking that dynamic by creating effective feedback loops with the community, as well as undervaluing the role of organizing. We have these organizing programs that are talking to voters every single day. We’re getting back reports from organizing on the ground. Shouldn’t that have a space at the strategy table and help inform our work and ultimately break our political operative echo chamber? Having that feedback at those decision-making tables is incredibly important.
One other thing that needs more attention: effective management training. A lot of people in political spaces grow up in messy political spaces. We’re creating a culture where toxicity is able to grow and evolve, and so many of us are getting burnt out because of it. We need effective management training for campaigns, which also means a shift in party committee focus to help professionalize the industry.
Campaigner: Political campaigns are often defined by their messiness - staffers bragging about staying up all night to do data entry or content production or whatever…
Samantha Steelman: It shouldn't be! We’re trying hard to break that within the culture we're building at Triptych. It's gonna take all of us being better and being more intentional with our boundaries and holding people accountable within this space. We can’t allow the toxic work culture where people equate success with toxic behaviors or approaches like bragging about staying up all night. All we're gonna do is continue to burn out people that get into this values-driven work for a reason.
Honestly, if we're treating ourselves and our peers this way, imagine what the voter is feeling. Are they really gonna trust you or politics? No. We have to treat everybody better and build a culture where all — supporter or staff — can feel seen and heard within this space.
Arena Highlights:
Samantha talks about how important good management is on campaigns. Apply to Arena Academy 201 Online by March 7 (next Monday) to level up your management skills. Apply today>>
That’s it for Campaigner this week! If you enjoyed reading this issue, give it a share on the socials! 🙏