Outreach Strategy

For our chapter to succeed in making a meaningful contribution to local politics, a strong base of supporters, volunteers, and organizers is absolutely essential. That’s for us to affect local politics, much less state policies which preempt any municipal legislation seeking to pass a progressive income tax, reduce dependency on fossil fuels, or set a higher minimum wage. These are grounds on which we need to be prepared to fight, and the biggest lift for that preparation is to drive membership and engagement which super-charge all of our political efforts.

The Groundwork Slate has worked to build capacity towards this end over the past year, and we aim to continue that effort in the next year. As a part of this strategy, we want to keep in mind four primary objectives.

Improve DSAs representation of the Cincinnati multiracial working class. The simple fact of the matter is that DSA as a national organization is primarily made up of white people. Our chapter is no different, which is particularly bad in Cincinnati where the majority of residents are non-white! There is no future of success in the city if we aren’t representative of the whole population, and there are no shortcuts. It is imperative that we act now to resolve this misalignment so that we are not surprised in the future when the black people we have chosen not to engage aren’t excited to join our project.

Lay the groundwork for future electoral wins. Strategically, as our chapter grows and capacity increases, we need to run candidates for office. When we run, we want to win. To do this, we need to find communities with favorable political terrain, recruit people embedded in those communities, and develop leaders who we trust and are best poised to fight for an election.

Increased collaboration with membership of local labor organizations. The socialist project is to build working class power, and organized labor is essential to class formation. As our chapter grows, we want to build strong relationships with labor organizations in and around Cincinnati, with members dual-carding between their labor union and DSA. Given this, the chapter must prioritize creating inroads with local labor formations through a variety of tactics. Both personal relationships with active union members and strategic partnerships in our outward-facing campaigns are excellent opportunities for collaboration and cross-pollination. 

What We’ve Done

To these ends, the Groundwork Slate has built up the necessary infrastructure for organized new member onboarding. Since November, we have moved more than thirty-five new and prospective members through one on one meetings where we help connect them to working groups and committees they can engage with. Members of the slate have also organized several public DSA 101 events as a way for new and prospective members to learn about DSA’s values, structures, and priorities.

Our slate has also been instrumental in the development of resources that help the chapter succeed by educating and engaging new members. We created the new member handbook that provides an excellent starting point for people to learn about our chapter’s operations, and we fought to get our website updated. The new home page which embeds Action Network links has proven to dramatically increase the number of RSVPs we receive for events, and most of those people show up.

Finally, our slate’s emphasis on electoral work for the No on 2 campaign in Kentucky was extremely successful not only in its canvassing objectives, but in bringing in new members while activating previously disengaged members. Henry and Mike, both running for at-large on this slate, became involved in the chapter through electoral work, and they have kept their enthusiasm for that work while also spending time in the communications committee. Mike has begun working with the Green New Deal Campaign Commission (GNDCC) and is aiming to create a local committee towards that end. Henry has focused on outreach and recruitment within communications, and has helped to organize the flyering effort which will begin this week to promote turnout for the January 18th People’s March. Other new or previously disengaged members Sophia and Danielle were activated by the electoral campaign and have since been plugged into our labor working group and the unionization effort at KCVG.

What next?

Moving forward, our slate seeks to continue building on our success in creating infrastructure to engage and onboard new members with a cohesive plan to create a steady stream of people moving through that pipeline while also preparing ourselves for the possibility of future electoral campaigns in areas where we see opportunity. In this plan, we want to recognize that our chapter isn’t representative of Cincinnati’s multiracial working class, and that any long term strategy to achieve socialist victories in our city must include the support, insight, and leadership of black communities.

To that end, our slate has set the goal of bringing sixty new members into the fold throughout this year. We hope to reach that goal with a multi-front recruitment effort, distributing flyers, tabling, planning events, and identifying local leaders within Mt. Healthy, Bond Hill, and Norwood. These locations were selected because we see all of them as opportunities for future electoral campaigns. Mt. Healthy is heavily blue, but the Democrats don’t run enough seats to fill the city council. Bond Hill is home to state representative Sedrick Denson, who missed nearly a third of all voting sessions in his previous term, and has already missed the first of his new one. He ran unopposed in the Democratic primary this year. Norwood is the only city in the area where Bernie Sanders received more votes than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. In addition to being ripe for future electoral campaigns, Mt. Healthy and Bond Hill are both communities with large black populations who we can make an intentional part of our outreach strategy.

We will also distribute flyers, table, and recruit at technical colleges. These colleges are a unique opportunity for us to reach young people training for the professions which we can message to very strongly about their material conditions. Additionally, many of these same people will later join unions which we can use them to connect with. We can also build membership within local labor organizations by helping to organize them with a local Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC).

Another piece of our strategy is to continue making improvements to the infrastructure we’ve already put in place. As we’ve seen embedding Action Network links on our website to be an effective and low-hanging way to increase turnout, our slate would like to continue updating the website by adding pages for committee and working group details, and replacing the currently under-utilized public calendar embedded committee and working activities. This plan would include training co-chairs of chapter bodies to use Action Network for planning.

We would also like to formalize and improve some of the processes we’ve constructed for new members. Discord on-boarding has proven an unnecessary and burdensome hurdle for people to get engaged with what is happening in the chapter. Our slate would like to restructure that process and create an officer role within the communications committee to tackle its administration. The slate also plans to continue regularly performing DSA 101s as a component of the communications committee’s responsibilities, while expanding into different events like the Socialism 101 we held.

And finally, our slate will continue activating new people into membership by pursuing actions similar in spirit to the canvassing of the No on 2 electoral campaign. It is our belief that these activities were prime ground for recruiting new members because they had clear demands, tactics, and strategy. For most people looking to participate in political work those are the characteristics they are looking for, and we want to make use of that fact to drive people into the organization.