Brad Schenck is the digital director for the Rainforest Action Network, and he previously spearheaded digital strategy at Organizing for Action, the Obama 2012 campaign, and Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration Committee. He’s been a leading figure when it comes to digital campaigns for NGOs, political campaigns, and nonprofits, and his teams have used Sprout Social to accomplish their objectives.
We spoke with him about how different kinds of not-for-profit and activism organizations have different sorts of needs, what makes for a smooth-running organization, and how Sprout Social helped make his job easier.
Rallying Around a Date
When he transitioned from a campaign and an inauguration — both big events with set end dates — to ongoing advocacy in Organizing for Action, the transition was more challenging than some might think.
“In the campaign world, your dates and deadlines are pretty prescribed to you by the calendar,” he says. “There are voter registration deadlines, there are end of quarter deadlines, there’s election day. There’s a termination point to your actual organization’s existence.”
Having that event to rally around remained important even after the campaign. “You have to set that date. There will be a few dates on the calendar that make sense, but mostly you have to be forward-thinking enough to create dates. You have to create moments… It’s really important that everyone in the organization believe in the date as the most important thing the organization is doing that day. The supporters will never feel it unless everyone’s really together and unified.”
Managing Large Networks With Sprout Social
When he worked on the Obama campaign and later Organizing for Action, he said the scale of the organizations was vast, and that presented some unique problems. “One of the very unknown things about the campaign was that we had a pretty robust digital presence for all 50 states, …read more
Source: Sprout Social