Billionaire Reid Hoffman has it out for Donald Trump, and he's willing to spend money to beat back the White House's agenda.
The New York Times dropped a big profile of Hoffman and his efforts to fund groups that can blunt the influence of our populist commander-in-chief.
I'm a reporter now, but before I worked in the media I spent a lot of years working in social change organizations. Based on my experience there, here's what I would suggest Hoffman do with the money he wants to spend.
TL;DR - Don't fund a bunch of new organizations. Invest in existing, longstanding organizations, specifically with the goal of improving retention.*
There's a lot of strong progressive organizations out there, groups that specifically focus on building a base of people, mobilizing them at key moments and building power that can move the needle. The groups that have stood the test of time have developed an analysis about the world through years of trial, error and real practice.
For example, if Reid Hofman were to sit down with folks at the Industrial Areas Foundation he'd learn that they have a very specific way of talking about "power" and "leaders."
Many people throw words like that around without any super clear sense of what they mean, or maybe each person knows what he or she means, but that's not necessarily what the person listening thinks. If you're at the Industrial Area Foundation, though, "power" means organized money or organized people. "Leader" means a person who has followers, who can actually get a certain number of people to do things when they ask.
It's hard to overstate how powerful it is to have an organization that has a political analysis. It means they don't get paralyzed debating the right way to tackle a problem. They've got a script they know how to follow. Or, to put it in Silicon Valley terms, they have developed an algorithm, one they know can work.
Political neophytes think that all social change organizations operate the same way but do it on different issues. This could not be further from the truth. Organizations that mobilize real people on issues have "model." It's a specific approach, from organizing door-to-door to organizing leaders of existing organizations, such as churches or unions. These models have been refined over decades. We know they work. Not all the time, but they do work.
Each one can point to a lot of important victories.
A lot of these organizations share a problem, though. As movement groups, they have never been about money and have grown all too accustomed to running on fumes. This means that they work their people too hard, pay them too little, offer few benefits and see a disturbingly high turnover.
I'll never forget when I worked at ACORN, a group that often fought for raises in the Minimum Wage around the country. One day, I got shown the official ACORN memo on why it had argued in California that the organization shouldn't have to abide by the minimum wage law there that ACORN had helped get adopted.
It was disheartening, but I also understood the underlying logic. ACORN barely had the money from year to year to keep the lights on. That's just how it works in that world. One of the left's saddest ironies is how unjustly it treats is frontline soldiers.
Progressive organizations never ask for much more than what they need to just barely get by, including how much they pay their people, and funders don't argue. Funders get off on seeing their money go a long way. But it goes further than it should because people leave too soon.
The Public Interest Research Group network is a powerhouse for consumer and environmental justice across the country, but in most places its best people spend their summers running a grueling, soul-crushing canvass to raise money to keep the organization going. It's round the clock work and that work is all about doing the most discouraging kind of fundraising possible: begging from door-to-door.
That's nearly a quarter of every year burnt on fundraising work that doesn't make anyone feel good just to keep the fight going.
Mr. Hoffman, I know you are going to feel very tempted to start new groups (in fact, the story suggests you already have), but new groups waste a lot of time and energy figuring themselves out. You're not going to find a new algorithm in the speed you can come up with a new product, because you're only going to know if your product is working every couple years . By that time, the organization's founders are going to have a very strong incentive to try to convince you that whatever its executives came up with did work (even if it lost campaigns).
Believe me: I have seen all this too many times before.
Make a long bet on social change. Go to existing organizations, help them fund better pay, better hours, better equipment and better benefits. Help them turn their movement jobs into actual careers, into work that people can continue doing even without extraordinary commitment to the commonweal and with personal obligations (like family and friends).
I understand that there's doubt about whether or not these groups can really be as effective as I'm contending they are here if we see people like Donald Trump win, but they burn a lot of energy every year as they either lose good people who've learned their model or can't attract good people who can excel while using their model.
I know longer have a dog in this fight. I left social change work and I'm not going back, but I do know a thing or two about the subject. I've seen rich guys with piles of money before. Think about helping existing groups keep their people. They already know what they are about. They already have members. They have a plan. They just need more resources to do what they know how to do better.
Improving retention will go a long way.
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(all photos in this post are from WikiCommons)