In many ways, this is an excellent private citizen solution to common collective action problems; such as clean air and water advocacy, as well as other general environmental externalities. While people tend to have an expectation that the air they breath and the water they drink is clean, this preference is often so general that there is no specific advocate for the issues itself. Non-profits are designed to represent these kind of generalized preferences, and through the canvassing model they can literally give people an opportunity to express their preferences by donating. Canvassers are, in effect, asking people to 'purchase' whatever policy being advocated. This is important becasue, although technically separate organizations, MassPIRG share significant infrastructure and personnel with a group called The Fund for the Public Interest, or 'The Fund' for brevity. This organization describes itself as a creator of "public support needed to overcome powerful special interest opposition," by "train[ing] our staff to raise money, recruit members and do grassroots political work on behalf of more than 50 progressive organizations" (Fund, main page). As we will later see, much of MassPIRG's recruitment tactics, and model overall is reflected by The Fund itself.
The reason why canvass system is so influential on MassPIRG's recruitment tactics is because it is so effective. For non-profits that wish to run lobby-specific political campaigns, canvassing offers three distinct advantages. First, it maximizes donation revenue, it casts the widest possible next for organizational membership and has proven to be highly flexibility, both in terms of location and personnel.
The first reason why MassPIRG, and similar groups employ a canvass is financial. For any non-profit, securing both a steady and adequate stream of income is easily a top consideration. One of the realities of interest politics is that the most moneyed party often prevails. As these organizations attempt to influence state, federal, and even international policies, they are increasingly being met to bigger and better funded oppositions. “[Greenpeace's] challenge is how can we be as sophisticated globally as Ford Motor Company,” or “General Electric or Exxon Mobil,” ” explains a former director Joe Passacantodo, (Fisher 74). Often, victory or defeat on an issue will boil down to which group was able out spend the other. What results from this is a kind of political auction, where political spending is proportional to policy influence. In such a climate, there is enormous pressure on non-profit organizations like MassPIRG to raise as much money as possible. Canvassing allows them to do that, by casting the widest possible net by, literally, going to every door soliciting donations.
This brings us to the second advantage the canvass offers. It maximizes potential membership in the same way it maximizes donation revenue; canvassing casts the widest recruitment net possible by attempting to contact every single resident in a given area. This kind of meticulous self-promotion ensures a degree of name recognition and interest. By literally talking to everyone you can, everyone is informed and given a chance to join.
The final advantage non-profits enjoy with a canvass model is flexibility, both location and personnel. The basic format of the Canvass Model is an office run by two or three salaried full-time employees, who recruit, train and direct canvassers. The canvassers themselves are often walk-ins with little to no experience in politics or organizing. As Dana Fisher explains, canvassers are trained and sent to canvass the same day they are hired, as the training itself consists of simply memorizing a pre-written speech of 2 to 3 minutes, and a short tutorial on how to full out donation and tracking paperwork. Standard in the industry is a two or three day probationary period, where if the canvasser does not reach a day's quota, they are let go.
This template allows for a canvass office to be open virtually anywhere, anytime. In more rural regions, bike and camp-canvassing tactics have yielded results. Dense, urban areas use the street canvassing tactic, where canvassers simply stand in a spot and solicit pedestrians. This flexibility allows non-profit's to tap into multiple revenue streams, and allows it to broaden their membership base. For both the reasons of profitability and portability, the Canvass Model of organizing has become ubiquitous among high profile progressive political groups, such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the Democratic National Committee.
However, despite these advantages, organizing a membership base through the canvass has failed to emerge as a panacea for these (and countless other) lobby-focused non-profits. Within the various critiques of the canvassing organizational model, two major claims emerge. First, the donation/membership method of organizing fails to create horizontal bonds between members, a necessary element of any social change movement. Second, the model creates a professionalization of activism that has numerous perverse if unintended consequences.
The first criticisms of the Canvass Model argues that the basic criterion for organization membership – making a donation – fails to generate a robust horizontal bond between the groups members. Meaningful campaigns for social change, critics insist, must be built on a foundation of strong interpersonal bonds between group members. The argument alleges that soliciting for donations with paid canvassers fails to build these kind of horizontal bonds between group members, since the act of donating to a stranger at your door, and occasionally reading a newsletter or e-mail about the groups activities, fail to strengthen, or even create, any kind of interpersonal bond. Without these connections, groups have now foundation to motivate it's membership into individual action. Author Dana Fisher describes the problem:
The People's Project[footnote 1] was using the canvass to accumulate political clout in the form of postcards to bolster its lobbying efforts on their clean water campaign. Instead of educating the public about ways to pressure their political representative personally, or actually cleaning up the polluted river - both of which are difficult, long-term projects - the organization identified how much money and how many names it needed to work the political system and then paid canvassers to achieve these instrumental goals” (34)
Instead of engaging their members with work, educating them on issues or organizing them for demonstrations, the paid Canvass Model allows donors to defers these physical acts of issue advocacy to paid professionals. Since the canvassing model simply soliciting people for donations, and then uses those donations to finance professional advocates, groups like Fisher's People's Project are minimizing the groups investments in its members, and in turn many of the People's Project's members maintain a low commitment to the organization. Running a canvass based campaign, thus enables those who donate to effectively outsource their political advocacy; as their donation pays for the professional advocate to argue on their behalf.
This, at face value, shouldn't strike the reader as such a lamentable state of affairs. Many, if not most people lack the time, expertise or opportunities to effectively lobby their representatives. Organizations like the People's Project give these people a chance to both express and assist the advocacy of their preferred policy goals. However, this has a damaging unintended consequence. “Paying canvassers to go door to door ensures that locals are contacted,” Fisher argues, “but it does not engage the local institutions of civil-society that have enduring roots in the communities” (96).
Since canvassed members are not mobilized, groups like the People's Project create no opportunities for their members to meet and make interpersonal ties. These observations on the lack interpersonal exchange, Fisher explains:
“...are consistent with the findings of scholars such as Robert Putnam, who concluded that the 'explosive growth in interest groups represented in Washington … is not really a counterexample to the supposed decline in social connectedness because they are not really associations in which members meet one another'” (71 emphasis mine)
This is known as weak-tie organizing; the process of constructing a large network of weakly bonded members. It is important to note that no one is arguing that creating a weak-tie network is, a priori, a flawed way to base an political organization's membership. In some ways, weakly-tied political networks offer an advantage. By appealing to a broader section of people, groups have access to a larger contributor base. The caveat with weak-tie organizing is that explains sociologist Malcolm Gladwell, is that while tenuous, associative ties can be “our greatest source of new ideas and information,” these “weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism” (par 15). The reason for this, he explains, is that weak associational ties “doesn't require you to confront socially entrenched norms and practices.” (par 16). Making commitments, especially to abstract things like organizations and political ideas, is a two-way street. Asking less of those who join, those who join expect less from the campaign.
The second major critique of the canvass-based organizational model shifts the focus, by criticizing effect canvassing has on the canvassers and directors themselves. Critics allege that the proliferation of the professional and regimented canvassing model has serious negative consequence that offset whatever fund raising advantage the template might provide. [Professionalized] organizations accomplish quite a bit and have been very effective at reaching some of their goals,” admits activist Cynthia Kaufman, but “rarely to those those hired canvassers become deeply committed to a lifelong involvement in social transformation. For a movement to grow, people's commitment's to it have to grow” (270). The problem, Dana Fisher diagnoses, is that the “top-down directives,” endemic to the canvass-model, “are a central components of the scripted and institutionalized setting of the canvass office (29).
This kind of centralized, bureaucratized model of social activism is completely repudiated by the New Left and their values of prefigurative politics and participatory democracy. Our next model, the Relational template, is much more compatible with these values.
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