My county's annual Harvest Democratic Dinner is happening this weekend. I didn't get an invite. Neither did my sister-in-law. Despite the fact that both of us contributed to multiple local candidates and the Democratic party. I hosted two fundraisers for Jon Tester, and my father is running for state Legislature. My mother-in-law got one addressed to her, and her husband. Her husband died last year and she has made multiple requests to get her address corrected, because receiving invitations to her deceased husband are painful. There are multiple people in the county with their lists, none are complete, nor shared. If you are not on the list of the person that did the mailing, you didn't get an invite. That's bad. Not only is it money that didn't get collected, it is the opportunity for a larger gathering that both energizes the party and allows for precinct organization.
Not getting an invitation doesn't mean that I won't go, or that I am offended. No, this points to a much larger problem. And I bet my county in Montana isn't unique. In Red states the county democratic party doesn't have the money to build the infrastructure to build the party. It is a chicken and egg kind of a problem. They need money to build an application database that they can maintain. They need people to provide that money. They need that tool to contact those people with that tool they don't have.
I am a web developer. I know how simple this application could be, but I want more than that. To maintain a web server with a database that is maintained 24X7 with backups, etc. Why can't we have a Democratic organizational tool equivalent of Meetup? It would be specific to campaign organizing. ActBlue addresses online contributing, but we need more than that. Now picture this:
You as a local precinct or county chairman can go and log into the National Democratic Site, and create a precinct or County Organization. Maybe the county party pays some fee to the national party for this service. They put a link on their local organization site to this tool that handles collection of personal data (similar to Act Blue), and an option to share this information with the State, and National parties. This gives the individual the option to be involved at a higher level but also gives the individual the control of their personal information. This application would also provide some kind of data exchange format to upload spreadsheets of data collected at event's like fund raisers and county fair booths, as well as existing data that individuals have. (For those of you groaning programmers, I know DATA is a four letter word. But specifying the format for a tab delimited upload or xls spreadsheet is not formidable!)
Now you have a tool that you can e-mail monthly newsletters, with opportunities to help with local campaigns, party events, candidate events, profiles on local candidates, etc. And the state and national democratic parties benefit two fold. They have a more effective ground game at the local level and a way to contact people at a state and national levels. It can also be effective for informing constituents of votes in Congress/Senate that can mobilize constituents to contact the representatives in key states for committee votes etc.
We keep talking about moving the blog arena to the grassroots ground game. In order to do that we need better tools of communication. Computers can facilitate that if we use it wisely.
(In the interest of full disclosure. I am the woman from MT in the PBS NOW with David Brancaccio. Blog the Vote)
Update: Patrick Kennedy pointed out that there is such a tool- Party Builder. Now we need to get the bastions of the Democratic party to use it!