Oh, the dreaded phonebank.
Before I tell you another long, rambling story, I’ll skip to the end: Last night I phonebanked in support of the upcoming North Carolina teacher walkout and rally, and I had the time of my life. They had to force me off the phones! It was awesome and I loved it, and I made calls that lifted me up and buoyed me to my next chance to phonebank. I made 132 calls, and just about every single one of them was a delight.
Of course, as things go in this life, my love affair with phonebanking didn’t start out so joyful.
In 2007, when the 2008 Obama campaign started heating up here in North Carolina at the grassroots level, I’d already been doing voter registration and canvassing, but while recovering from a surgery, I attended a phonebank training session and made a few calls. Gah, I hated phonebanking. With a passion that burned with the heat of a thousand fiery suns.
One evening at a community organizing meeting to establish a local Obama HQ in my city, the regional field manager asked the crowd (and it was a crowd, let me tell you!), “How many of you have had phonebank training?” I was sitting in the front row and figured just about everyone behind me was raising their hand, because those training sessions were full. Right? Wouldn’t you raise your hand?
Well, duh. Smart people don’t ever raise their hands to such questions, because they know how this flowchart works: If YES to training, then you are trained. And in the world of campaign volunteering, if YES to trained, then you’re an expert. If YES to expert, then you’re in charge of the entire known and unknown multiverses of phonebanking.
Oh, those liars seated behind me!! So many of them attended very same training session!! But I was the only one who raised my hand. Duh.
And as quickly as Gilligan could talk the Skipper into donning a coconut bra and dancing the hula for The Professor’s birthday party, I was a phonebank captain.
But, O Lord, did I have to grit my teeth through making those calls. Ugh. One evening as we were tallying activities, our field organizer mentioned that my phonebanking teams weren’t hitting their targets. “I’m a friggin’ volunteer!” I screeched at him. “With volunteers, you only get 60% of non-suckage!”
Which is how we ended up with a daily reminder on our Cary HQ wall of the number of days to Election Day and its cryptic companion number, which was a percentage. Just a percentage, no inkling of its significance. Only a few of us knew that the 56%, 96%, 83% signs were indicators of how close to 100% our field organizer was grading me each day. LOL
Oh, c’mon. How could I not love that challenge???? And, as such things go, I learned to not only grit my teeth through the phonebank but to embrace it and make it my own.
Yup, you read that right: “For being able to poke small children with a plastic for into making calls.” Totally did that, admit it, feel proud of it.
I’ve been sick lately and spending too much time in bed reading Twitter and whining about how overwhelming this political crap is. Then I remembered something I’d always gently shouted at our Obama for America phonebankers: “If you have time to whine about the news, you have time to make some phone calls!”
Leaving the house to phonebank about the teacher walkout and rally was the best decision I’ve made in a long time.
Dolores wasn’t home, but I called her number three times just to listen to her voicemail message (you have to imagine these words in the sweetest Southern accent you’ve ever heard): “I have a biiiiiiiiiiiig smile on my face, because I get to hear your voice and call you back. So please leave me that message.” I could actually hear the smile on her face! We weren’t leaving messages last night, but after I rang her phone three times, I had to leave one thanking her for that voicemail greeting. (Sorry for the extra ringy-dingies, Dolores, but … that greeting!!) Josette wants to attend the rally, but she had a minor car accident in March and has physical therapy for her knee that day. We talked a little about how frustrating it can be to recover from something we think is minor, that so often the finish line is moved in our marathons. “It’s like teachers,” she said. “We keep believing them that this is a minor setback, that next year the legislature and county commissioners will fund our schools and classrooms better, we just have to wait our turn and keep working ourselves to the bone for our kids. But it’s always next year, then next year, then next year.” I arranged a ride and a wheelchair for Josette so she can attend the afternoon portion of the rally and not wear herself out in the expected crowd of tens of thousands. Vernon’s wife Cotton (Constance, but she goes by her childhood nickname) answered the phone and explained that Vernon passed away in April. He would be disappointed to miss the teachers’ march, she said, because both husband and wife were lifelong public school teachers and always wondered when North Carolina would sit up and pay attention to how the defunding of public schools has hurt students and our school systems. Teachers, she said, didn’t expect much compensation, but now they’re actually taking away from teacher paychecks while making life so much harder for students and their families that teachers are paying more out of pocket for pencils, Kleenex, jackets for cold students …. Cotton said that of course she’d be there on Wednesday, and we both agreed we would carry signs with Vernon’s name on them. James is one of the only male teachers at his elementary school. He’s concerned that so many “economically comfortable” families are taking advantage of recent state funding support for private/charter schools that it’s changing the nature of each classroom. Many kindergartners at his school, for instance, mastered only 10-20 of the 41 Kindergarten Initial Assessment skills and start out their school years getting caught up on such things as being able to tell a story while having a conversation, create a pattern with manipulatives of varying size and shape, catching and throwing a ball, etc. With school resources stretched beyond limits and class sizes increased while funding for classroom teacher assistants has been all but eliminated from the state budget, it’s tough (if not impossible) to help those at-risk students catch up to their peers. He is worried that these students will become discouraged and quit school altogether at some point. This is a trend that occurs most often with boys, and James is wondering how we can ever turn that trend around. Kathryn’s daughter is one of my neighbors!! Turns out we both live on the same street, in between two elementary schools and two churches. Kathryn says her daughter would be gravely disappointed if they didn’t march together on Wednesday, and that she and her daughter already have four others coming with them to Raleigh in Kathryn’s van.I could go on (and far too often do), but … whoa … it was an incredibly uplifting couple of hours! Far better than being at home reading the news and worrying and fretting and anxiety-ing.
Maybe it’s true that volunteers are only ever 60% of perfect, or maybe in my snippy hyperbole, I understated and the true figure is a bit higher. But I doubt it. Because when you call people on behalf of a cause that matters to you and the folks on the other end of the line, you end your volunteer shift a better person. You can tally the numbers you dialed and the number of people you spoke with, remove disconnected or wrong numbers from the burden of aaaaaall next people who call into that list, and give your field organizer some good data she can be proud of. You can also console someone who’s lost a dear companion, make it possible for a teacher with a knee injury to attend a rally that matters so much to her and her students, talk with a teacher who doesn’t care that budget cuts hurt her paycheck but cries at how those cuts hurt her students, learn more about how students who start their school careers with academic risks need and deserve their community’s support to catch them up and help them love to learn, and hear a voicemail greeting that has you smiling even 24 hours later while you type a blog diary.
If you’ve got a little time to make some phone calls, even just half an hour, sign up RIGHT NOW to do that. If you need me to be Gilligan to your Skipper and pep-talk you into dancing, just let me know.
Ugh. Phonebanking, right? Nah. The frustration of making those REFUSED calls is far outweighed by the joy of the connections we make.