Grassroots Manual

Organizing Berning Manhattan

Compiled by Jacob Weinstein, an organizer of BERNing Manhattan. Notes, commentary, assistance, and other
materials used here from Reddit /u/miskellaneousness (organizer of BERNing Manhattan), Ella Ryan (organizer
with Team Bernie NY), Tascha Van Auken (organizer with Brooklyn for Bernie), Reddit /u/rcas (organizer of
BERNing Manhattan). Credit to Christien Bernier for kickstarting BERNing Manhattan in the first place!

Introduction
Hello, Bernie Sanders supporters out there! This is New York for Sanders. We
coordinated a very successful event called BERNing Manhattan. The concept was simple
get volunteers at as many subway stations as possible in Manhattan to hand out
flyers. The event took place on September 5, 2015, from 12 PM to 4 PM. Wed like to
share how we did it so that you can do it in your own city. You dont need a subway
system to do it - just some volunteers and street corners, plus whatever money is needed
for flyers.

1. Create a local Slack group for organizing.

Slack

was an
invaluable tool for this event. We exchanged thousands of
messages between a dozen or so people leading up to the event
regarding getting flyers ready, social media promotion, etc. It
would have been an absolute mess to do all of that via email.
(Were not affiliated with the Slack company in any way!)
2. Set a date.
The date you set should be at least 4 weeks (or more!)
away. This will give you time to adequately promote and prepare
for the event.
3. Come up with locations.
For BERNing Manhattan, we set out with
an ambitious goal: place volunteers at all ~150 subway stations in
Manhattan.
We ended up getting folks to 84 stations
. While
covering 84 stations ensured that our event had incredible reach,
it also meant our teams of volunteers were highly dispersed,
making things like distributing flyers to teams difficult. For future
events, we recommend choosing fewer locations and sending
larger groups to these locations and then breaking into small
teams and dispersing from there. For example, instead of sending
3 people to 100 locations, send 30 people to 10 locations and have
them disperse from there. This serves a number of purposes:
a. It makes flyer distribution easier. Instead of getting flyers to 100 locations,
you only have to get them to 10.
b. It allows volunteers to interact with each other and see how many other
folks are coming out!
c. Having larger groups makes for great media exposure!
d. Volunteer leaders at each location can give a very short seminar on flyering
and outreach for new volunteers.

4. Contact /u/rcas (rapi@bernie2016events.org) to have

a map
created
.
Its very important that this step be complete
before
you
start promoting the event on Facebook and the
berniesanders.com/events site. With BERNing Manhattan, we have
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600+ Facebook RSVPs for the event by the time we got the map set
up. It was difficult to get these RSVPs to then sign up through the
map, so its best to get the map prepared beforehand and then
have it prominently displayed when you create a Facebook event
and
an event on berniesanders.com
.
5. Work with Bernie2016Events.org to create a signup form.
When people click on Canvas Here on the map, they will be
redirected to a Google Form that will allow them to enter their
contact information. This is very important in that having their
phone number and email is much more valuable for mobilizing
volunteers for the event than simply having them signed up to
attend on Facebook. Here are a couple important things to include
on the form:
a. Ask if they are okay to have their information added to a local grassroots
volunteer mailing list/database/whatever you have in your area. If this
event gets hundreds of signup, having this option on the form can
substantially beef up local volunteer efforts.
b. If you are doing smaller teams, ask if they are okay with their contact
information being shared with other members of the team to make for
more fluid coordination on the day of the event. This will allow you to send
emails out a few days before the event with contact info of the folks they
will be working with so they can coordinate flyer pickup, exact meeting
location, last minute details, etc.

6. Create a Facebook event.

Once youve created your Facebook
event with a signup map, begin sharing it! Post it on your local
Sanders for President subreddit, the national subreddit, share
with friends, families, etc. Make sure that you absolutely have the
signup map pinned to the top of the event page and let everyone
know that they should sign up via the map ASAP so they can
coordinate who is going where.
7. Create an event on the official campaign website
.
There are
many folks who are not looking for events on Facebook, but who

are signing up for events via the campaigns official site. Make sure
you create an event on this page with all necessary information
and be sure to include a bolded link to the signup map in the
event description.
8. Find someone to design a flyer.
You can find someone locally, or
reach out on reddit or other forums to have a flyer designed. Its
great to design a state specific flyer so that you can include all
local deadlines.
Heres the one
that was designed for the New York
event. We also designed and printed 5,000 of the Spanish ones!
Design the flyer early on so you can post it on the Facebook and
other event pages so that people can print on their own, and so
that you can get it to a printing shop very early to avoid problems
and paying for rush printing. Call local businesses/unions about
getting reduced price or free printing for the event. Consider
starting with 30 flyers an hour per volunteer, but allow more for
high-traffic areas (and if your event encompasses rush hour,
adjust for that too). Note: if you raise or spend over $250, you
should look into filing
FEC Form 5
.
9. Develop a social media presence for the event.
We got a late
jump with this for BERNing Manhattan, and we still had a good
number of folks Tweeting pictures to the hashtag #BERNingMan. If
you come up with and promote a hashtag early on, youll be able
to generate more excitement for the event and get more great
pictures! In addition social media is a great way for volunteers to
feedback on their experience and a way to get a feel for the
success of the event on the day.
10. Stay in contact with volunteers in the leadup to the event.
Stay active on Facebook, answer any questions that volunteers
might have, and promote the social media presence of the event.
Also sign up for an email service to send reminders/updates about
the event via email. We used a free MailChimp account. Since mass
emails can end up in the spam or promotions folders of peoples
email accounts, share with them the email address you will be
sending from so that they can add it to their contact list. Depending
on the number of volunteers you have flyering and your groups
bandwidth, individual phone calls, emails, texts to volunteers the
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day or two before the event will great improve turnout. If you have
a volunteer or two who like making phone calls, this is the job for
them! Reminder calls are the easiest and best kind - and worth
every minute.
11. Create a guide for participating in the event.
For BERNing
Manhattan, we came out with
this pretty simple guide
. The guide
should let people know what to do and expect on the day of the
event.
12. Come up with a game plan for distributing flyers.
Get the
flyers early on. If you are having an event with fewer locations,
give a few thousand flyers to a team lead at each of these
locations. If you are having an event with many locations, come up
with flyer pickup sites in the days leading up to the event. Its a
good idea to have a few people running around resupplying the
volunteers and keeping morale high.
13. Promote, promote, promote.
Once you have everything in the
works, spread the word about your event. Reach out to local
Bernie groups and have them promote the event too. In NY, we
used
this directory of social media groups
to promote the event.
THE DAY OF THE EVENT
Its finally here. Today is the day of the event. You have prepared everything and ran
through it the night before, so there are no worries about things going wrong. The gears
of your machinery are well-oiled and will glide smoothly. Get out an hour before the
event starts and go to the place you have set to be your flyer depot (if there are multiples,
pick one). Volunteers will start arriving. Observe the process, and answer any last-minute
questions they might have. If there are multiple depots, be sure to visit all of them. Check
to make sure that the person running around delivering flyers to those who have run out,
and the one taking pictures or videos are both present. Relax, and enjoy the show.

AFTER THE EVENT IS OVER

Make sure that all of the pictures are uploaded to Instagram and Twitter. Get your
hashtag for the event working, and try to get considerable traffic on it. Compile your
photos into an imgur album. Send them to
newyork4sanders@gmail.com
and the official
Bernie Sanders campaign, along with a basic summary of how the event went. And be
sure to congratulate yourself and everyone who participated for making it a success!

For Volunteers: What to Expect

Berning Manhattan lasted 4 hours, from 12 PM to 4 PM.
Heres a guide that was created
for it
; you can adapt it to fit your own city or town.

Volunteer Experiences
Youre going to want to know as much about the experience as possible, so heres some
stuff about how it went and what to expect from a volunteer.
Every location is going to be different. Every neighborhood in NYC is different! No
matter where you are, the important thing is to stay positive and friendly. Some people
will take the flyer. Some people wont. In some areas, people will stop and be very
friendly, and in some people may walk right past you. 90% of it has nothing to do with
you, but with the dynamics of that location and time. I was in a spot where there is not a
lot of Bernie name recognition - a lot of people didnt know who he was, so just getting
the flyer in their hands and his name in their ear was a huge first step. If that was the
first time they heard Bernie Sanders and president in the same sentence, it wont be
the last, and that first contact can make an impact when they suddenly see him on TV
and remember oh thats the guy those people were talking about the other day. I think
its worth pointing out that young people LOVE Bernie. While a lot of adults didnt know
who he was, we had many teenagers and college students say things like Bernie? Hes
the man! or I like that guy! When people stop and talk to you, and ask how they can
help - it makes it all worthwhile.
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Tascha Van Auken