Barack Obama in Austin, TX
Barack Obama in Austin, TX

From now on, I’m going to feature comments from time to time on the main page of this blog.  There are some comments that I think should be displayed more prominently on this site so that more people can read them. Last weekend, Lainey Melnick helped organize an OFA canvass in Austin, and the results of her canvass were very impressive.  She commented on my post about my tweet-up and OFA Pledge Project canvass, and here is what she wrote.   -Jared

We organized a pledge canvass out here in Austin, Texas and had a very positive experience with it. I worked on the campaign here and we’ve kept a very tight organization of volunteers and everyone has been chomping on the bit for something to fight for. We’ve had some local battles here like on voter id legislation that got us going, and this national initiative helped to give us more to organize behind.

We used the website that I created during the campaign, linktoaustin.com, plus mybo, FB, twitter, state democratic party, Travis County democratic party,  and emailed all the precinct captains, democratic clubs and used word of mouth. We have a facebook group for our local organization, Organizing for Austin - Central Texas. We had about 35 definite rsvps and 25 more maybes, but ended up with about 14 volunteers who came to our rally and worked the high-traffic areas. We had a few other canvasses hosted in our area that had a few more volunteers. All in all, we were able to gather 467 pledge signatures from the Austin-Central TX area, a decent showing.

Yes, there were definite hiccups, but anyone who worked on the campaign knows that this is how they learn. They actually read the feedback and revise, learn from the mistakes. This is one of the things I really like about the organization. I am not an Obama-bot. I was actually a Hillary supporter, so I am not drinking the kool-aid, but I am very proud that I worked so hard to elect President Obama and that I am now working to support him.

It looks like OFA has made a few changes and now would like us to call supporters from home:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/contact/splash/budgetaction

I think this is a much better idea for people who can’t commit to several hours out in front of people. Canvassing is not for everyone!

Everything that we do to heal the world, is good work. Keep it up!

–Lainey Melnick
OFA Regional Lead - Austin CD 21/25