Blogging lately has been slow because I’ve been sidetracked by some side projects.  One is the Grassroots Organizing Forum that I am helping plan.  I didn’t realize this before, but this event is the first statewide Organizing for America (OFA) event in the nation.  OFA-Massachusetts is a genuinely inspiring group of very hard-working volunteers (I don’t think anyone is staff here) and I’ve enjoyed working with them.  Our event is Saturday, and I think it’s going to be a big success.  So far, over 600 people have signed up.  I will write a follow-up post about it for sure.

In any case, I’ve been experimenting a bit with Twitter by creating an account for OFA-MA and then using it to promote our event and raise money for it.  My experiment has been to test the capacity of Twitter as not only a marketing and communications tool, but as an organizing tool.  I’ve tried to experiment with Twitter in this way in the past when I organized my Ice Cream Tweetup and Pledge Project Canvass.  That worked fairly well, and I was pleased that a very effective organizer in my neighborhood, Joseph Porcelli, heard about the event through Twitter, showed up, and helped get the word out on his website, Neighbors for Neighbors.

So I’m still in the early stages of my experimentation with Twitter as an organizing tool, but so far I have learned a few things.  First, it is very difficult to find people on Twitter who would be interested in a specific cause and who are living in a specific area.  As a result, it is tough to find the right people on Twitter to contact about an event or action.  The fact that Joseph learned of my event through Twitter was just good luck.  The problem is that Twitter does not have a search function that allows one to search by location and keywords in the user’s bio, so finding the right kinds of people to follow is cumbersome.  There may be apps that allow for this kind of search, but I do not know of them.  Second, because tweets get lost in one’s ever-changing stream, it is very difficult to communicate one’s message and get relevant updates out to people in an effective way.  (I’m sorry if this point is lost entirely on people who don’t use Twitter.  Solution: sign up and start using it!  It’s free, after all!)  Third, despite these setbacks (which I hope to solve soon) Twitter is an extremely effective tool for getting one’s message out to a different audience and as a supplement to more traditional forms of outreach.  I am finding new Obama supporters through Twitter that I didn’t know about before.  I followed them, they followed back, and we started a conversation that revealed their support.

At the Organizing Forum I hope to have a hashtag (#OFAMA) for any Twitterers in the audience to discuss the event for people who are not able to attend.  My hope is that this will allow me to identify more Obama supporters in Massachusetts who use Twitter.  I am also planning a more ambitious Twitter-and-organizing event in June, focusing on local politics.  Stay tuned!