Six Months Ago Today

Dear Reader,

Six months ago today, Will Urquhart and I sat in my basement and signed the paperwork to officially create Sum of Change Productions, LLC. With nothing but a camera and a couple laptops, we set out to use our respective political organizing and documentary production experiences to build a multimedia company that explains and discusses the most relevant issues of society in a simple yet substantial way. Thanks to you, our first six months have yielded over 125 independently produced videos that have been viewed over 50,000 times collectively. On this anniversary we would like to thank you for helping us reach these milestones.

Though I am very appreciateve for the support, I would like to ask for your continued help in order to grow our email list. Please send a message to 10 friends who you think would appreciate our material and ask them to join our email list.

I'm proud that our videos have been featured on NPR, The Nation, Daily Kos, and The Huffington Post, but we are working to directly share our films with our viewers. It is through these personal connections that we are able to learn about important ideas and movements and make them more accessible. We want to expand the scope, depth, and influence of our coverage and your grassroots support will help us to do so.

We would like you to send this message to 10 socially conscious friends and ask them to join our email list. Tell them why you follow us and why they should too.

By doing so, you will help us reach our goals for the next six months of tripling our email list and breaking 150,000 views. With your continued support, we plan on increasing our output and effectiveness, expanding our network of contributing editors and eventually launching a user generated blog, so that people all over the world can share their own stories.

Please send this to 10 friends and ask them to join our email list. You'll not only be helping us grow, but you'll be building a grassroots network that can affect real change in America.


Thanks again for your continued support. I am proud and honored to have you with us.




Mitch Malasky
Managing Partner - Sum of Change

Training Tuesday with the DFA: The Art of Email Engagement

"Successful emails will build your online community, increase activism, and raise you money. It is also the fastest most accessible way to send your message out to supporters... Compared to the other online strategies, email is by far the most effective strategy to inspire action and raise money."
-from Democracy for America's Campaign Academy Training Manual

The Art of Email Engagement.: In the last five or ten years, email has exploded as a campaign strategy and, without question, Democracy for America (DFA) has led the way on running effective email programs. We were fortunate enough to get to sit in on a DFA Campaign Academy training on the art of email engagement. Today, we bring you the top five email Do's and Don'ts according to Matt Blizek:

Do's Part 1:


Do's Part 2:


For those of you wondering about Zephyr Teachout's other best practices and tips for emails we turn to page 139 of the training manual (You don't have a training manual? Well you'll have to attend a training next year):

Zephyr Teachout's Tips and Best Practices for Emails
• Draft drunk, edit sober.
• Aim for the amazing. Shoot for the moon, and if some fall flat, so be it.
• Tell a story! Each email is a short story with a moral.
• Think in images! Plunge people into a world. Make your message visceral.
• Read your emails out loud to someone before sending them. Reading out loud will force the cadence.
• Experiment! Be willing to try new stuff and fail. It's a relationship - push the limits.
• Involve a short-term narrative. i.e., a 5 email series in which something from the last email is always engaged - this is a serial publication, and a connection from one email to the next - storytelling over time - is one of your strongest suits for establishing a connection.
• Imagine yourself writing TO someone at all times. Never address a crowd - address a member of the crowd. If you wouldn't send this email to a friend, why not?
• Length doesn't matter - should fit the purpose of the email. That said, when in doubt, be very short.
• Use short punchy paragraphs.
• Link early and often. The same link over and over. In this way it is like a poem or song with a refrain.
• Write for a 7th grade reading level - people read fast online. It will improve your writing, making you less abstract, more concrete, and with fewer clauses.

And last, but certainly not least, the Don'ts:


That's all for this week. Next week we'll have a second round of videos from the Art of Email Engagement, just check back at the Sum of Change Training Tuesday web page at 6:00pm next Tuesday! Oh, and speaking of emails, you can always sign up to receive email updates from Sum of Change!

Virginia Residents Making Health Care Personal on Capitol Hill

On Wednesday, just days before the House passed historic health care legislation, I tagged along with the Virginia Organizing Project (VOP) and residents from all over Virginia as they visited Capitol Hill to share their personal health care stories with their Senators and Representatives. You can read more about it in our written report from the day, but today we present you with our video coverage:

The emphasis of this trip was to have Virginia residents share their personal stories with Congress. So what would our coverage be without those personal stories?

Matt's Story:

Linda's Story:

Donna's Story:

The Virginia Organizing Project is still calling on folks to contact their legislatures. And while not everyone can drive to DC like Virginia residents can, you can still pick up a phone or write a letter.

Visit Sum of Change for more coverage, and don't forget to check back tomorrow for Training Tuesday with the DFA where Matt Blizek will bring us tips on running a successful email program!

J Street Conference Video Wrap Up

To supplement our earlier post about the J Street Conference, here is a video wrap up of this year's conference created by Found Object Films for the folks a J Street. I was privileged to have a very, very small hand in working on it (though in no way do I take credit for it) and was really struck by the strength and logic of their organization and mission. Please click on the links above (or following) to get more info (and video) from the J Street Conference and Found Object Films.

J Street and Israel on Campus

There's a new Israel lobby on the block.

J Street held its first conference last week in Washington, DC since its founding in April of 2008. The organization, viewed by many as a counterweight to AIPAC, boasted an impressive number of young faces.

About 250 college students attended a parallel conference organized by J Street U, J Street's campus activism branch, and dozens of twenty-something political staffers, think-tank interns and bloggers milled in and out of the main conference's sessions.

According to The Nation:

The few hundred young faces were a welcome sign for J Street leadership and other representatives of older generations of Jews. In the past few years, studies have shown that youth engagement with Judaism and Israel is declining. And as Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the New Israel Fund, cautioned the audience, "This is a time when many Jews, especially young ones, are walking away from a life that involves Israel." In many cases, younger Jews represent what Ben-Ami calls a new "silent majority," who have felt until now that voicing critical opinions of Israel would expose them to harassment and accusations of anti-Semitism or self-loathing. "Young Jews have no forum to question," Lauren Barr, a college junior, observed. "And so they walk away."

The conference also included discussions directly related to campus engagement. In a session titled Israel on Campus, several educators and campus leaders met to share issues they faced in addressing Israel within a university setting.

A recent JTA blog post noted that "tensions within Jewish groups [on campus] and between student organizations of various faiths played a significant role in student life and continues to be an ongoing problem."

The post also addressed the recent problems experienced by Hampshire College. The institution's president, Ralph Hexter, was a speaker on the panel.

"When asked about the specific nature of these tensions, Hampshire College president Ralph Hexter replied with a chuckle "What tensions don't I face?" Hexter referred to accusations earlier this year that his institution had divested from Israel. These claims, most notably made by political commentator Alan Dershowitz, were later reversed. Dershowitz, as fate may have it, is in fact the parent of a Hampshire College alumnus. On a lighter note, Hexter said that the back and forth between school and pundit was in fact an excellent example of how the school takes care to maintain good relations with the extended Hampshire College family."

The speakers all agreed that campus engagement is essential to getting young people involved with Israel.

The Mad Scene at the Capitol Today

Don't let this picture fool you. Things are craaazy down at the Capitol today.

Check out this video which captures throngs of the health care bill's opponents going through security earlier this afternoon. (via Wonkette)



Yowsas!

Photo courtesy of Dana Barciniak, Senior Photographer, U.S. House of Representatives Office of Photography.

Virginia Residents Making Health Care Personal on Capitol Hill

Yesterday, I tagged along with the Virginia Organizing Project (VOP) and residents from all over Virginia as they visited Capitol Hill to share their personal health care stories with their Senators and Representatives. As Kevin Simowitz, a VOP organizer, said to the group before their scheduled meetings:

"They [Congress] get lobbied all the time, right? Our estimates show that the insurance lobby spends about $641,000-a-day lobbying Congress. Now, we can pass a plate, but we're probably not gonna come up with that much money. The thing that we can do is you all can bring your personal stories about why we're here and why we need a public health insurance option as part of the bill. And if you're speaking out of your own experiences, speaking in non-partisan language, and speaking about what needs to happen... we're gonna walk out of this meeting a little bit further along the health care road than where we are."

We will have a video report for you on Monday, but for today I will share with you what these meetings were like and what was discussed.

The day started off at Senator Mark Warner's office where the group of some 20 people met with Luke Albee, Sen. Warner's Cheif of Staff (CoS). The group began the conversation by asking Mr. Albee for a legislative update on the health care fight from his perspective. "We're further along in health care than we've been in my life." We hear this all the time, but to this 25-year-old, that statement continues to move me. This fight is so much older than I am and we are so close to taking a huge step forward for our nation. "I think at the end of the day we're gonna get there," Mr. Albee added. "You guys have helped us a lot, because we are hearing from folks." He went on to say that during the stimulus fight they were only hearing from the other side, that it felt like the calls were 99 to 1 against and it hurt, but on health care both sides have been vocal.

The group then took some time to share personal stories about our health care system with the CoS. They started with Matt Masterson. Matt is a father of 3. He has Rheumatoid arthritis, his wife suffers from depression and had a near-fatal, enlarged gall bladder, and one of his children was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at age 2. He had great insurance, but struggled to cover his son who has a preexisting condition. Matt mostly struggled with the costs though. Even with decent insurance, the copays for medication for his family became too much to take, eating $1,500-a-month at points. Then Matt lost his job for taking too much sick time. The costs became crippling to his family. His family lost their home and car. He explained all this to Mr. Albee, then began to tear up as he said, "I'm not doing this for me, I'm doing it for my kids... I want them not to have to go through what I went through... I got drove into poverty."

They continued sharing stories with Mr. Albee. Linda Pallette told about her battle with breast cancer. She had no insurance when this happened. She calls herself "lucky" that she did not own a home at the time, if she had, she would not have qualified for state hospitalization. It has now been 10 years since her successful fight with breast cancer, "I can never repay these 10 years... that's why I'm doing this... I'm okay. This is not about me." She then shared another story. This was of her neighbor's dear friend, who Linda only knew as Mary. Mary, when facing illness, literally chose to die rather than leave her family in medical debt.

Mr. Albee urged the group to continue knocking on doors, getting people to write letters and call the Senator's Office. The meeting ended with a group photo and an assurance from Mr. Albee that he would relate these stories and the others to Sen. Warner as thoroughly as possible.

Next on the list was Senator Jim Webb. The group met with Courtney Weaver, a Legislative Correspondent from Sen. Webb's office. The meeting was very similar to the previous one, a legislative update from Ms. Weaver, followed by personal stories, a request that she relate the stories to the Senator, and, of course, a photo with the group. And then it was off to the Representatives, Glenn Nye, Rob Wittman, and Eric Cantor to be exact. I tagged along with the group visiting Rep. Nye, who has said of the public option:

"I will consider the notion of a public option," Nye said, "... if it can be set up in such a way that it does not crowd out the private insurance market. That reduces choice, not increases it."

The group chose Rep. Nye because of this shaky support of the public option. The VOP believe this is a Representative that they can move. While Rep. Nye's office hears from insurance lobbyists, and opponents to reform, they are also hearing personal stories of struggle from members of his district. And to the Senators' and Representatives' credit, they are making time for their office to hear these stories. This plan, focusing on personal stories, is how health care reform advocates are fighting to cross the finish line.

Check back at Sum of Change on Monday for our video coverage of the day's events