2017/2018 recap

In less than two years, 30,000 young diverse progressives have told us they want to run for office. We have already elected 200+ of them to local office in 40 states.

Our 2018 winners!! Look at all those beautiful world-changing faces.

Some fun stats:

55% of our winners are women

50% are people of color

16% are LGBTQ

We’ve spent just around $2.5 million (raised from 12k+ donors!) to do it and had the help of 8,000 volunteers.

Over two years, our candidates flipped state legislative seats in 20 states including Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Washington, West Virginia and Virginia. At least 10% of all flipped state legislative seats in the 2017–2018 cycle were won by RFS candidates.

Our candidates have immediately made life better for folks across the country — they’re ending police relationships with ICE in Hennepin County, Minnesota, proposing bills to end conversion therapy for minors in Nebraska, passing sweeping election reform in New York and expanding Medicaid to cover 400,000 more Virginians. They’re not just the future of the Democratic Party — they’re the right-here-right-now leaders who are bringing progressive values to life.

And we’re helping them get there. Over the last two years, we have built a program that does two key things: Recruit people to run for office, then support them from soup to nuts. Let’s break those down!

Recruitment

Strategy

Our 2017–2018 recruitment program was driven by a single premise: You cannot be what you cannot see.

We aimed to tell the stories of “non-traditional” candidates in order to give other people space to see themselves as candidates or elected officials. When possible, we tried to connect the candidate’s story to our organization so potential candidates understood that if they wanted to run, we were the ones who could help them.

Tactics

We worked directly with reporters and media partners to tell both our story and the story of our candidates. Major press hits resulted both in increased donor and supporter engagement, but more importantly, in increased candidate sign-ups. A few (of the many many) examples…

Look at all those beautiful Run for Something candidates!

We are building audiences on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr in order to meet people where they’re at.

We use Twitter for connecting with journalists, activists, and grassroots supporters. We highlight stories of our candidates, reinforce our core messages about how the political system needs to change, and are a bit more informal (and occasionally, profane.)

Facebook is for “real people,” so to speak — our audience there is a little older. They love stats, factoids, and engaging candidate stories. We love them!

Instagram rolled out during the spring of 2018. We used the platform to highlight candidates, doing “candidate takeovers” every week and letting them tell their stories directly.

We rolled out on Tumblr in fall 2018 and use it nearly exclusively for candidate stories. Young people are the primary users on Tumblr — they’re the kind of folks who should consider running for office.

While generating original content was not our primary communications work in 2017 and 2018, the help of incredible volunteers, we were able to tell some powerful stories.

Our “Why We Run” series on Medium (and then posted on all platforms and over email) highlighted candidates with Q&As to get at both their backstories as well as how we helped them.

We worked with freelance editors to create videos spotlighting various groups of candidates — including our teachers and parents — as well as marking moments in organizational growth, like our 500th endorsement, the surge of volunteers after the Kavanaugh hearings, and National Run for Office Day.

We tested out running in-person recruitment events through our college tour program, which held events in Orlando, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Columbus. Ultimately, results were mixed — we determined we need either staff on the ground or stronger partnerships with local groups in order to yield more productive results.

We also tested out candidate recruitment ads on Facebook and search; our first round of creative ultimately was too expensive to continue running. However, we did have success leveraging paid advertising for additional earned media and social media virality — in particular, around the shooting in Parkland, Florida. After the tragedy, we worked with the Miami-Dade Democratic Party to identify 24 GOP state legislators with NRA A/A- ratings who did not yet have opponents at the time. We ran a print ad and the first-of-its-kind TV ad recruiting candidates to run in those 24 districts; ultimately we found folks for 19 of the 24 seats, including two who we endorsed. Partners on the ground reported back our efforts were critical to filling out the slates for these races.

Finally, we launched National Run for Office Day (NROD) through our 501c4, Run for Something Action Fund, primarily because we hate taking vacations the week after Election Day, but more importantly, because we wanted to build off the momentum of Election Day and immediately get people thinking about the next step. NROD 2017 and NROD 2018 combined recruited more than 10,000 people to think about running.

Impact & immediate learnings

A Data for Progress study on our recruited candidates taught us a few key points about this pool:

10% of the folks recruited actually get on the ballot, giving us a good sense of how big we need our top-of-funnel to be in order to yield actual candidates.

White men are the mostly likely to sign up, but women of color are the most likely to actually get on the ballot, meaning our pipeline and proactive outreach to underrepresented communities is reaching the targeted audience.

The folks most likely to actually run are the ones interesting in solving problems and can clearly identify that. This informs the kind of framework we should apply to advertising and storytelling moving forward.

Barely 9% of potential candidates mentioned Trump on their intake survey and only 3% of confirmed candidates did so. 40% of candidates on the ballot mentioned local issues. Again, this informs how we can message to recruit the most likely “real” candidates moving forward.

Look how few people mention Trump… this isn’t about him!

On a more macro-level, our work made an impact across the Democratic Party. The number of uncontested elections on the state legislative level went down — from 40% in 2016 to 33% in 2018, with Democrats contesting nearly 88% of all seats and Republicans only contesting 79%.

A number of states ran full (or nearly full) slates, including North Carolina, Ohio, and Colorado, and others like Texas, Pennsylvania, and Arizona ran record numbers of diverse slates. Those are worms you can’t get back into the can (or whatever the metaphor is.) Moving forward, any state party or caucus that takes steps back in recruitment will be rightfully held accountable.

Support

Strategy

We built our support program informed by three main principles:

We do not have to do everything ourselves, especially when other people are already doing it or do it better. Support should be as accessible to as many people as possible, in whatever way candidates need it. We might not know the best way to help them! As they say in the critically acclaimed ABC show Lost: Live together, die alone. As applied to our work: Running for office is really hard, but you don’t have feel so lonely when you’re doing it.

Our pipeline is structured to take the initial massive number of potential candidates and winnow it down (partially through self-selection, partially through our own screening) to a more manageable number that allows us to engage deeply with candidates one-on-one while still be working at scale. It intentionally prioritizes women, people of color, and other underrepresented communities.

Tactics

The screening process

Once someone signs up at runforsomething.net, they’re invited to join a weekly conference call run by one of our regional directors — the call goes over what Run for Something does for folks (and what we don’t do), and begins to answer initial questions nearly every potential candidate has: how to pick what office to run for, how much it might cost, where to find filing deadlines, etc.

At the end of the call, potential candidates get tracked into our queue for screening calls. We have approximately 300+ volunteers who do regular 1:1 calls with potential candidates. Those volunteers are similarly on-boarded through a conference call and are provided with an extensive guide on how to have these 1:1s along with being paired with an experienced volunteer who can answer any questions or coach them through the process.

Those calls screen for four key criteria:

Progressive, whatever that means wherever they live — we believe in basic progressive values, but do not demand purity to any particular policy, nor do we have a strict litmus test. Our candidates are running for too many offices and we work in too many states (i.e.: all of them) to do that.

Authentically rooted in their community — this doesn’t mean born-and-bred somewhere, but it does mean someone has ties where they’re running, and represents that community in a meaningful and genuine way.

Willing to work hard and talk to voters — we don’t sugarcoat how hard running for office is.

Interesting and compelling to talk to — if our volunteer enjoys the conversation, voters probably will, too!

runforsomething.net/volunteer

Anecdotally, the calls reinforce volunteers’ faith in American democracy — while the news from D.C. is farcical at times, the calls are authentic insights into what Americans really care about and how people can work together to make a difference.

One volunteer told us the reason she loves RFS more than other groups is because of the direct connection to candidates — it makes the work feel more direct to them, even if it’s just a 30 min call.

Over the last two years, we had more than 2,280 1:1 conversations with potential candidates.

Approximately 70% of the people we’ve talked to have met the above criteria, are under the age of 40, and are running for local office for the first or second time. Everyone we screened was admitted into the Slack team and got regular weekly updates with training information and online resources and had access to the mentorship database — all explained in detail below.

For deeper engagement, we further winnowed this pool down by making endorsements.

Our endorsement application is thorough and asks candidates to align themselves with a series of value statements, along with providing us with a campaign plan, a budget, self-research, and context about their race. Eligible candidates must all be 40 years or younger on Election Day, running for down-ballot office, running for the first or second time, and share our progressive values.

Endorsement applications were reviewed by trained volunteers who did thorough background checks and social media deep-dives. Regional directors did a second review, incorporating anything on the application along with any other information we got from the in-take survey and the 1:1 the candidate did with a volunteer. Operatives on the ground with experience in-state reviewed a third time, and then we made our final decisions.

Over the first two years, we received about 1,000 endorsement applications, and endorsed 650+ in 48 states plus D.C. After the 2017 elections and 2018 primaries, we ended the 2018 cycle with 416 endorsed candidates on the ballot on Election Day 2018, with 50% identifying as women and 35% identifying as people of color.

From there, our candidate services program was extensive and included…

Partnerships

Managed by political director Sarah Horvitz, we ran what we affectionately called a “partner-full model.” We worked with a range of groups, from Our Revolution to EMILY’s List to MoveOn.org to DFA to OFA to the DLCC to Emerge America to Onward Together and a vast network of new-ish like the National Democratic Training Committee and old-ish organizations like Planned Parenthood Action Fund. When approaching relationships with other groups, we aimed to get our candidates help in whatever way we could, at little-to-no cost to them. We didn’t care if we got credit for it (although credit is nice!) — more important to us was that candidates were supported, not scammed, and able to leverage our relationships on their behalf.

A few examples of how this played out:

We co-sponsored trainings with EMILY’s List and heavily recruited women to attend from our lists

We encouraged women to apply for Emerge’s 6-month intensive candidate training programs across the country

We worked closely with the National Democratic Training Committee to make sure our candidates had access to their extensive library of free, online, campaign resources

We recommended candidates for endorsements by groups (like Flippable, Working Families Party, MoveOn, DFA, #VoteProChoice, etc) and people (like President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton)

One Vote at A Time made videos for more than 30 of our candidates

Meet Lina, the new Harris County Judge

Civic Power Media and The Creative Cabinet supported our candidates with creative help

The Hometown Project connected public figures/celebrities with our candidates

Get Her Elected, a group of women content creators run by Lily Herman, worked with dozens of our women candidates

We worked with Mobilize America and text messaging platforms to ensure our candidates received the best tech tools for them to win

Trainings

Where we didn’t see other groups doing the programming our candidates needed, we filled in the gaps. But we don’t ever want to be duplicative — no need to recreate the wheel. (You’ll see us say that a lot. We mean it. Collaboration = good, duplication = bad.) We prioritized trainings that were either tactical in nature or specific to the level of government our candidates were seeking to fill. For example…

How to Fight Climate Change as a City Councilmember

How to incorporate DREAMERs and DACA protections into a local campaign

GOTV 101 for first-time candidates

Cybersecurity for small campaigns

Mentorship

Our mentorship network allowed us to scale our efforts so effectively and sustainably. Over time, we built up a database of more than 500 professional operatives and private sector experts who were willing to offer time and talent to campaigns across the country. Some folks are long-time political operatives, others are professionals in the private sector with experience in copywriting, design, public speaking, or marketing. All applications to join the mentorship database are reviewed before accepted.

To be connected with a mentor, candidates submit a request through our website — or a regional submits a request on their behalf — then Flonja Hoxha, our programs associate, finds the appropriate mentor and connects them over email. (A note about this: We tested out various technological solutions to connect candidates with mentors and ultimately, a person doing the matchmaking was the most cost- and time-efficient. Shocking!)

One example of how this worked…

RFS volunteer Randye Hoder utilized her decades of journalism experience and contacts to work with candidates to tell their stories. Candidate Caitlin Clarkson Pereira fought with the state of Connecticut to change state campaign finance rules to allow covering childcare expenses related to campaign activity was picked up in Fast Company and Motherly. Randye also worked with Aisha Yaqoob to write her opinion piece in HuffPo: “What It’s Like To Run For Office As A Muslim Woman In The South.”

Community

Our incredible (and recently promoted!) director of community, Leslie Hauser, was intentional about fostering relationships — both between candidates and volunteers. We tested out a variety of tactics here, the primary ones being Slack and Facebook groups.

All candidates were funneled into Slack after their 1:1 call with a volunteer, where they could connect with each other and ask/answer questions. This was more successful earlier on in the cycle, when candidates had more time to dig in with each other. As we got closer to Election Day, understandably, candidates were less present.

In September 2018, we launched a Facebook group called “Parents Who Run,” where we invited all our parents (men and women) who were endorsed candidates. This was a bit more active, as parents love sharing photos of their kids and Facebook is already a native platform.

Candidates anecdotally told us that feeling part of something bigger — not entitled, not alone, not abandoned — was one of the biggest value-adds we provided. Initial debriefs have also indicated that “friendships with another candidate” were a major source of support and resiliency. This is something we are excited to learn from and scale as we move into 2019.

Amplification

As mentioned in the discussion about recruitment, we used our social media audiences to amplify our candidates stories and gave them exposure to a national audience. We also regularly pitched our candidates to reporters and worked off incoming requests (i.e. “I’m looking for young women running for school boards in the midwest!” or “I need veterans running for state legislature”) to get more press for our candidates, which the candidates could then leverage into more fundraising and volunteer recruitment.

For endorsed candidates only: Staff support

Our regional directors (Tariq Smith, Derek Eadon, Najaah Daniels, and Amanda Clarke), prioritized their time to work with endorsed candidates in their regions. Once on-boarded in June/July 2018, our regional staff immediately did 1:1 calls with endorsed candidates in their portfolio to audit where they were at and how we could be helpful. In August/September, regional staffhit the road and traveled to meet 1:1 (or 1:few, pending on density of candidates) and help however possible. Sometimes that looked like looping candidates with staff at other groups or reviewing proposals from vendors; other times it was getting new field directors onto VAN, or simply doing a canvass shift with a candidate in their off-time.

Regionals were also our primary points of contact with campaigns, ensuring they were hearing from a singular representative from the organization for all things, ranging from video requests to training alerts to “good luck!” notes.

Important note here: We worked with counsel and followed campaign finance law in each state to ensure we were not overstepping any legal boundaries.

Fund for Something

We raised money through ActBlue tandem fundraising for endorsed candidates in 14 states, in accordance with campaign finance law. We ultimately raised nearly $25,000 split across more than 150 candidates.

While supporters told us they wanted to give directly to candidates, online fundraising testing didn’t bear this out. Some individual donors identified types of candidates they wanted to give to, and we would highlight a variety of folks for them.

Volunteer support & GOTV

We connected volunteers directly to campaigns both ad-hoc and en masse.

Volunteers would find candidates through our candidate directory online or would email us and ask for help identifying campaigns in their area. From there, we might directly loop them with folks on campaigns. Sometimes these one-off volunteer experiences would turn into ongoing relationships and sometimes they’d even develop into full-time career changes.

For example: Kelly O’Donnell volunteered for NY state senate candidate Andrew Gounardes starting in Spring 2018, was hired on as his field organizer in the summer and ultimately left her career in theater to be in politics full-time — after his victory, she joined his office as his scheduler.

Samantha Paschke started as our volunteer and through the connections she made as a newly mobilized organizer, joined Allison Berkowitz’s Maryland House of Delegates campaign part time as Campaign Manager. Daisy Pardo in San Francisco wanted to help someone locally and found herself doing tons of behind the scenes work for Victor Olivieri. These are volunteers that had not been involved with politics before 2017 in a significant way.

Through our Volunteer for Something hub and taking advantage of our partnership with Mobilize, we funneled hundreds of volunteers into GOTV shifts for candidates.

Volunteers and candidates connected on Slack to get questions about social media, messaging, texting, data, and more answered in peer-to-peer learning where volunteers could use their professional and personal skills and apply them to political world.

Additionally, Run for Something Action Fund sent over 350,000 GOTV text messages in key Democratic areas during GOTV weekend.

Impact & immediate learnings

We did immediate debriefs with all our 2017 candidates. A few things we learned:

Money wasn’t the biggest value-add we could provide candidates — community was.

It was so helpful to have someone to ask questions to who didn’t have financial skin in the game — meaning, if they asked a stupid question, we wouldn’t yank our support.

Two-thirds of our losing 2017 candidates wanted to run again

We are doing intensive debriefs with our 2018 candidates, including qualitative and quantitative feedback sessions, to ensure that our support program is providing candidates what they actually need and not what we think they need.

Alumni

In December 2018, Ben Theodore joined our team as our alumni program manager. He immediately began doing 1:1s with candidates to identify how we can best support them as they enter elected office or continue their civic engagement after losing campaigns. In January 2019, he launched our alumni Slack team, and will be rolling out an alumni mentorship program. He’ll also be the primary point of contact for organizations that want to connect with our new elected officials, and will be building out additional support efforts for our alum.

Fun fact: Seems like at least two-thirds of our candidates who lose intend on running again!

A note on our 2018 goals:

When we kicked off 2018, we laid out two big goals: We would recruit 50,000 candidates who want to run and endorse 1,000. These were numbers that, to be quite honest, we’d ambitiously picked out of thin air. We did not hit either of them, and we want to be transparent about why:

50,000 candidates was a lot! Our pace of candidate recruitment stayed relatively stable throughout the months (about 1,000 a month) but especially as the 2018 elections crept up, folks focused on those. We also found advertising for these leads — particularly if we wanted good leads — to be prohibitively expensive.

1,000 endorsed candidates would have been possible had we endorsed all the folks who applied. We would have had to lower our standards, and frankly, would have had to engage more deeply with candidates who didn’t meet our “hell yeah!” test. We had to make a decision: Meet our arbitrary goal, or miss it but maintain the quality of race we aspired to engaged with? We chose the latter, and will happily defend that.

Empowerment

Eight members of our staff were on the programs team, focusing on candidates, volunteers, and political work. The rest of the team focused on raising the money, telling the story, and building the tools so the programs team had the space, money, and flexibility to recruit and support candidates.

Communications

The communications team, lead by Lesley Lopez, chief communications & marketing officer, focused on recruitment and candidate amplification as laid out above. She had support from Tyler Goodridge, our Digital Communications Manager, who joined in spring 2018. Along with press, social media, and message strategy, they worked with a network of designers along with video freelance editors and interns and volunteers who helped manage things like Instagram takeovers and keeping Tumblr updated.

Fundraising

Our fundraising program was run by development director, Robert Wrasse and supported by Marsha Gonzalez, Senior Events & Special Projects Manager, and Chief Operating Officer Seisei Tatebe-Goddu.

Over the first two years, we raised $2.5 million from more than 12,000 donors. The money came in through three primary sources:

Major gifts from folks including Reid Hoffman, Chris Sacca, New Media Ventures, Onward Together, and partners across the progressive movement. Some of this funding was program-specific; others were general operating funds.

A focused online fundraising program that raised a steady amount of money with an average gift hovering below $45 and included merchandise sales.

More than 25 small/medium-sized fundraising events across the country in New York, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Madison, Sacramento, and London. Events ranged from meet-ups with $35 or free tickets to $50,000 events with catered food, alcohol, and large host committees.

One big event! Party for Something, held in D.C. in June 2018, where Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren all spoke, along with Virginia Delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy. We played cornhole! It was fun, and just as important, the event raised nearly $250,000. We plan on doing it again, so get psyched.

We aimed to build a balanced fundraising base — we did not want to rely on any single individual high-dollar donor to fund our program, nor did we want to rely solely on small donations, which come in waves and can be less predictable to budget around. By being 100% transparent (for example, through documents like this one) and perhaps verging on over-communicative, we aim to treat all donors equally (and with a mountain of gratitude).

Technology

Our technology has developed dramatically since day one. We launched with a Squarespace site and a mess of Trello, Slack, Google docs, ActionNetwork, ActBlue, and Zapiers which connected the tools together. That mess has stayed relatively consistent over the course of the last two years, with the addition of AirTable. In February 2018, RagTag rebuilt our website to its current iteration.

In September 2018, we brought on Justen Fox as the Director of Technology and Product, with both short-term and long-term goals. In the immediate present, he built a tool that allowed us to easily monitor all 416 endorsed candidates on Election Day. In the long-term, he’s developing a product roadmap specifically geared toward building an in-house constituent manager database and a hub for all candidate resources and training materials. These things are hard, but we’ll get there.

Operations & expenses

Our Chief Operations Officer built and oversaw all operations for the organization, with a focus on legal, compliance, human resources, internal infrastructure, and all the bumps and obstacles that come with scaling a team from 5 people in January 2018 to 17 people in December 2018. (A note that in 2019, we’ll be re-organizing slightly to bring on a director of operations and, eventually, a chief of staff.)

Legal hurdles were particularly tough to overcome, as we navigated managing both a non-federal political action committee (Run for Something) and a 501c4 (Run for Something Action Fund), and ensuring we were on the right side of both federal law as well as state campaign law for every state we were engaged in.

Our team is entirely remote — in January 2019, we have staff in New York, Maryland, D.C., North Carolina, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, California, and Pennsylvania. The staff is two-thirds women and 43% people of color. Most had previous political experience, some did not.

Our expenses over the first two years included:

Staff — including health care and benefits

Travel — fundraising trips, in-region travel for regionals, and the cost of bringing a remote team together regularly

Legal fees

Advertising

Video production

Merchandise production and shipping

Fundraising and event expenses

Values & philosophies

Before we get into what we want to accomplish moving forward, it’s worth taking (more than a few) paragraphs to articulate the “why” — meaning, the underlying values and principles driving our decision making. These principles are consistent from we first launched Run for Something, and are further informed by two years of doing the work.

First, we believe that the progressive movement should prioritize running good people, running them locally, and running them everywhere.

Breaking that down…

We believe just as we did on day one that “good candidates” don’t look or sound like any single archetype. We’ll continue to prioritize recruiting and supporting candidates from diverse backgrounds (meaning race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, occupation, and more); who have strong rationales for running; who want to do something, not be something; who emphasize voter contact and local issues in their campaigns; and who are willing to do the work.

On the flipside of that, we will continue not to care whether or not our candidates can raise a bunch of money from day one — a metric that, when used in isolation as a measurement for viability, is problematic on a multitude of levels.

We will continue to focus solely on local elections, defined as state legislative races and below. We believe in this guardrail for four key reasons:

Local and state government directly affects people’s lives — it’s critical to have good progressives in those offices, making those decisions.

Most local elections are manageable, affordable, and can be won purely on hustle by the right candidates.

Our future presidents, governors, and members of Congress will come from our bigger pool of present-day state legislators, city councillors, and school board members.

Running strong local candidates who do aggressive voter contact will spur more voter turnout, helping Democrats at every level of government.

We will never expand our work up the ticket to include statewide elections or federal races. While those are important too, we’ve got a lane and we’ll stay in it.

Finally, we believe in running good people everywhere. We invest in people, not in geography. We’ve worked with candidates in every state and in every kind of community — from inner-city to rural western counties. We are willing to risk endorsing candidates in “deep-red” districts and the bluest of blue districts.

There is some nuance here: We will prioritize our staff time and resources toward redistricting states in 2019/2020 (more details to come; read on), and we’ll certainly help state caucuses or other organizations recruit for specific races as needed. However, a mentality of “these races only and absolutely not others” is not and will never be our mission.

Second: This work cannot be cyclical in nature.

After two years of Run for Something, we’ve determined effective candidate recruitment takes approximately 18 months, at least — from beginning the conversation about running for office all the way to Election Day. That means we need infrastructure to constantly scout and encourage new candidates to run all the damn time, not just in even-numbered election years or in the 2–3 weeks leading up to filing deadlines.

Additionally, the best and strongest campaigns come from having a lot of time to do the work — meaning they get started as far as a year out from when voters go to the polls. We intend to build a year-round candidate support apparatus that allows us to help candidates at every stage of their efforts. (We’re already getting part-way there — some of our early 2019 endorsements are of candidates who we’ve been working with for over a year.)

Third: We have to trust voters. (Even when — and perhaps especially when — it’s scary.)

Run for Something is not primarily a voter-facing organization. We are here for candidates. We want them to have every resource they need to reach voters.

Our goal with endorsements is not to tell voters who to pick when they go the polls. Instead, our goal is to empower candidates — who are the best possible messengers for the values we share — to connect with voters efficiently and effectively. Our endorsement is an asset candidates can use as leverage to get even more resources and talk with even more voters.

Fourth: We don’t believe in recreating the wheel.

This one feels pretty obvious, and we say it a lot, but it’s worth spelling out: Resources are limited and the progressive ecosystem is full of people doing amazing work already. We don’t need to be duplicative. Recreating others’ work and slapping our logo on it is a waste of our time and disrespectful to our peers.

Where other organizations are doing great work (say, running trainings or directing volunteers to campaigns), we’ll play matchmaker with our candidates so everyone can benefit.

Fifth: Community matters. We really are ~stronger together.~

Politics is hard, demoralizing, and can be an absolute grind — and running for office especially can be lonely. But we’re all part of something big. This is a movement of people coming together, whether as candidates, supporters, donors, volunteers, stakeholders, political partners, or whatever other label you want to use, all to do something powerful together because that’s the only way change happens.

We believe in the power of community, and we’re going to do our best to cultivate one that is meaningful, effective, and at least a little bit fun.

Sixth: We stay in our lane.

A list of things Run for Something has no plans of changing or including in our scope of work:

Federal races

Expanding our age limit — we’ll keep our focus on young people

Officially merge with the Democratic Party

Advocate for specific policy positions

That doesn’t mean these things are not important, nor that someone else shouldn’t do them. But we can’t do everything well, and we’re not going to try. That’d be silly.

Finally, our core values as an organization.

Every member of our staff tries to live these values every day — they drive our organization’s culture and operations. While we don’t always succeed, we’re doing our damndest.

Bold & Fearless

We have big dreams and are unafraid to pursue them.

We have a high risk tolerance; we’re not afraid of fighting the system when fighting is necessary. We’re not afraid of primaries either.

We’re willing to fail; we’d rather fail than avoid challenge.

Open & Honest

We believe in radical openness; we never shy away from challenging dialogue.

We tell the truth, even when telling the truth is difficult.

We’re transparent.

Supportive & Respectful

We’re here for the candidates and we put their needs first.

We meet people where they are, with warmth and without judgment.

We work hard while respecting people’s lives outside work.

Progressive & Diverse

We support Democrats that share our values and want to run for office.

We value cultural competences and strive to exemplify it in all we do.

We believe in diversity and seek to build a team that demonstrates diversity across race, class, geography, professional background, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

Long-Term & Strategic