FACEBOOK DIGITAL DOOR-KNOCKING

Can a Motley Crew of Rural NC Parents Recruit Public School Supporters Across the Cosmos of Facebook Groups?

• BACKGROUND

Public School Strong is a project of H.E.A.L Together NC and Down Home North Carolina.

H.E.A.L. Together NC is a statewide coalition that meets monthly to learn about current threats to NC public schools, connect like minds from across the state, and build the skills necessary to grow county level teams to win the schools we all deserve. 

The Public School Strong “Digital Crew” will be leading this experiment along with PitaBreadFace. 

The PSS digital crew is a group of parents and public school supporters who enjoy using social media and building relationships online who will form the backbone of the peer-2-peer organizing effort. 

At the time of this experiment the digital crew had four members from the following NC counties: Wilson, Pasquotank, Iredell, Union 

• Assumption

We need to understand the effectiveness of volunteer-led Peer-2-Peer recruitment tactics. 

We need to think of digital communities as similar to turf that is co-organized by volunteers and members of that turf.

The question here is what happens when genuine participants of a digital community become organizers? What are their tactics, asks, and how effective can they be when distributed across different communities?

Specifically, in the case of the Public School Strong campaign I have an assumption that we can recruit individuals located in rural areas through issue-based facebook groups. 

These individuals will need to be genuine participants or perceived as genuine participants of those groups and have a period of time where they are only engaging and building relationships in those groups before making asks. 

Digital Crew Member — Amye — created a TikTok to share out on her facebook groups and reach potential Public School Supporters.

• Falsifiable Hypothesis 

We believe that commenting, engaging, agitating, and posting in place and issue specific facebook groups can drive recruitment for Down Home North Carolina’s Public School Strong campaign.

We believe that we can drive at least 2 meeting attendees to one of Public School Strong's monthly meetings within 2 hours of participation in a group. 

• Setup

The Public School Strong “Digital Crew” will join Facebook groups located in priority counties (3 each) and attempt to recruit individuals to the upcoming PSS mass meeting. 

Priority 1 Facebook groups for canvassing will be oriented around school district conversations (ex. “Union County Schools,” “Parents of Waxhaw County Schools”).

Priority 2 Facebook groups for canvassing will be oriented around county specific conversations (ex. “Everything Gaston County,” “Tell me you grew up in Wilson Without Telling Me,”)

We will measure the time we spend within each group relative to the number of “strong yes” responses we receive from individuals. 

We will run this effort for two complete weeks from March 11th to March 25th 2024. 

We will use the Public School Strong mass meeting on March 25th, 2024 as our recruitment ask.

• KEY TAKEAWAYS 7/22/24:

The digital crew was excited and eager to make this work happen!

There was initial discomfort with the idea of using facebook as a platform – many have opted out of real engagement on facebook with their personal social media usage.

One crew member uses facebook exclusively to run a group for public school workers speaking out on their experiences. She found it difficult to move her own members from the facebook group she ran to the Public School Strong work.

Members found that even in very specific facebook groups, with active engagement, that most posts were by individuals promoting their small businesses, commenting rarely occurred, and harassment was rampant. 

One crew member who is an avid TikTok user created a video that she posted throughout her facebook groups that she was canvassing. It led to the recruitment of one member, but an overwhelming amount of harassment.

That individuals TikTok video’s relative success prompted reconsideration. The question became less focused on facebook as the platform and more on what is possible with peer-based tactics when the tactics take more deeply into account the online lives of the organizers.

What’s Next?

After two weeks of running this effort we decided to pivot the project. Our core realization being that – even though crew members were inside of groups that they were genuine participants within – most of them did not have affinity for the platform of facebook itself. 

We decided to end this effort, take this learning in stride, and recruit additional crew members who are avid social media users and try our canvassing efforts again within the platforms that crew members enjoy using. 

If we plan a future platform-specific project, we are considering a paid-peer-2-peer effort to focus efforts in a targeted way.