The following is a transcript of a micro-keynote I gave today at the CampaignTech conference. On behalf of the whole Fission team, thanks for the Advocacy Innovator award, Campaigns & Elections!

I want to spend my 5 min today sharing a vision for re-humanizing politics and advocacy through technology -- bringing the concepts of real relationship and real leadership back into organizing, at scale.

When I came to Washington in 1999, issue advocacy was dominated by direct mail and field organizing. I came, I thought, as an evangelist for the future.

As the Feminist Majority Foundation’s first “Cyberspace Representative” to their campus program, I mapped out an ambitious plan to massively scale up by moving our outreach online. We created online toolkits, and neighbor-to-neighbor search tools, and downloadable flyers to empower campus leaders to lead... "Bring our campus organizers home from the field!" I said. "Stop wasting their valuable time interacting with people face-to-face. We can reach thousands instead of dozens each day."

At the time, online-to-offline organizing was a relatively new concept -- and my enthusiasm generated (rightly) a fair bit of skepticism from my bosses, community organizers with decades of experience. They wanted to look their super-volunteers in the eye, get to know them.

I thought: "Oh, they’re just old fashioned!"

And I felt vindicated when in 2004 I went to work for MoveOn and had the privilege of being part of the best version of this new "online organizing" model in action. We “baked back America” selling almost $1MM in cookies and cupcakes in one day. Turned out hundreds of thousands of volunteers to get-out-the-vote on election day. 

But between cycles, something felt missing. Metrics that used to measure whether we were doing a good job providing a service to our members -- open and click through rates, website traffic -- became an end in themselves.

Slowly I became, then helped train a generation of, “experts” in ramping up those numbers. We dreamed up ever more adrenaline-pumping subject lines to drive click through as off-season open rates waned, using tricks like “re:” or “fwd:” to make them seem more personal, included ever bigger, redder buttons to click. 

An industry has grown up around using email to try to keep people who showed up during an exciting period -- opening, clicking, signing, sharing -- during all the down-times, when in reality most people are not tuned in.

And fundamentally, this is a good thing! Who wants a democracy whose citizens only tune in once every 4 years? Engaging people year-round on issues that impact our planet, our kids, and our future is how we make the world a better place.

The problem with relying on email -- and specifically your email stats page to direct your energy -- is that you end up knowing perilously little about the people to whom you are talking every day, your “base”. It’s like an extended game of 20 questions with several hundred thousand people.

In the meantime, that same group of people is over on Facebook, and Twitter, and Pinterest chattering about what they care about, in their own words -- and their own images.

About a year ago, Fission started developing a tool called Attentive.ly that could show what those supporters were talking about on social networks. And when we did that, we found 3 interesting things:

1) Every list has a vibe -- a personality you’ll never pick up from click through rates. Momsrising has some really happy people on it. They talk about summer and vacation and kids and lunch. The Fission list is more hardcore politicos -- we get really fired up about what’s on CNN and Fox and MSNBC. We use the #p2 hashtag a lot.

2) Any decent-sized list has some amazing people on it that you should be taking the time to get to know personally.

• Some of them have bigger networks than the bloggers and journalists you’re courting.
• Some of them have bigger networks than you.
• More importantly, people trust them more than they trust you. Studies show people trust people, not institutions, more all the time. Some organizations resolve this by having strong public figures -- Van Jones is really “out” as the face of Rebuild the Dream -- but for most, having evangelists outside the organization resonating their message, sharing their actions, is revolutionary.

3) When you combine what you already know about a person -- for example they’re a donor that lives in San Francisco and -- with what they’re talking about on social media -- for example they’re worried about climate change -- sometimes it turns out you only need to talk to 50 people or even 5, to get real-world results. The biggest list does not always win.

The next “ah ha” moment for us came when we partnered up with Morningside Analytics. They do natural language data analysis and are known for making cool maps of the blogosphere that look like outer space.

Morningside was able to take the social media data from Attentive.ly, run it through their analytical software, and show us what we all really wanted to know all along -- what we lost when we traded in face-to-face conversations for email blasts:

• who are the communities of people on our “supporter” lists -- soccer moms and college students and the retiring boomers may all respond to an outreach about healthcare, but they click and care for totally different reasons
• what are they talking about -- literally: what phrases and hashtags they’re using
• who do they trust and listen to, what URLs do they share

This kind of data has HUGE implications across campaign and advocacy communications. Instead of guessing about what phrase or bright color will trigger a click -- we now have a map (literally) of the conversations our existing supporters are having around an issue.

We can proactively engage in those conversations, talking to the soccer moms in the ways that resonate with them.

Spend time getting to know the thought leaders in those communities, showing up for them so they show up for us -- reaching a multiplier of the number of people we were before, via a human rather than an organizational voice.

This is my vision for the future of campaign technology -- that the compromise between “going big” and “building real relationships” disappears. 

That social media, geolocation, and mobile all help us recapture the personal interactions that pre-dated our click counts -- and we can start inspiring each other again, instead of just pushing each others’ buttons.