This is an important conversation.  MFA has a list of 70,000 young voters.  They've been present at over 4,000 music events since October 2003 and registered approximately 20,000 young voters.   No other organization dedicated to engaging Millenials/"Echo-Boomers" is more integrated within the fabric of youth culture and touches so many people on a nightly basis.  

Yet in many ways the organization is dysfunctional.  There are problems with the volunteer process, little cohesion to MFA as a movement, and for many volunteers it is a dead-end, providing no way to move further into the ranks of the progressive movement.  As a result, to quote Mark, "employees and young activists and partner bands start to get disillusioned with politics due to MFA."

As I noted above, MFA is uniquely positioned to reach young voters in the 2008 Presidential cycle.  Parts of it are broken, but I hope that it is fixable.  We have a rare chance here to openly discuss with the current leadership of MFA ways to correct the course of the organization well in advance of 2008, when once again MFA could have a significant impact on the outcome of the election.

As Alex noted in his thesis, this is not meant to as an attack on Music for America or any of the other groups that worked extremely hard during the election, but a critical critique of the problems people face when they attempt to become more involved. If we are to regain majority status in this nation we have to look at ourselves with extremely critical eyes.

The conversation so far:

Alex noted that MFA faced huge challenges in creating a workable infrastructure - volunteers failed to show up, materials never made it to concerts, and bands themselves sometimes lost materials.  Just as great a problem was the lack of intra-organizational knowledge.  There was very little knowledge of who had volunteered for MFA, when they volunteered, what they volunteered for, or how well they performed.  Finally, there was no way to plug highly motivated, talented kids into other forms of activism.  MFA was raising interest among young voters and finding potential leaders, but had no way to help those leaders develop.

MFA Staffers Molly Neitzel and Mark Ristaino responded by noting that some of Alex's proposed solutions were, in fact, tried by MFA or were unscalable for fundraising reasons.  They also asked Alex to provide examples of organizations that effectively mixed online and offline activism among young voters.

Alex responded with a post about IAVA and Cosmopolity/Drinking Liberally, which he held up as examples of successful organizations combining online and offline organzing.

In the comments to that post:

• Mark responded with a mix of interest and doubt as to the relevance of Alex's examples, and posed this doozy of a questions: If a lot of damage control can be dealt with by personal interaction, how do you make a national organization with a huge membership more personal? How does a staff of 6-12 maintain meaningful, personal contact with 70,000 kids?  This, in many ways, is million dollar question.


• I responded to Mark and Alex by expanding on the ways in which Drinking Liberally is a successful organization in its use of online activism to fuel offline activism.  I also noted that comparing MFA to Drinking Liberally is not an apple to apples comparison because DL has 3 advantages over MFA that makes its model much easier to pull off:
  
  1. DL chapters have a consistent venue
  
  
  2. DL meetings have a consistent meeting time
  
  
  3. DL has a much lower bar for what constitutes an acceptable outcome for each meeting

• Alex responded to Mark with an incredible post that I won't even attempt to fully summarize.  Suffice to say that it touches on the meaning of leadership, the consequences of failures in MFA's activities, and  the need for more decentralization, more accountability, and a teasing reference to the need to combine political movement building with for-profit activity models

Here is Mark's final response, and where the conversation stands now:

I'm gonna try and reply to both y'all in one comment cuz I'm short on time. First off- THANK YOU SO MUCH for all this honest, frank feedback. I have to admit that Alex's comments and commentary on the direction of MFA was a little tough for me to read at first, since I've been so deeply invovled with the org for the last year, but after reading through multpile times, I started to see that there's good points throughout.

So, the main feedback that I'm getting from the both of you is that MFA's biggest failing right now is an inability to continuously maintain meaningful communication with our national membership. The reasons for this problem are apparent when you look at our model- hundreds decentralized events attached to structure of bands touring nationally, managed and coordinated from one centralized location, with little crossover between the events and people doing the coordination. Our inability to connect with our members offline tops the list of problems.

Stepping back- this problematic decentralized structure is also one of the main reasons MFA was funded in the first place, so the best solution would involve finding different ways to connect offline rather than changing our strategy of outreach.

Solutions vary from little tweaks to a complete overhaul.

The "overhaul solution" is something that Alex has been pushing for- creating a decentralized management structure in key community building places across the country. Admittedly, MFAs robust online capabilites would be very conducive to a structure like this. This solution, though, is the opposite of the direction MFA has been heading- consolidating staff, stripping down operations and focusing on streamlining our model. So while this is a good idea, it would be a complete u-turn in terms of the orgs' direction, and I don't see this happening under our current management. Subtle moves in this direction would definitely be possible, though.

The next solution would be to tweak the existing model and manufacture a local MFA presence in order to ensure some manner of personal, offline connection with members. There have been many failed attempts at manufacturing local communities. Hiring "state coordinators" in key communites died due to poor management and an unclear vision and direction, as well as our inabilty to hire these positions as full-time jobs due to funding. Attempts at getting our committed Minnesota community to organize themselves failed- mainly due to the similar reasons. We provided them with their own website in hopes that it would jumpstart the action, but at the end of the day we were asking too much from unpaid volunteers.

Both of you talked about the importance of local places for local MFA organizing to live. Mike hinted towards some sort of "partner venue" model which could work. I'd love to talk more about that. Can someone fill me in on what happend with venue partnerships in '04? What did MFA attempt, and why did it fail?

We over in MFA land right now have talked extensively about organizational partnerships and how they could end up filling that dead space in MFA right now. Our partnership with "The league of pissed-off voters" is our first real attempt at this. We "engage young people in politics" and then plug our members into select other organizations where they can start really making a difference in the progressive movement. For this tactic to be successful, we need a stronger, more focused communications strategy than we have right now, but it totally works with our model. And it oversteps the need for a local community presence by changing the utility of the org. MFA would no longer be a virtual lobby, but instead be a recruiting center.

In this sense, MFA could be the organization that mines music communites and plugs young activists into other progressive organizations like the League, Young People For, Young dems... Do you think having this function would be enough to make MFA a worth while org in the greater picture of the progressive movement? We would still have to tweak our volunteer program so it's less frustrating.

Oye- too much thinking. Sorry if I sound like a robot right now. Let me know if you need clarification on any points.

I'll be checking in on this post and noting comments, but I encourage all MyDD readers to comment on this over at the Future Majority site, where MFA staffers (and ex staffers) will be joining the conversation.