"The Bus is Here!"

        We had an enormous number of out-of-state volunteers in Bristol, PA.
        Most likely because our office was a short 80 minute drive from Manhattan, but also because I think we organized a good volunteer experience, our typical weekend brought in 400 volunteers from New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut--plus or minus a few hundred.
        Most of these volunteers came by car, but in the months leading up to election day, they increasingly came in buses, sometimes two per weekend day, but typically one on Saturday and one on Sunday. Our challenge, then, was to organize a system for processing all of these volunteers: sorting new volunteers from returning volunteers, pairing them into canvassing teams, ensuring that people on buses were paired with people in cars, training them on how to use the materials we provided, offering a sense of how to speak to strangers and pace their conversations--and then getting them out the door and into the streets as soon as possible.
        Early mornings on Saturday and Sunday, we would imagine traffic flow through the office: What were the stages of their training? Where would the stages take place? How could we avoid bottlenecks where we didn't want them and how could we create them where we did want them? We tweaked our plans each week, sometimes leading volunteers through check-in, pairing, training and packet-distribution all within the office and other times running the entire operation outside in our driveway and parking lot. We posted signs directing traffic. We recruited early arrivals to man certain stations.


        We could always easily handle the early trickle of volunteers that showed up 15-45 minutes early. Even the significant surge at 10am, our start time on Saturday, was manageable. But the arrival of the bus, usually at half past ten, indicated the arrival of 50-65 zealous volunteers who had been sitting down for the previous hour and a half. (Sometimes there was a van in tow with an overflow team.) They poured in like a flood, anxious to work, eager to find a bathroom, reluctant to wait any longer for anything.
        We communicated during the week so that we could anticipate their numbers, and it took all the preparation we could arrange to defuse the the nervous energy the volunteers brought with them. When they arrived, pace in the office jumped from ant hill to bee hive. The words "The bus is here!" shouted from the front sidewalk triggered spasms of alertness: Is everyone in place? Do we have enough training packs? Are there enough sign-in sheets? Check-out sheets? Clipboards? It was like a "places!" call before the action began, but the camera was already rolling.

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        I like to think we played our part well. We received a lot of good feedback from volunteers, and some people even posted online about their volunteer experiences at our office:

• Strategy '08: "Report from the Ground: Pennsylvania" (9/21/08)
• My.barackobama.com: "My Really Cool MOM!" (10/1/08)
• Flickr.com: "Bristol, PA Obama office overflow" (10/5/08)
• VillageZendo.org: "Body Politic" (10/8/08)
• ThisKhmericanLife: "A Barack-tastic weekend in Pennsylvania" (10/22/08)
• OurTownNY.com: "Diary of a Swing State Volunteer" (10/30/08)