Hypothesize to Win with River Fiocco of TakeAction Minnesota

This post is part of D4PB's launch series, featuring three data practitioners at grassroots organizations in Minnesota.

River Fiocco (they/them) serves as the Data Analyst at TakeAction Minnesota, where they perform data analysis and support staff in leveraging data to enact people-powered political change. Prior to joining as a staff member, River served as TakeAction’s Data and Digital Intern in the summer of 2019. They have also previously served as a Membership Database & Research Extern at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, where they researched the impact of recessions on nonprofit organizations. River graduated from Carleton College in June 2020, where they majored in Psychology and minored in Spanish and Educational Studies. When they are not being a professional data nerd, River enjoys dancing, plant-based cooking, community-building, and trying new ice cream places in the Twin Cities.

TakeAction Minnesota is a multi-racial people’s organization building power for a government and economy that works for all of us. They are a hub for Minnesota’s progressive movement, bringing together people and organizations to make more politically possible. Founded in 2006, TakeAction Minnesota exists because the challenges we face are bigger than one campaign or election cycle. With offices in St. Paul and Duluth, they’re organizing to change who decides and who benefits in our democracy and our economy.

Data > Vibes

MOLLY Can you describe your role at TakeAction, in broad strokes?

RIVER My title is Data Analyst, but I do a combination of data infrastructure, analysis, and building dashboards. Wrangling all of the data that is needed to do the analysis.

Infrastructure looks like setting up codes and tags and phone banks and text banks. That kind of more mundane work, auditing, setting up integrations between all of our tools and making sure all the data's flowing. Catching any folks who are falling through the cracks, who we haven't reached out to in the past a couple of months or however long, and we want to re-engage them.

I'm a part of the Minnesota cohort table at TMC [The Movement Cooperative], and I'm part of the core team with the People's Action data cohort, helping plan trainings and meetings and convenings for the whole group. This year we’re moving into a mentorship/buddy system where folks who've been in data roles at power-building orgs for a while are leading trainings and mentoring people who are newer to this, who are coming from organizing to the data side or coming into this work in some other way - being there as buddies for them, to help them skill up and get the strategic lens they need. I'm really excited for that, for building movement data capacity through that.

MOLLY What do some of your analysis projects look like? 

RIVER I need to look at this past election year and the year before, at the patterns of how people are moving through our ladders of engagement (or not) based on how we're reaching them, how we're talking to them. How do we get people to be more active in democracy, especially since our targeting is based on mostly young folks and people of color? I want to see those folks represented in our democracy, because that's not the case right now. In general I'm evaluating where we're at currently with our member base, who is taking what type of action and why.

I'm always analyzing and evaluating towards the hypotheses that we set. I can talk more about hypotheses. That's a big part of TakeAction culture around data in general. This year, every team has a hypothesis and it brings me so much joy. 

MOLLY Oh I definitely want to hear more about hypotheses. Before we do though, would you say a bit more about dashboards? What is a dashboard, what does it look like to build one? What do they do for you and the organization?

RIVER Through TMC, I have access to Periscope [a data visualization/dashboarding tool]. And so I write code in SQL to populate the dashboard. Usually my dashboards are oriented around the hypothesis for our season. In election season, it's usually tracking election work. Last legislative season, we had goals around how many people we were activating and how many patch-throughs [calling members and “patching them through” to their elected officials] we were doing, and how many one-to-ones. I track all that in the dashboard. 

I see the dashboard as having a lot of different purposes, one just being the transparency and accessibility of the data. Our field manager can go in and see, on this day we had X number of conversations, these volunteers really knocked it out of the park, or we're seeing this level of support or opposition in this section of the turf. It's just so visible what we're doing. We can see the power we're building and where we need to make strategic interventions. 

Recently we were seeing, especially from our phones, that our contact rate was going down [during phone and text banking]. We're like, oh, our number's being marked as spam. So I changed it. It's a very simple intervention, but the dashboard helped us track that. Anecdotally, we thought maybe we were reaching slightly fewer people, but we could look at the numbers and see something happening. With the dashboard, we're going to identify the cause, we're going to fix it, and we're going to be able to reach more voters.

Strategy is a big part of why the dashboards are important. Here’s a story that is probably going to hit a little close to home for you about this past election cycle [I volunteered on the 2023 Soren with Ward 8 campaign for Minneapolis City Council, an election we lost by 38 votes]. 

You probably remember there was a bit of panic around Aurin’s race [Aurin Chowdhury, 2023 Minneapolis Ward 12 candidate, now Ward 12 councilmember]. We saw some pivots in the movement world in general, to investing more time and energy into Aurin’s race as opposed to Soren's. Or not even “as opposed”—just people responding to feelings of fear and redistributing where resources were going. But at TakeAction we had the dashboard where we could see that voter contact was going really well in Aurin’s ward, overall very supportive. Things were looking a lot closer in Ward 8. And so we chose to invest in Soren. We did a little bit of work for Aurin too, but we used the data to make the strategic choice: We think Aurin’s got it, and we really want the city council supermajority we could have with Soren in office. Without the dashboard to have that data in front of us, I don't know what we would have done. We were able to logic our way out of the feelings of fear that were trapping a lot of other people. Not that feelings of fear are not valid, but we were able to have a balanced approach to figure out what was going on.

MOLLY So the dashboard gave you something to base decisions on besides like… vibes.

RIVER Yeah. Our team is very flexible, we can pivot based on the data. That is also necessary for something like this to work. So visibility, interventions, strategy, those are the main reasons we use dashboards. And grant reporting, reporting to our funders. It’s a reality of how we fund ourselves as a power-building org.

We Are Going to Follow Up With Every Single One of Those Leads

MOLLY What's an example of something specific you’ve done at TakeAction that has connected data and power-building?

RIVER Where to begin?? A tangible thing I did last year was really telling staff at our org the story of our targeting [decisions made about who to contact as part of a door-to-door canvassing, phone bank, or text bank program], and then also doing data raps, little tiny data presentations, at the beginning of canvassing shifts. 

I was in the room, I was telling a story about how data was impactful and important to me and talking about the strategy behind the list that people were about to go knock or call, who was on the list and why we thought it was important to invest in them. It helped set expectations of who they might find on the doors, but also give them a lot of context of why this matters. Folks asked questions and were really into it, I think it made a difference in people's experiences on the doors. People came back from it so fired up about what their conversations added up to. You know, X conversations means X voters for a progressive city council majority, and that will have an impact on the city of Minneapolis. Or I talked to X renters in this landlord's building and with those people, the renters can do some sort of collective direct action against this landlord. They're really able to feel the impact of what they did. And so I'm really glad I did that, that felt very powerful to me. It really grounds people in the work and helps motivate them. You have a rough conversation on the doors or whatever, but you have this bigger vision behind that: This is the world we're building. This is how what we're doing is adding up to that. Even that negative conversation got this person to engage a little bit differently in the world, potentially. Since we're deep canvassing, especially.

MOLLY What are the different parts of the canvassing program? If people are out on the doors or on the phones, is it only for electoral campaigns or is it part of other work that TakeAction is doing as well?

RIVER We canvass year-round, so our conversations are grounded in issues and organizing, with conversations taking an electoral bent as we approach election season. For example, we canvass in Duluth around tenants rights, where we have an organizer organizing a tenants union. DyAnna’s team has been hitting the doors nonstop, finding renters and talking to them, getting them involved.

We've got Lindsay in Hennepin County organizing a team of parents and caregivers. Right now she is door-to-door canvassing, using a list I gave her, and also just going to houses with toys in the yard. She’s gathering their lived experiences and stories and feedback in this survey that is leading towards an issue-cutting process for her team.

And then we do issue canvassing for legislative stuff. So coming up, we're doing a project in collaboration with the teachers union in St. Paul because their contract bargaining is this year. That'll be canvassing around a Green New Deal for schools, which I'm really excited about.

We are also working with a coalition doing deep canvassing that challenges white Christian gender norms, the way that evangelical Christian white culture is so dominant, especially around queer and trans people. Our canvass is going to be about trans kids and their rights in Minnesota, helping people in Minnesota see very clearly through the bullshit that is the anti-trans kiddo narrative, and help them ground in their values instead. So an inoculation canvass, kind of.

And then we're doing ceasefire [Palestine solidarity] organizing. We've been doing ceasefire stuff since October [2023], calling on elected officials to publicly call for a ceasefire. We've been putting pressure on Amy Klobuchar, Tina Smith, and then the Minneapolis city council ceasefire resolution.

MOLLY Are you involved in figuring out the canvassing universes and lists and turf cutting for all of these projects?

RIVER Yeah. Very deeply with electoral stuff but pretty deeply with organizers too. 

MOLLY So you’re talking to people about the data strategy, bringing the work that you're doing to the people who are doing on-the-ground work. What other kinds of feedback have organizers or members of the base reflected to you about how they feel about that, how that impacts them?

RIVER People have said it really helps them put into context the work we're doing. Like, yeah, it feels small to go knock a block. I mean, it's a huge thing to do, but it does kind of feel small. It really helps people to see that it's adding up towards a bigger picture. I've heard from volunteers and from organizers that it's helped people take it very seriously, and feel the investment and care that we have for people. If you mark them as follow-up, they're getting a follow-up. We care about every conversation that you've had. If you leave a note in the VAN [the voter database used by most progressive organizations and campaigns] on someone's profile, River will find it.

MOLLY Which is not a small thing in the VAN, to find all of the notes.

RIVER Someone cares, someone has got their eyes on it! Someone's paying attention. We are going to follow up with every single one of those leads and every single conversation matters. We're going to see if those people voted, and we're going to invite them to more things, and we're going to follow up with them next year about voting. People have really appreciated that it's not just that, if they talk to this person, they talk to them once and then we never see them again. It’s an investment. We're in our community, we're really in it with these people.

MOLLY That seems unusual, especially with electoral work.

RIVER Yeah, that's very fair. I think our deep canvass scripts lend themselves to a lot of story sharing and emotional connection and help us get to that place too. So it's not all the data! But getting everyone up on the follow-up list and all that, that is truly a task.

Are We On Track to Change the World?

MOLLY Okay, tell me about this culture of hypotheses. What’s the deal?

RIVER Oh, I love it so much. Shout out to Martha Grant [Director of Product Strategy, Action Network], who was a consultant with us years and years ago, who introduced this idea that's just taken off in terms of TakeAction’s culture. It’s a pretty simple framework. If we do X (and then we describe the work that we're going to do for the year or the quarter, or whatever time frame), we expect Y results. 

An example is helpful. One that we often use versions of for voter work is: if we do a full voter outreach contact, say we do a deep canvas conversation, we do a follow up, we send them a digital ad, we send them mail—whatever we define our full treatment as—then we expect a certain percentage of them to vote and we expect a certain number of voters to move up the voter ladder towards more active engagement. Or we expect a certain number of people to opt into our base and to start receiving our emails and texts and political education and showing up to things.

So it's just very clear for us. We've clearly defined what we're doing and we can measure it. We’re going to make sure we actually did what we said we were going to do, and then see where the results vary from our expectations and ask, why is it different? What are we learning about the world, and the power that we have in the world? 

It’s a really effective way to hold folks accountable to doing what they said they would do. And it makes the work very visible for us. Are we building the power that we think we are? Is the outcome what we expected? If it is, if it’s awesome, what parts of our program helped us get there? If it isn't, where's the gap, what are we missing? Where can we identify a place where we can change something and build more power?

It honors the work that's happening. We had a bajillion convos and a bajillion contacts and a bunch of one-to-ones—that’s a bunch of work that went into the results that doesn't get recognized, and we want to make that visible. And also make visible the outcomes of our work that maybe we didn't even expect, or that were larger than we expected. It’s just really cool to be able to see that we've met our goals and had an impact, and the impact is something we strategically picked as important to changing the landscape of Minnesota. Not just having voter conversations for the hell of it. We pick our hypotheses based on our strategic objective and how we want to see Minnesota change—in the next couple years is usually the timeframe. We can ask, do we have a voter base of however many thousand people it will take to decisively win progressive majorities in the state legislature and city governments, to win the types of policies that our people need to live? It feels very much like: Are we on track to change the world?

This is one of the ways that I see data as essential to power-building. I'm biased because I'm a data person. But we have to be able to hold ourselves accountable, to see what we're doing and the impact it's having. I need it to believe in what we're doing, to physically, tangibly see our impact on the world. We are literally moving Minnesota towards the vision we have.

MOLLY I’m caught by what you just said - that you need this, to be able to see that what you're doing matters. Do you find that the culture of hypotheses also helps you stay in the work? Does it make it more sustainable for you to do what you're doing?

RIVER That's a great question. I think so. You know, sometimes I'm tired and I feel burned out, but I rarely waver in hope. I know a lot of people leave because they're tired of it all, because they lose hope or lose faith that what we're doing is working. To me, that's what hypotheses do. They're hope and faith and belief in ourselves. We're doing the right thing, we can see the impact it's having.

If I get tired, I'm like, I'm going to rest and come back. We still have hypotheses to finish.

MOLLY  That was really helpful, your walkthrough of what a hypothesis looks like around electoral work, what the “full treatment” would be and what the organization expects to happen if that is accomplished. Are there other hypotheses going on outside of electoral work? I'm wondering specifically about the longer term base-building work. 

RIVER Yeah, I am most deeply in the voter numbers, so that’s where my brain always goes first. But yes, every organizer has their own hypothesis.

For the leader team, the team Katie [Base-Building Director Katie Blanchard] supervises which includes all of our organizers, we have metrics. We have the number of leaders leading other people, the number of members and roles, the number of active team members we want in each team. Power is people, so that's where we're starting with our hypotheses for this year. I'm building a dashboard for Katie's team to track their progress on all of this: one-to-ones, propositions, agitations, being able to make that really visible. Look at all this amazing power-building work that this team is doing.

MOLLY Okay, just for my brain, those outcomes—number of members and roles, number of people leading others—those would be the second half of the hypothesis. If we do X, we expect Y to happen. Those outcomes are Y. And then X would be like, if we do this number of agitations, one-on-one meetings, whatever the other stuff that you're tracking in the dashboard is, then we expect that we will end up with these outcomes.

RIVER Yes.

MOLLY That's so cool.

RIVER I'm very excited. I'm screaming a little. My neighbors might be like, oh my god, River, calm down.

MOLLY But have they heard about hypotheses? Have they though??

Data is How We Know We Are Power-Building

MOLLY Ok, the specifics are so inspiring and helpful, and in many ways that’s where my heart is with this project. But the big picture can be helpful too. In terms of wrap-up thoughts, anything else on your mind in terms of why your work feels important to the power-building goals at TakeAction?

RIVER I mean, data is how we know that we are power-building. Not to make sweeping statements! It's also the relationships. It's also some of the less measurable things. But this is the measurable way that we know that we're building power. And because it's measurable, it is the most visible, often, way that we're building power.

MOLLY Not to make sweeping statements… but also to be clear! Without data, how do we know?

RIVER [Laughing] I know people do power build without data, but I don't understand.

It helps us be super strategic and effective. I mean, we always evaluate based on feelings and how people are feeling about their work and everything, but we also evaluate based on the quantitative, on very tangible numbers. I talked about the example of Aurin and Soren, but there's so many examples where we can make changes in our work and be more effective because we have the numbers. 

Got an idea for a future post, someone I should talk to, or feedback of any kind? Email me at molly@tallgrassco.com! I'd love to hear from you.