Q&A with Nick Knudsen, DemCast
An online grassroots activist on how he built a distributed network for messaging & content sharing
DemCast is a distributed network of online grassroots activists who share content and strategic messaging across the internet. They use DM groups, text messages, email blasts, Facebook groups, and Slack to coordinate online messages for campaigns and causes up and down the ballot and across the progressive movement. They raise money, drive volunteer shifts, make topics trend, share content, and in the 2020 election cycle, they had enormous success. We spoke with DemCast’s founder, Nick Knudsen, to hear his thoughts on why organic content sharing and message distribution is important, and get a peek behind the scenes of his operation.
Kyle at FWIW:
Tell me about the beginning of DemCast and why you decided to start it.
Nick at DemCast:
So, I hadn't really been involved online previous to Trump's election, but like many people who are currently in the movement, he radicalized me. I started some social media accounts, got on Twitter. I've always been a writer, so I started writing some blog posts and guest posts places, got a few things published, and just kind of started to play around in the digital space. It was where a lot of the conversation was happening, and where a lot of the anti-Trump #resistance efforts started to come together. People started to come together in online spaces.
I became a digital activist, and through the 2018 midterms, I really tried to push support for House candidates that needed to win so that we could retake Congress. In that election we tried to empower grassroots voices, people who were active in local Indivisible groups around the country, doing good work, creating good content, and I wanted to make sure that their stuff was able to get seen.
I realized that a really great way to get good, local, effective messaging out there was just by intentionally amplifying it on social media and I started to network with people who wanted to do the same thing.
After the 2018 midterms and we retook the Hosue, I got together with a few of those people who I'd been working with online, and we decided that there was a huge empty space that wasn't being filled. We kind of came up with the idea of DemCast as a way to drive narratives online, to energize, inform, and empower our base, and to fight disinformation being spread by the right-wing media apparatus 24/7.
We believe that the people themselves are the best messengers for our movement, and our goal at DemCast (which we founded in August of 2019) is to empower the people to use their social media feeds to relay strategic messaging. We curate content and media, and then we package it to make it as easy as possible for people to share with their networks online. And there's so many different networks online. Some are highly localized, and some are sort of more national narrative networks. It depends on what platform you're on. So in a nutshell, that's how I connected with this totally new and random career that I never thought I could do.
Kyle at FWIW:
There's some really good stuff in there. Can you talk a little bit about the sort of digital infrastructure that you all use to communicate with your followers, your members, or your network at large, whether it be email or Slack or DM or Twitter or Facebook groups?
Nick at DemCast:
Yep. It's all of the above (laughs). It’s a different strategy for different platforms. We’re asking people to volunteer digitally, so we bring them together, create community, create energy, so that people feel like they're working on a team to push narratives and distribute content.
We engage people where they want and need to be engaged. So we use sort of every communication tool that we can. Initially, when people sign up with us, we get their emails so that we can send out information that way. We also collect their phone numbers if they’re willing to share them and use texting - we have really good response rates on our social media share campaigns via text.
We engage with people in-platform on Twitter and Facebook - with DM groups and Facebook groups to communicate with people directly on the platforms they spend their time. We recognize some people are just Twitter people, and they just want to engage on Twitter and they want to get your emails and all that. So we decided to use an all of the above strategy, which of course creates some logistical difficulties, pushing things out in so many different ways... But, it leads to the best results.
We use Slack too, which we don't love, and I see the need for, some type of more all-encompassing digital hub maybe in the future.
Kyle at FWIW:
As you said, everybody uses social media differently. Some people just want to log onto Twitter and retweet stuff. So I’m sure it’s difficult to find something that works for everybody. I saw this morning that Demcast has a take-action / content sharing hub for the California recall election, where people can go and customize a whole bunch of different messages and graphics and stuff. Can you talk a little about those types of campaigns? What type of coordinated actions do you think have been some of your most effective at generating shares and pushing messaging out there in a really large way?
Nick at DemCast:
For sure, for the social media toolkits that we use, we work with a company called Speechifai, which is really, really useful. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to participate. Standard social media toolkits that organizations use are typically in a Google doc, where people have to go in and download a graphic and copy and paste something, and then go over to the platform and share it natively. That’s too many steps.
The tools that we use make it a one or two-click process for somebody to share something, and they can share it to multiple social media platforms from the same page. We think that’s a really important innovation and piece of our success as an organization - because people don't want to click 8, 9, 10 times to share something.
Regarding some of the more successful efforts we’ve had - we did some big stuff around impeachment that was really effective at moving content online. Obviously, it didn't sway Congressional Republicans, but I think it did help influence the media narrative. We've also done some of our bigger campaigns since Biden's been in office. We did a “100 days of Biden” campaign that had close to three-quarters of a billion impressions in a four-hour period on Twitter.
Look, we all know Twitter is not always real life and impressions aren't necessarily the most important thing in the world, but those are all real eyeballs seeing progressive messaging and it can really help to impact the media narrative, to engage the base, and make people feel excited about, about the fact that they got out and voted for Biden and that positive things are actually happening.
We’ve also recently been working with the SEIU and some of the folks who really invested in making sure that Democrats invest in home care in the upcoming reconciliation bill. Home care is an issue that touches all of us at some point in our lives - and that's more of a slow burn campaign we’re running. Some of our campaigns make a big splash, try and get a bunch of impressions in a certain period of time. But we also know that messaging is about repetition. So getting consistent talking points in front of people is another thing that we do on a regular basis. Revisiting a campaign once a week for four months is more the strategy with those ones.
Sometimes we want the big splash, and sometimes we just want to put out consistent messaging over time.
One other campaign that was successful was called “Democrats Deliver” - around the beginning of the Biden administration and the first American Rescue Plan bill. That messaging angle has persisted and caught on amongst our network. We see it in the California campaign - sharing how “Newsom delivers.” We want to let everyone know that the people who you elected into office are actually doing the stuff they said they were gonna do.
Kyle at FWIW:
How do you approach either getting strategic messaging or creating your own sort of messaging and content?
Nick at DemCast:
It comes from all over the place. We sometimes consult with people inside the party so that we understand what's coming down the pike and know what the strategic priorities are gonna be. But, we don't think of ourselves and we are not a subsidiary of the Democratic Party - we're definitely a grassroots organization. Most of the work that we do is helping grassroots groups and organizations and trying to lift up their messaging priorities. We just try and work with local folks to lift up whatever it is that they think is gonna help them flip a district, change hearts and minds, or get people out to vote in the local area.
Kyle at FWIW:
What are some of the most effective sort of offline outcomes that you all have driven online actions for?
Nick at DemCast:
We see digital activism as a gateway to other forms of activism. What we saw in 2020 was that a lot of our members who had been kind of keyboard warriors their whole lives, jumping in with Demcast, develop a sense of community, and then take advantage of opportunities to engage in other ways: doing phone banking, text banking, etc. (More, text banking than phone banking with the digital folks, you know, as baby steps, of course) During the 2020 cycle, during the last two months before the election, we were on a concerted basis trying to push out opportunities for phone banking and text banking - not through us, but through other partner organizations.
We would just push out Mobilize (event signup) links and during that short period, we got 12,000 shift signups for the general election, and then another 2000 shift signups for the Georgia runoffs. That's a lot of volunteer hours from real people. That's real people doing real stuff offline. So digital activism isn't just yelling into the wind. It’s helping real people to engage in real ways.
Through our network and just by sharing ActBlue links last year, we raised $1.4 million for candidates and causes. About $1.1 million of that was for over 400 candidates across the country from the state legislative level to Senate races like Warnock and Ossoff, and of course the Biden campaign.
The other $300,000 or so was for groups like Black Voters Matter, New Georgia Project, local Indivisibles, and stuff like that. For fundraising, we found that you can really take advantage of trends online when people are rage tweeting or rage posting about how terrible Republicans are. We try to curate ActBlue funds that give to the places where money’s needed the most, as opposed to places where it's the most cathartic to give. You may really want to unseat a Jim Jordan or somebody like that, but that district is not gonna be flipping blue anytime soon. So we try and steer people toward where they're gonna get more bang for their buck out of their donation.
Kyle at FWIW:
Is there anything else you’d like to mention before we go?
Nick at DemCast:
Something that happened in 2020, we saw platforms like Facebook and Google decide to pull out of political advertising in the months leading up to the election. So suddenly, there were big firms and campaigns who'd built entire strategies around creating content paying to get it in front of eyeballs online, who were then faced with a huge challenge. They couldn't necessarily move that content in the way that they'd wanted to. Some of them came knocking on our door in September and October because they needed a way to move content organically. It was the only option.
The political ad bans underscored I think for a lot of people, the value of a distributed online network of human beings who could move messaging and content.
It became a lot more obvious in the final months of the election. Twitter still doesn't allow political advertising and who knows what other platforms will do as the 2022 and 2024 elections approach. We feel like it's in the best interest of our movement, at least as a fail-safe, but also as a value add to build this kind of network. 🔥
You can learn more about DemCast + support their work here.