Annie Tsai

The first campaign I worked on was five years ago and I would describe it as being cordial, friendly, respectful. It was, dare I say, a nice experience. We knocked on over 4,000 doors between San Mateo and Foster City, had incredible conversations, did so much listening and learning, and met several people who I am grateful to call friends today. 

This time around, there were so many more dynamics at play. 

I had been engaged in and following the affordable housing development pipeline in San Mateo County for several years now, so I had certainly seen the impact that community pushback  could have on timelines and ultimately giving people access to stable living environments. However, I wasn’t sure what to expect from an intensity standpoint in San Mateo, as I wrote last week that like most working parents, my husband and I were embroiled in our own battle much of 2020 trying to survive both working full time while essentially homeschooling our then 6 year old and preparing for our second.

So, stepping into land use in a city where the same land use policy has been playing on repeat for three decades seemed like it might be an interesting and dare I say, nice experience. Overwhelmingly, it’s been an equally wonderful experience, with several important lessons. 

The biggest lesson that continues to be reinforced is that it takes a lot of specialized skills to execute well. Being the smartest or best in the room has never served anyone well, and it was no different here. We had volunteers who were only canvassing because they were great at doing that. People were only engaging online because it was a space where they shined. Volunteers were great at coordinating others, installing signs, or working on content strategy, so that’s what they did. The list goes on. There is not one person who is going to have the skillset nor the time to do all of these things, and we were fortunate that so many people raised their hands to pitch in. 

Something I knew would matter but perhaps didn’t expect was how important technology would be. Five years ago, I was canvassing with paper printed out on clipboards. The past few years, nearly everyone around here seems to be using pretty affordable apps to canvas and collect and aggregate real-time voter intent. 

Surprisingly, search engine optimization was absolutely critical given 40% of our website visitors clicked into our website through organic search engine results. As I shared earlier this summer, recycling letters like “T” for ballot measures creates big problems for search engines, and even bigger problems when you are working on a three month campaign. Getting to page one in organic search results for multiple keywords can be near impossible in that timeframe. Thankfully, content and search optimization is something that I’ve played with for years, so it was a really fun late night project to tinker around with until we got to an average top three  placement on page one for target keywords. Design and social media content were the other big impact opportunities, with 36% coming to the website directly and 19% of site visitors clicking into our website from a piece of organic social content. 

Not the last, but my most important lesson – we seek perfection in a system designed by imperfect beings that cannot predict the future. Our founding fathers knew that perfection was an ongoing pursuit because the goal post was going to keep moving no matter how hard anyone can try to keep things the same. Our region is increasingly dependent on each other to work together and solve the big challenges we are facing as a society, and this should be seen as an opportunity to move faster, not handcuffs that hold us back.

My friend once told me I was too naive to be in politics. She always thought there were ulterior motives lurking behind every decision. Believing in and designing for mutual benefit, whether it’s immediate or further down the line, doesn’t feel naive to me. It feels like good business.

What my friend doesn’t get is that I’m not “in” politics. I’m a mom with a job and two kids that happens to always have had this pull to leave things a little better than I found them. All of the volunteers who spend endless hours away from their families to do the many things needed to advocate for something on the ballot today? Same. Regardless of what happens in the election, voters will have spoken and the team stands together, proud of having gone to bat for a future that so many struggle to realize today.

So is it naivete, or is it hope? Let’s call it hope.