Wel­come to our eighth install­ment of NPI at Net­roots Nation 2022, a spe­cial lim­it­ed pod­cast series record­ed live from the David L. Lawrence Con­ven­tion Cen­ter in Pitts­burgh. NPI staff jour­neyed to Steel City this past week to par­tic­i­pate in the nation’s largest annu­al gath­er­ing of pro­gres­sive activists.

As part of our con­fer­ence cov­er­age, we’re bring­ing you a series of con­ver­sa­tions with key move­ment lead­ers and elect­ed officials.

In this install­ment of NPI@NN, we’re hon­ored to be joined by Saman­tha Bouch­er, Co-Founder and CEO of Shire. Press play below to lis­ten to the audio, or read the tran­script below.

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Read the transcript

(Note: this tran­script has been edit­ed light­ly for clarity) 

CAYA: Wel­come to NPI at Net­roots Nation 2022, a spe­cial lim­it­ed pod­cast series from the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute, record­ed live from the David L. Lawrence Con­ven­tion Cen­ter in Pitts­burgh, Penn­syl­va­nia. I’m your host, Caya Berndt. We are glad to have you with us! For this install­ment, we are excit­ed to be joined by Saman­tha Bouch­er, founder of Shire.

Saman­tha, thank you for join­ing us!

SAMANTHA: Thanks for hav­ing me! 

CAYA: Yeah! So, can you tell us a lit­tle bit about your­self and what it is that you do? 

SAMANTHA: Sure. So, I orig­i­nal­ly have a back­ground in tech. I’ve worked with a num­ber of tech star­tups over the years. And then, when I moved back home to South­west Ten­nessee, I am a trans woman, and I got involved very heav­i­ly with with local orga­niz­ing on the streets, but also at the city coun­cil lev­el, and, like, local pol­i­cy work­ing groups, and orga­niz­ing to try to like win civ­il rights reform at the local and state lev­el there.

And I end­ed up being the first open­ly trans cam­paign man­ag­er on a fed­er­al race in 2018 when I man­aged a con­gres­sion­al race in my home dis­trict, and then man­aged a U.S. Sen­ate cam­paign in Iowa in 2020. And I also worked on a num­ber of oth­er cam­paigns in the gen­er­al. So yeah, I’ve kin­da got a back­ground as a tech­nol­o­gist, but also as a cam­paign man­ag­er and organizer. 

So, Shire was sort of the brain­child of that combination. 

CAYA: So tell us about Shire. What is it?

SAMANTHA: Sure! So what we are build­ing is real­ly the first dig­i­tal office for pro­gres­sive cam­paigns and causes. 

What we mean by that is, right now, the way that, his­tor­i­cal­ly, vol­un­teer­ing has been done for pro­gres­sive cam­paigns, or cam­paigns in gen­er­al is: you walk in the front door of an office some­where… in your local cam­paign office, right? 

And there’s a guy with a clip­board there and he’s like, “Hey, nice to meet you. Like, let’s be friends, you wan­na make some phone calls, you wan­na go knock on doors? What do you wan­na do? And that expe­ri­ence, espe­cial­ly when it’s done well, is trans­for­ma­tive in its com­mu­ni­ty build­ing and it builds rela­tion­ships, right?

But espe­cial­ly after the COVID pan­dem­ic hit, but also just in gen­er­al, there’s been a move towards more dig­i­tal and remote orga­niz­ing, where we wan­na be able to have vol­un­teers, no mat­ter where they are or what their cir­cum­stances are, get togeth­er online and do the same kind of work.

But right now, the tools that exist to do that are designed for cor­po­ra­tions, for com­pa­nies. You have tools like Slack, you have tools that are, that are real­ly meant for when you’re an employ­ee somewhere. 

And they have such a huge learn­ing curve for a lot of peo­ple that if you have a less tech-savvy vol­un­teer, often­times they can get over­whelmed and quit as a result. Or not even get start­ed. So fix­ing that is super impor­tant, because we know that there are cam­paigns out there, like here in Penn­syl­va­nia with the John Fet­ter­man race, where the con­trol of the U.S. Sen­ate hangs in the balance. 

They need all the help they can get! And it does­n’t have to just be peo­ple that are here in Pitts­burgh, or in Philadel­phia, or in Penn­syl­va­nia, like any­body across the coun­try or around the world should be able to come help make phone calls, and send text mes­sages and do that sort of thing remote­ly. But the tech just has­n’t been there to sup­port that yet.

CAYA: Okay, so this is not only a plat­form for orga­niz­ers being able to con­nect with each oth­er, but it’s also a plat­form that would allow orga­niz­ers from oth­er states to help a cam­paign, even if they’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly in the same state?

SAMANTHA: Right, exact­ly! So there’s a lot of dif­fer­ent tools out there that you can use remote­ly to vol­un­teer for campaigns. 

There’s things like tex­ting tools where you can send text mes­sages to vot­ers. There’s phone bank­ing tools where you can call vot­ers and have con­ver­sa­tions with them for the cam­paign or the can­di­date. And you can do that from any­where. But the prob­lem is, how do you get con­nect­ed with the cam­paign in the first place? How do you get trained? How do you build that com­mu­ni­ty and not feel alone? And I think that’s the piece that we, as pro­gres­sives, and as the left, in our cam­paigns have not been doing very good job at.

It also has a sig­nif­i­cant impor­tance from an acces­si­bil­i­ty per­spec­tive, because we talk a real­ly good game in pro­gres­sive spaces about acces­si­bil­i­ty, but not every­body can go to a local cam­paign office. Like, I expe­ri­ence some chron­ic health issues as a result of long COVID. I used to be able to be go out [in the] out­doors all day long, in the streets. But we’ve got a lot of folks that have health issues or con­cerns like that, or they had acces­si­bil­i­ty trou­bles, or they’re get­ting old­er and they can’t nec­es­sar­i­ly make it out all the time anymore.

So it’s not just about the acces­si­bil­i­ty in that regard, but also loca­tion. So if you’re in a deep red Wyoming dis­trict some­where, or you’re in down­town Man­hat­tan, maybe you don’t feel like that local race is real­ly where your efforts are gonna be best used, or maybe you don’t even have a local can­di­date that you can sup­port, for some of those seats like gov­er­nor or Con­gress, or what have you. And Shire is gonna give those folks a way to be engaged, to help the move­ment, and to build com­mu­ni­ty with each oth­er from across the country. 

CAYA: Ear­li­er, off the mic, you had said that you had done quite a bit of research, or you had been involved with research, about vol­un­teer­ing, specif­i­cal­ly why vol­un­teers stay and why they leave?

SAMANTHA: Yeah. So back a few years ago now, the cor­po­ra­tion for Nashville and Com­mu­ni­ty Ser­vice, it’s this con­gres­sion­al­ly char­tered orga­ni­za­tion that runs pro­grams like Ameri­corp all across the coun­try, folks like Feed­ing Amer­i­ca, all those dif­fer­ent con­gres­sion­al­ly fund­ed pro­grams, they did a lot of research on what makes vol­un­teers quit, right? What makes vol­un­teers stay? What makes them wan­na be a part of some­thing, and what makes them leave? 

And they found, in that report, that the top three rea­sons that vol­un­teers will leave an orga­ni­za­tion is feel­ing under­uti­lized. So not hav­ing enough to do, not feel­ing like they’re mak­ing a dif­fer­ence, right? Two, the envi­ron­ment they’re in, not sup­port­ing their efforts. So things like the tools that they’re using or not hav­ing access to the resources that they need to actu­al­ly accom­plish that mis­sion. That’s anoth­er rea­son that peo­ple get frus­trat­ed and quit. 

And the third rea­son is a sense that the envi­ron­ment is imper­son­al, or cold, or dis­tant, or not hav­ing the abil­i­ty to have that com­mu­ni­ty and a sense of con­nec­tion with peo­ple. And I think as pro­gres­sives, espe­cial­ly in our polit­i­cal cam­paigns, right now we are nail­ing all three of those in a bad way, in the sense that we are doing a bad job at engag­ing peo­ple and mak­ing them feel like they have per­son­al con­nec­tions and com­mu­ni­ty. We’re not doing a great job at pro­vid­ing them tools and resources to do the work. And also, we’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly uti­liz­ing peo­ple the most effec­tive­ly either, because it’s a brave, new world of remote, and peo­ple are not quite sure how to do that just yet.

So that’s real­ly impor­tant because, like I said, it real­ly mat­ters at the end of the day, espe­cial­ly to these races, like John Fet­ter­man’s here in Penn­syl­va­nia, because remote, real­ly good dis­trib­uted cam­paigns – there’s great exam­ples: Beto in 2018, the Bernie 2016 and 2020 cam­paigns, they did amaz­ing jobs at this, but the tech­nol­o­gy that they were using was just duct taped and hacked togeth­er. It was sort of not real­ly effi­cient. And they had to kind of fill those gaps with peo­ple pow­er that could have oth­er­wise been used to talk to vot­ers, or build those rela­tion­ships. And so that’s why we’re try­ing to make things eas­i­er for them. 

CAYA: Yeah. So can you tell me about what influ­enced the devel­op­ment of Shire, and what real­ly sets it apart from oth­er platforms?

SAMANTHA: Total­ly. So, it’s real­ly a first of its kind in the polit­i­cal space. There real­ly isn’t any­thing of this nature that is specif­i­cal­ly built for polit­i­cal cam­paigns and orga­ni­za­tions. And one of the rea­sons that’s impor­tant is because polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions work real­ly dif­fer­ent­ly from your aver­age cor­po­ra­tion, or even small busi­ness­es. They’re gonna go from maybe a few staff and a hand­ful of vol­un­teers to a few thou­sand, or more, overnight. 

And as the elec­tion gets clos­er, they start ramp­ing up their efforts, and build­ing part­ner­ships. And so the scal­ing that hap­pens so fast means that tools like Slack, for exam­ple… with the Bernie Sanders cam­paign in 2020, they had 72,000 dig­i­tal vol­un­teers in their vol­un­teer Slack. And they used the free ver­sion of Slack, which had a mes­sage cap of 30,000 at a time. 

So you would send a mes­sage there, and then like six hours, or a day or two lat­er, it would be gone, because they have that cap, because Slack is like, $8 per per­son. If they would’ve had to pay for that, and got­ten the full fea­tures they need­ed, it would’ve cost them like, half a mil­lion dol­lars a month, which…

CAYA: If you’re not real­ly get­ting a return on invest­ment, in terms of votes, you’re just throw­ing mon­ey away. 

SAMANTHA: Exact­ly. And it’s not just that. Slack has a real­ly intense learn­ing curve for peo­ple that are not tech-savvy. Its not real­ly designed to…like, let’s say how social media plat­forms are designed, like Face­book, et cetera, where they real­ly want peo­ple to be able to under­stand that design sys­tem, and know where to go, and how to inter­act with it. Peo­ple have learned how to do that for 15-plus years, right? Even old­er folks are on Face­book at huge rates. 

So, Shire is designed from the ground up with that in mind, to feel, in the inter­face, more like a social media plat­form. The things that peo­ple are used to doing, to send mes­sages or texts to each oth­er, the things that peo­ple are used to see­ing on their news feeds, that is the kind of design think­ing that we have to apply to these tools to make it easy for peo­ple to under­stand how to use them with­out hav­ing to spend time to deal with that learn­ing curve.

CAYA: So, when can we expect to see this pro­gram launched? 

SAMANTHA: We’re work­ing as hard as we can to get it out before the midterms this year. We’re shoot­ing for a Sep­tem­ber launch, so we can get that out to cam­paigns that need it. We’ve got a wait list of close to a hun­dred cam­paigns and orga­ni­za­tions now, includ­ing John Fet­ter­man here in Penn­syl­va­nia! And also a cou­ple state Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties. We’ve got the Greens Par­ty from New Zealand! We’ve chat­ted with them a bit, it was crazy. That just shows you how ubiq­ui­tous this prob­lem is. Every­thing down to a local city coun­cil race on our wait list, all the way up to entire nation­al polit­i­cal par­ties, are try­ing to fix this issue.

And we’re so excit­ed to be able to join the fight and help the move­ment in that way. And we’re real­ly excit­ed that we actu­al­ly just won the Best New Tool cat­e­go­ry at the pitch com­pe­ti­tion [New Tools Show­case] here at Net­roots Nation.

CAYA: Congratulations!

SAMANTHA: So yeah, it’s just a ubiq­ui­tous prob­lem and every­body gets why it is a problem. 

CAYA: Yeah. That must be such a good feel­ing, see­ing so much pos­i­tive feed­back from your idea already. 

SAMANTHA: Yeah, def­i­nite­ly. And I mean, you know, and I think what we’re doing now is impor­tant, but it’s also only the begin­ning. We also know that there are oth­er chal­lenges, you know, as a cam­paign man­ag­er myself, I know the things that I strug­gled with because there weren’t tools to do these things. 

So we’re gonna be doing things like build­ing a learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tem, so cam­paigns can actu­al­ly build train­ings and eas­i­ly give those to any­one, right? They don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to be on a Zoom call, espe­cial­ly if you’re deaf or hard of hear­ing, it’s an acces­si­bil­i­ty issue. But if a cam­paign can build a real­ly easy-to-use train­ing work­flow that’s in the same appli­ca­tion, it’s gonna be real­ly easy for them to get peo­ple trained up and get them access to the knowl­edge that they need to go out, and talk to vot­ers, and use these oth­er tools that are out there.

CAYA: Thank you very much. So we are just about at time here, so before we wrap up the pod­cast, I just wan­na ask you a ques­tion that I ask every­body at the end of our inter­views. There’s a lot of real­ly freaky stuff going on out there! It can be… there’s a lot of uncer­tain­ty. So dur­ing these gloomi­er times, what’s bring­ing you joy right now? 

SAMANTHA: What a ques­tion… I’ll tell you what, one of the things that I think is so amaz­ing about hav­ing been here, and also hav­ing been in the Are­na con­fer­ence back in June, in Austin, is, you know, we’ve all been, a lot of us, have been fight­ing this fight for years. And espe­cial­ly dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, we’ve been in our own bed­rooms, or our home offices, doing all of this real­ly hard work with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly see­ing each other. 

And I’ll tell you, get­ting in a room full of 4,000 oth­er peo­ple that are work­ing just as hard as I know I am, and my team are, to advance the move­ment, to pro­tect, espe­cial­ly as a queer per­son, to pro­tect our civ­il rights and try to be that bul­wark against this fas­cist out­growth that we’ve seen, that is….that’s real­ly ener­giz­ing. It’s refresh­ing. It feels like we’ve talked about, right? 

There’s not real­ly a great way right now to build that sort of com­mu­ni­ty online nec­es­sar­i­ly. So we feel, I think, as cam­paign orga­niz­ers and even tech­nol­o­gists, like this is an incred­i­ble expe­ri­ence, and it’s some­thing that we walk away from feel­ing juiced up and ready to go to the next fight.

CAYA: Yeah. Thank you very much. I def­i­nite­ly agree. 

SAMANTHA: The only thing I’d share with folks out there is that, if you’re work­ing on a cam­paign or you’re vol­un­teer­ing for one, or even if you’re just run­ning a local orga­niz­ing effort, for any rea­son, any kind of non­prof­it or advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion, we wan­na help you if you’re on the pro­gres­sive side of the move­ment. Our web­site is at getshire.com. It’s S‑H-I-R‑E.

It’s a fun ref­er­ence, but getshire.com…

CAYA: Lord of the Rings….

SAMANTHA: Cot­tagecore! But the oth­er thing is that from now until Sep­tem­ber 15th, we’re actu­al­ly doing an equi­ty crowd­fund­ing cam­paign, because one of the things that I’m pas­sion­ate about is mak­ing sure that we’re in this for the long haul, we’re in it for the move­ment, not to sell it off and make a quick buck in a year or two. So we’re doing this equi­ty invest­ment, you can actu­al­ly invest mon­ey and own a piece of Shire! 

The min­i­mum invest­ment is only a hun­dred dol­lars, and that’s through Sep­tem­ber 15th. I think we’ve already got about thir­ty grand that folks have invest­ed from around the move­ment so far. We have to get to at least fifty in order to make that crowd­fund­ing work. And then beyond that, we’re real­ly excit­ed to share the own­er­ship with peo­ple who actu­al­ly care about what we’re doing.

CAYA: Thank you very much! And I will drop the infor­ma­tion for both of those things in our post on the Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate when this is published.

SAMANTHA: Awe­some, yeah! So that’s getshire.com and then you can go to wefund.com/getshire and, yeah. Check us out, say hello! 

CAYA: Thank you very much. That was Saman­tha Bouch­er with Shire on this install­ment of NPI Net­roots Nation 2022! Join us next time for our oth­er fan­tas­tic inter­views. For NPI, I’m Caya Berndt.

To learn more about Shire, lis­ten­ers can vis­it www.getshire.com. Investors and indi­vid­u­als can donate or show sup­port here.