"So, what do you do?"
Two weekends ago, I returned to my old stomping ground for my good friend Joe's wedding in Newport, Rhode Island. In addition to being a great chance to reunite with my high school friends (who may or may not spill wine on themselves less than halfway through the evening) it also served as an opportunity for me to describe my new profession to both friends and strangers alike. So, naturally when people asked me the aforementioned question as to what I do, I had a response handy and ready to go.
(blank stare)
Now, that's not to say I was trying to be rude. However, it dawned upon me that I had yet to truly define how I identify myself in my new line of work. When I taught for seven years, I was a teacher and there was never any question about how I describe my line of work. Initially, during my senior year of college, we had a guest speaker who insisted that we were "educators" rather than teachers but I personally thought that idea was dumb so I made a conscientious effort to always refer to myself as a teacher. Yet with my new job, I have come to realize that I don't have a good answer as to how I refer to my new chosen profession.
To understand my situation, I feel I should explain the daily ins and outs of my job to provide context for exactly what it is I do. Starting off, my official job title is an assistant director. Essentially that is what I do. However, both the daily job tasks as well as the field itself merit further discussion and it is because of this that I am hesitant to simply refer to myself as an assistant director for a non-profit.
The organization I work for is, in fact, a nation-wide progressive non-profit organization. It's part of a federation of non-profits that work on both environmental as well as public interest issues. The environmental part is fairly self-explanatory: These organization work on a variety of environmental issues like conservation, alternative energy, and banning unsafe practices among others. The public interest part is a little more involved, but what it comes down to is acting on the part of consumers whose own public interests are being drowned out on the national stage, usually by big money and unresponsive politicians elected to represent them. The public interest groups we work with work on such issues as public health, public safety, and closing tax loopholes among other things.
That's the broader picture of the organization I work for. To be more specific, I work for one of three national call centers that work on behalf of these organization. The way I describe it is that these organizations have outsourced their work to us so they can use their time and resources to canvass new members, do research, do public awareness events, and hold press conferences alerting the media to their work. Each office has certain regions or "turf" as it is called that they are in charge of managing. Out of our California office, we are in charge of California groups, but we also call members in New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, Georgia, and Iowa. In addition to these states, we will also call for some nationwide groups that reach out to members in nearly all fifty states.
The kind of calling we do also varies, depending on our clients' needs. For the most part, we deal with memberships. We renew members, try to convince older members to become involved again, and touch base with people who have been canvassed and encourage them to become members as well. In addition to this, we will also call for some of the national groups and will try to solicit brand new members who are members of similar environmental or consumer advocacy groups. Besides membership calling, we will also use voting registration information to gather signatures for various petitions that our partner groups may be working on. Lastly, in a close election we may use our limited political sway to make calls to our members encouraging them to support a specific candidate whose views align closely to those of one of our member organizations.
So, as you can see there is definitely a large telemarketing aspect to my job. Especially since I am on the phones with other callers on a near daily basis. However, it's not truly telemarketing as we're not simply selling a product or even a membership as it is. The goal of our calling it to build support for our organizations and to help them win campaigns. All the groups we call for are non-profits and do not have the power or financial resources to lobby on Capitol Hill. Their strength comes from the support from their members. Our goal is to get as many people as possible involved in the campaigns and talking about these issues so that when it becomes time for a state or local legislature to vote on these issues, our members will have enough political clout to help convince their elected representative to vote on their behalf.
However, the calling is only a small part of what I do on a daily basis.
As a director, I am expected to call. However, there also is a lot of addition work that goes along with the "director" portion of my official job title. I'm involved in hiring and firing employees as well as conducting pay evaluations for current employees as well. I conduct group overviews and do in-person interviews with perspective employees and I help train and monitor recently hired staff. Each day, I start up the calling software, I produce reports analyzing how our callers are calling, and I help manage which groups we call for using that same software. In addition, there are also random tasks around the office that I assist with including payroll, printing pledge cards and reminders, sealing and stamping envelopes, assisting with supervisor notes, and setting up the room before the callers arrive.
In other words, there's a lot going on.
And yet, I still don't have a good answer for what I do. I feel that that even saying that "I'm an assistant director for a non-profit" doesn't do the job justice. However, at the same time I don't think I can identify as being a "political activist" although that's what I feel like on a near daily basis. I also think that by saying "I work for a political non-profit" is too vague. So, I'm essentially left with the same conundrum that I was faced with two weeks ago in that I still don't have a simple answer for what I do. However, at least now I have had enough reflection time to come up with a much better response than a simple blank stare.
"What do I do? The better question is what don't I do!"
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