Great causes to support, but not the best treatment of workers.
Pros
Decent base pay with the opportunity for sizable bonuses. Somewhat-flexible work schedule. Awesome environmental causes to support. Cool coworkers, relaxed work environment. Quick to get hired and start training. Teaches you many important life skills like: how to deal with rejection, how to ask for things that you're unlikely to get, how to manufacture the confidence and happiness needed to talk to random people, how to maintain persuasive eye-contact, etc. Canvassing, especially during the summer, allows you to be active and outdoors everyday.
Cons
The job itself won't really help you to get very far in life, unless you want to be a local grassroots campaign organizer (nothing wrong with that, btw). Management doesn't help you to succeed; if you're not making quota, they just blame you and give vague suggestions like "be more confident", "try to target higher", "work on your close", and other things that you are already doing. Your base pay is near the minimum wage (varies per state) during the 3 week training period, which you're only going to make it out of by sheer luck due to quota requirements. You have to raise a certain dollar amount each night while canvassing, or you're let go. However, the amount that people chose to donate is largely out of your control; as the amount of wealthy households, households that agree with CWA's campaigns, households that aren't busy doing something else, etc. aren't evenly distributed between canvassers. Once you make staff, your pay still fluctuates with the dollar amount you receive in donations. This means that your pay partly determined by luck, which makes it difficult to budget with and just isn't the best thing to put workers through. You're trained to recite a memorized pitch, which most people notice; creativity is rather frowned upon for a progressive organization. Work environment can be juvenile at times; employees are rewarded everyday based on donations, signatures, etc. the got the previous day, like getting gold stars in elementary school. Not only does this waste time, but it's annoying when you know you're working hard, but can't convert turn people into environmental activists at their doorsteps. The entire staff is afraid of offending anyone or being offended, which makes being genuine with your coworkers difficult. Hours are 2-10PM, which can make balancing work and life difficult for people who like to back-load their days. It also means that you don't get to eat dinner until after 10:30 PM everyday if you have any commute.
