The Outreach Team reviews

You will be strung along and tossed aside while trying to work for something you legitimately believe in. I applied for a canvasser role in Bellevue, WA and was accepted sometime in early March, with a start date of March 13th. However this start date was then pushed back by a week over e-mail. Apparently this office was new and they needed some time to figure things out before bringing me on, fine. The week before this new start date I receive a call moving my start date back another week. At this point I was getting suspicious as to whether or not this was even a real opportunity, but they had credentials and an I-9 as well as other onboarding tasks that seemed very legit. I stuck it out for this job because I believed in the cause I would be canvassing for, I stuck it out despite the fact that the start date was then pushed back 2 more times, until it was finally locked in on April 8th. I was given an address to meet the team and was somewhat surprised when it lead me to a library in Bellevue. As it turns out the office was so new as to not even have an office yet, they had rented out a room in the library so we could do our orientation. At this point, because it had been moved back so much, only myself and one other person showed up for the orientation, the other person left during the lunch break, I should have done the same. The pay was not good, basically minimum wage for a grueling job that involved terrible hours and walking all day, and as it turned out, the first week, the "training" would be significantly below minimum wage. You had to meet quota during that week in order to be signed on as a full employee apparently, and that just meant getting three donors. It was now just 4 people, myself and 3 others who were all directors of the project, with me as their sole employee in this non-office, office. From what they had said about their success in the area, that should be a cinch. They trained me to deliver a script, which I memorized and practiced well. I got constant, positive feedback on the script, my rebuttals to people's objections to wanting to donate, my delivery, and my energy, but none of this was enough. We had a grueling week, involving full, 8 hour days of walking door to door, bothering strangers and getting doors slammed in our face. Despite the assurances of the directors, none of us were able to reach our goals or quota. There were multiple days where, not just myself, but the directors themselves who were supposed to be training me, could not get a single donation, despite their assurances that they had set up in a good area. In the first two days I was able to get two recurring donations, both hard fought. The third day I had two people that absolutely wanted to donate but whom I could not get credit for. One of them had had her credit card stolen earlier in the week, she wanted me to take her name down so that when it had been sorted, she could start giving recurring donations, I did so and passed it on to my team of directors, this did not count for my quota. Another immediately wanted to donate, but refused to do it on my tablet, she wanted to donate on her device, on which there was no option to credit me for my canvassing efforts (which she tried and wanted to do). I both convinced her to donate and watched her sign up to do it, this did not count towards my quota. The fourth day was barren, we got basically no donations in our turf and finished contacting every house in it well before our work day was done. We had to get extra turf cut out for us to canvass, this ended up being a sketchy rural neighborhood that was almost exclusively anti-choice republicans, obviously none of them wanted to donate to planned parenthood. After four grueling days of sub-minimum wage labor, I was told that since I technically missed quota by 1 donation (despite actually securing 4) I would be let go and there was nothing they could do to keep me on. So the three directors then fired me, the only canvasser that signed up, who they had hung up to dry waiting for a start date which had been delayed by almost a month. Since they still didn't have an office, they did so in the dining area of a Panda Express, nowhere near a convenient bus stop. The main director was nervous and made several attempts to inject the moment with a sort of "cheeky millennial whimsy" which was not at all appreciated considering how badly they had just screwed me over. I understand that this organization might seem good if you want to make a difference and support causes that you care about, but please I implore you to do that in any other way than support these amateurs. I should have left at the lunch break on orientation like the one other person who showed up.

This organization consists of a handful of white folks paying minorities to do the hard work and laying them off in a heartbeat. Those at the top make 200,000, while they pay others 20 per hour. They are just as bad as organizations rolling back DEI but at least they did it in public. Don't fall for the hype. These people only care for what you can do for them.