March 4 Post Mortem
This document is a post mortem of the March 4 Protest. A post mortem is an afterwards analysis looking back at an event or incident that aims to capture:

• The learnings from the event
  
• What went right
  
• What went wrong
  
• Todo actions

Overall post mortems, generally written within 24 hours of the event, are an essential tool for making an organization better at the tasks it aims to accomplish.
What Went Right

1. Add hoc speakers worked quite well. Pastor Pam made a big deal talking about grass roots democracy. I wanted to leverage that and my initial idea was to open it up to the floor by asking "would anyone like to speak to the crowd". Yogi instead, suggested that I identify a specific person and ask them to talk . She then picked Alice a young woman who screamed ferociously in the chants and she got up there and she really rocked it. And that one person led three others to step up. If we really are a grass roots organization, I think giving the mic to an unknown is powerful. Yes it may bite us at some point but based on a limited data set, it was a good thing so far.
   
2. Humanize the Issue. When Pastor Pam spoke, she mentioned that "medicaid cuts would kill her son" but didn't elaborate. I asked her questions to clarify what this meant and to highlight who Jonah was. I guessed that she would be ok with it (and she was). And yes the crowd intellectually knew this but putting a face on it was effective.
   
3. Logistics. We were able to move all our protest stuff in just two wagon loads and the wagons can go into and out of my van in one shot. This was a lot easier than the repacking process we used at the last event.
   
4. Having Signs Available. This was a big win.
   
5. Politician Speaker. Having an up-and-coming politician was really good. Jackson got a ton of interest and he stayed for the whole event.
   
6. Having Someone Visible Always Available. During this event, I opted to hang back while Taelar led the marching. My thinking was that I wanted to network / make myself available and it worked. Among my contacts were: a professional video person who said he filmed all of it and will send us a vimeo link and a person with a 90,000 person instagram following.
   
7. Working the mic for the chanting as they walked past. Every time the group marched past, I would use the mic to enhance the chant and that really worked well.

What Went Wrong

1. Organization. We weren't terribly organized. We didn't do a great job following the schedule. And that's on me.
   
2. Length. 3 hours may actually be a bit too long. This event really drove home for me that, for a protest, 3 hours is an absolute maximum. We definitely lost people along the way and energy flagged at the end.
   
3. Sound System. We need a better sound system (discussed below).
   
4. Resisting Oracle was outstanding and people really wanted to talk to her further but she disappeared. She REALLY IMPRESSED PEOPLE. I had multiple people ask me for her details and I didn't know what to say.
   
5. Bottles of Water for Us / Speakers. The food not bombs people were fantastic but they ran out. We need our own supply to keep us and our speakers going. I'll handle that.

Todo Actions

I think the following todo actions are in order:

1. New Sound System. Although we just started and bought equipment, we need something better. This is my responsibility and I'll handle it. My gut says we either need a much louder system (which causes issues for the people close to it) or a networked set of speakers that we can deploy across the crowd.
   
2. Printed Material. We desperately need a piece of printed material, I recommend a post card, that we can generate per event and give out for when people want more information. This should be simple and give a QR code that gets them more info. If Tori can help me with design, I can handle this for March 8.
   
3. Contact Info. We need a way to capture contact info along with a description. For lack of a better tool, I can create a Google sheet for this purpose. As an example of why we need this, I found out that there is a group of people that every Friday night is protesting at the Governor's Home. However I was rushed and failed to get details so ... I did give them my card but if they don't reach out that contact may be lost (they are looking for more people as they are getting tired).
   
4. Blank Signs. Cut Up Cardboard for Sign Making. I have a ton of boxes and I'm going to add blank cardboard to our set of existing signs so people can make their own.
   
5. Metrics. Although I personally believe metrics are problematic, I do think we need to agree on a metric and then measure it. My suggestion is attendance. I purchased some event clickers and my thinking is that at the start of an event, we position someone at one of the state house corners and they can use the clicker to count them. Note - I am shameless ripping this ouff from a discussion with Taelar who did this manually.
   
6. Event Creation Checklist. We absolutely need a checklist of how to create an event for the next time. This was exhausting and I always felt like I was missing something. I think a master checklist (in addition to a spreadsheet that tracks the things) would be hugely useful.
   
7. Signal Access. We need to make getting into the signal easier. I ended up asking people to simply text me for details since I didn't think handling everyone individually was fast enough at the event.
   
8. Buy Bottled Water.
   
9. Organize the Supplies. Our internal supplies need to be better organized And I'll work on that.
   
10. Step Ladder. Possibly bring a step letter to stand on since people almost fell off that one step. There is real value tho in people being higher than the crowd even with the mic.
    
11. Being responsive to people's preferred information method. This is more of a gut thing than purely based on research but I think we need to offer multiple communications modalities. As an example, our older folks are more likely to respond to an email mailing list than our younger attendees who care about Insta or Tik Tok. I think we need to figure out what our communications tools are and then have a dedicated person who owns each of them.
    
12. We need more vests for March 8.

Attendee Feedback

This showed up in Signal so I thought the unvarnished words needed to be here:

1. Yeah, I had a couple of things for a retrospective on today's event that I wanted to share: 1) It was pretty hard to hear unless you were up close. Maybe another monitor/speaker would help? I and I'm sure others would pitch in. 2) When giving a chant to the crowd, I think the speaker needs to give them the cadence of the chant not just the words. Lead them through it a few times. This was a problem with the last protest too. The crowd would then just make up their own rhythm for it and that can make the chant fall apart or at least hard to follow. That's all I got. Everything else I thought went really well! Great job everyone!
   
2. Ideally I would like to have designated chant leaders in the future to help keep the whole group cohesive as we march too
   
3. You can see about Sweetwater in Fort Wayne. A QSC K10 or K12 would give you good volume with seperate mic and speaker input. Any more than that and you really need to get a little mixing board
   
4. I wasn’t at today’s rally but was at the last one and will be there in Saturday. My recommendations for solving the amplification problem and the chant delay:
   
   1. Use the “Mic check” method of Occupy Wallstreet. It amplifies to the growing crowd and keeps everyone actively engaged. Speakers may have to adjust their tempo to accommodate but if given advanced notice, should be okay.
      
   2. for chants around Statehouse, station a few folks at the corners and midpoints to be “chant conductors” for those marching to hook into. You’re marching chant leaders will have a continuous cadence correction. Also, it can allow for a change chant that is coordinated and transitions well. It will also help maintain energy from start to finish.

I think this is from Mike in the chat.
Conclusion

Not everything went perfectly, the sound system in particular was problematic but, overall, the event was a smashing success. It was far larger than we expected, particularly given that this event was really the "red headed step child" to the March 8 event.
I think we can take the lessons learned from yesterday and apply them to Saturday and then the lessons learn from Saturday and apply to moving forward.
Overall we have a nicely nicely working decentralized grassroots approach to raising a large number of people into a single process . This is a win for our overall effort.