Believers on the Bus: Planned Parenthood's Social-Media
Push

by Allison Yarrow 
Aug 31, 2012 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/31/believers-on-the-bus-planned-parenthood-s-social-media-push.html

     The group's enthusiastic young social-media
     staffers are touring swing states, going to the
     party conventions, and spreading the word. Allison
     Yarrow reports.

A big pink bus -- detractors call it "the Pepto bus of
death" -- is crisscrossing swing states and going from
convention to convention, carrying members of Planned
Parenthood's pink-shirted young political road team.

Women are Watching

At a Columbus, Ohio rally in a park named for the town's
first doctor, Lincoln Goodale, who treated the poor at
no charge, the staffers stand out because of their pink
shirts, but also because of their youth -- especially
compared to the decades -- older counter-protesters they
call the "antis" who arrive moments after the bus stops.
The pink shirts wield iPhones and cameras to capture the
speeches -- delivered to the crowd of nearly two hundred
people, mostly women -- by a rape victim, a new mother
who was treated at a Planned Parenthood center for a
condition that might have prevented her pregnancy and
the group's charismatic president, Cecile Richards.

Nearby, in the grass, about a dozen antis gather,
including Bryan Kemper, a well-known figure who's been
coming out for decades to protest abortion groups, and
members of the Abolitionists Society of Ohio. "We are
the generation that will abolish abortion. Peacefully,"
says Kemper. He and the others -- mostly men, along with
two women who coincidentally are also wearing pink
shirts -- hoist posters showing bloody baby limbs and
shout at the rally-goers: "Abortion enslaves women!" and
"You tear babies limb from limb!" They aren't filming or
tweeting constantly the way pink shirts are -- their
message is directed entirely at the abortion-rights
supporters.

The Planned Parenthood pink shirts edge in front of
them, standing between them and the rallygoers, covering
the bloody signs with pink ones emblazoned with "Women
Are Watching," with a wide eyeball for the "o."

"The little baby girls you kill can't watch," Kemper
trills.

But scrolling through the photos of this event posted
just after to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund Tumblr
devoted to the tour, all you see is pink. There's no
sign of the protesters.

Traveling across Ohio with 10 members of the young,
mostly single staff -- about evenly split between men
and women -- felt like being part of a political
campaign or a social-movement summer camp on wheels. The
bus itself felt less like a Greyhound trip than a high-
school prom chariot, furnished with string lights,
leather captain's chairs, a television, and a
kitchenette. Loose M&Ms in bus cup-holders, a stocked
snack cabinet, a bottle of whiskey in a drawer, and
everyone in the same T-shirt. The staffers, who stayed
on institutional message while this reporter was on the
bus, exchange inside jokes while they work and wonk out
on presidential trivia on their breaks. One communal
bathroom in the back means that rule #1 is "No #2."
Others, etched on a dry erase board include "be
helpful," "clean up after yourself" and "don't change
the channel during Bachelor Pad."

The Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which is putting on
the bus tour, is the group's political arm, separate
from its clinic network. As the bus arrived at events,
the guys assembled tents and rally risers while the
women passed out T-shirts to canvassers. Everyone
devoured press clippings from local papers on the
rallies in their states, even early on a Saturday
morning.

The 11-state bus tour aims to give supporters moments to
rally around in person, and to craft social-media-ready
moments at those rallies to connect with other current
and could-be supporters and donors online. In the
charged election-year environment, that group has grown
dramatically with each new Sandra Fluke and Todd Akin.
And of course, the road trip is also a way for the group
to rally support for the candidates it's backing, all
Democrats thus far.

"I've never seen an election where women's issues were
such a prominent part of the national debate," says
Richards, who has spent much of her life inside the
American political process, including the election of
her mother, Ann Richards, to Texas governor in 1990.
"Mr. Romney said that he would like [abortion] to just
go away. Essentially you would have states where it's
safe to be a woman and states where it's not."

Asked if she believes Romney's claim to support a rape
or incest exception to the party's anti -- abortion
platform plank -- which mentions no exceptions -- she
was incredulous.

"When you're running for the presidency of the United
States, if you can't even control your own party's
platform, why would anyone think you would lift a finger
for women once you're president?"

At the GOP convention in Tampa, the pink shirts were the
antis in a sense, chanting outside before moving on. At
the Democratic convention next week, the groups will not
only be let in but Richards will speak, along with Fluke
and NARAL president Nancy Keenan.

As calculated strikes and blunders from right-leaning
abortion foes have drawn attention to birth control,
abortion, and women's health -- a spotlight President
Obama and other Democrats have been happy to point there
-- Planned Parenthood has reemerged as a central
political player.

Digital specialist Morgan Shoaff says the people who
take in the group's online offerings aren't "necessarily
the people who use our health centers," but that both
groups are growing. Affiliates treat some 3 million
patients each year, delivering gynecological and
preventative-care services like breast exams and pap
smears. The fastest-growing demographic of visitors to
centers, according to Richards, is young men who come
for STD or HIV testing. Meantime, Shoaff says, PPAF's
digital team has doubled in size since last year.

Sometimes, an outreach strategy "gets pushed to the back
burner" to deal with an unforeseen flare-up, like Todd
Akin's comment about "legitimate rape," says the 25-
year-old staffer. Had Akin made his comment in 2011,
before Planned Parenthood had beefed up its digital team
and presence, "we wouldn't have gotten it out there in
the same way," she says. Now they can fire back in real
time, and use outrage to raise funds.

After Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the breast-cancer
foundation, threatened to defund Planned Parenthood for
what insiders claim were political reasons, Planned
Parenthood earned back what would have been lost almost
immediately, raising $3 million from nearly 80 thousand
donors in just four days.

"We're not under the radar anymore," says field
coordinator Emily Jakobsen.

The bus itself is intended to be sure the group
maintains and builds on its elevated profile. Shared
power cords snake the tables, floors and walls. Two bus
booths serve as an editing bay where mini-documentaries
telling women's stories at the rallies are cut minutes
after they are shot, and it holds a social media HQ
where the content is shared on a ++Tumblr++ [
http://womenarewatching.tumblr.com ] devoted to the 11-
state bus tour. The social-media push is key to the
field operation -- the moment after staffers return to
the bus, it's lit blue from their screens.

Whatever personality is required to relish being
photographed in a life-size birth-control-pill-package
costume -- "Pillamina" -- 26-year-old Jakobsen has it in
spades. The former Obama field organizer is by far the
most excited staffer to dole out condoms, designed by
Charlotte Ronson and Isaac Mizrahi, to students at Ohio
State. She been on the bus for long enough to run out of
socks, which she needs because she pairs the costume --
sewn by a staffer's mom-with cowboy boots. It's from one
of those boots that Pillamina extracts her phone to
encourage crowds to text and join the Planned Parenthood
supporter list. "Your vote is your voice, vote pro-
choice!" chants the pill pack.

This energy does, of course, require substantial fuel,
thus our dinner at a Brewsters Cafe in Twinsburg that
could accommodate 15 people on short notice and offered
peanut-butter cheesecake for dessert. But Ed, an ex-
Marine who runs security on the bus, asks the team to
remove the pink shirts for dinner as a safety precaution
-- a reminder of the violence that's been directed at
the nation's largest women's-health organization, and
also its largest abortion provider.

The next morning, the shirts were back on and the bus
team was ahead of schedule. With enthusiasm after a
night of drinking and a week on the road that
demonstrates the recuperative powers of youth, the team
set off for a side trip to an "Obama barn." Once there,
Pillamina leapt in the air in front of the barn, which
has the president's 2012 "O" logo painted on its front,
reviving a trend from 2008. The group drove an hour to
see the barn and take that photo, which nearly 6,000
people have liked, commented on or shared on their
Facebook page.

"The most important part of political communication is
one on one," says consultant Sarah Flowers, who has
worked with Planned Parenthood for years and whose ads
helped defeat the personhood ballot initiative in
Mississippi last year.

It's only in the last year and a half that Planned
Parenthood has wired itself to capitalize on the attacks
aimed at it as the campaign season has heated up. The
bus team members agree that while Sandra Fluke, the
Komen snafu and the Affordable Care Act debate all
boosted Planned Parenthood's digital reach, the group's
new approach to communication began with the House
passing a budget last year that could have defunded
their clinics.

"The largest abortion provider in America should not
also be the largest recipient of federal funds under
Title X. It's time to keep taxpayer money out of the
hands of Planned Parenthood," urged Indiana
Representative Mike Pence in February 2011. Planned
Parenthood launched an online petition in response, "I
Stand With Planned Parenthood," which 825,000 supporters
quickly signed. It became clear that building out
digital rapid response could revolutionize the group
Margaret Sanger founded in 1921 as the American Birth
Control League.

The organization claims 6 million supporters (both on
and offline), up from 4 million since the February 2011
Komen funding fiasco.

"We've never been in the spotlight like this before,"
says Shoaff, who posted the photo from the February 2012
birth-control hearing showing an all-male committee
debating the future of pills they'll never swallow. She
added the simple inquiry: "What is wrong with this
picture?" Nearly 50,000 people liked, shared, or
commented on Facebook.

It sparked a viral moment that the press chewed on for
weeks, and Planned Parenthood staffers still get giddy
mentioning it -- much as they did when Richards joined
them on the bus for a short jaunt this past Saturday,
and the staff updated her about the most recent moments
from the trip they'd shared online.

"The internet is forever," Richards tells them. And with
her team recharged, they set out to keep increasing
Planned Parenthood's presence there.

___________________________________________

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