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By: Freddy Oswald
From Viral Attention to Volunteer Action
Perhaps the most distinct feature of Zohran Mamdani’s primary campaign was his ‘man on the street’ videos.
Talking directly to the camera, often while walking, Zohran captivates audiences on social media with his humor and energy. And every video seemed to end with just about the same appeal: “get signed up to join a canvass in your area.”
To win June’s Democratic primary, Mamdani’s campaign mobilized an army of volunteers. More than 50,000 people signed up to volunteer and upwards of 30,000 or more actually attended a canvass, led by over 400 field leads and augmented by around 40 paid canvassers with fluency in key languages: together they knocked 1.6 million doors, holding more than a quarter of a million conversations with voters.
Behind those numbers sat not just good vibes or a popular working class election platform, but a piece of infrastructure that translated viral attention into material turnout: Solidarity Tech, a CRM designed by organizers for organizers and rooted in the organizing methods of the labor movement.
Mamdani’s campaign excelled at social media, producing attention-grabbing content that cut through timelines and inspired action. But crucially, that attention didn’t dead-end on Instagram, X, or TikTok. Instead, it linked to a volunteer sign-up page where supporters could commit to canvass shifts in their neighborhoods, which fed into the campaign’s Solidarity Tech database.
Once signed up, the CRM handled the unglamorous but decisive follow-up: automatic confirmation emails, text reminders, and calendar invites. These nudges dramatically boosted attendance, reducing the rate of no-shows. Unburdened from manually sending texts or doing constant event-reminder phonebanks, campaign field leads could focus on leading in-person canvasses and driving the face-to-face interactions with new volunteers and voters alike which are so crucial to deepening engagement with any campaign.
The combined system turned Mamdani’s charisma into an attention-to-action pipeline: from virality, to sign-ups, to turnout, to door-knocks, to earning the trust of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.
Technology Built By Organizers, For Organizers
In some sense, Solidarity Tech is like every other Contact Relationship Management (CRM) software. Just like Action Network or Salesforce, the system is a contact database, helping its users collect, store, and sort information about the people they engage.
But Solidarity Tech is different for two main reasons: it is independent from the Democrats, and it was designed with worker organizing in mind.
Unlike the dominant CRMs in U.S. electoral politics (NGP VAN, NationBuilder, or Action Network) Solidarity Tech was not born inside the Democratic Party ecosystem. This is crucial because the Democratic establishment has a history of weaponizing its control over this infrastructure to undermine progressive, anti-establishment campaigns. For example, in 2015 the DNC shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to NGP VAN. Others, like Justice Democrats challenging incumbents, have in the past been denied access to NGP VAN’s VoteBuilder software entirely in some states.
And the Democratic establishment doesn’t even try to hide it. “We talk about growing the Democratic Party, so how do you grow the Democratic Party if you go after incumbents?” Steve Brown, a spokesperson for the Illinois Democrats, told Wired in 2017. In the same article, another then little-known Justice Democrat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to purchase VoteBuilder for $6,000 only to find a stripped-down voter file. “It was all gone,” Ocasio-Cortez told Wired, referring to the information about vote preferences and past support which is collected by VoteBuilder and usually made available to candidates. It should be no surprise that the establishment Democrats have no interest in facilitating their own undoing.
But Solidarity Tech didn’t come from inside the Democratic Party. Instead, it was designed by a worker-organizer and software engineer, Ivan Pardo.
After working briefly in big tech, Ivan left to build Buycott, a website to facilitate consumer boycotts, with a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) effort as its second largest campaign. Then Ivan got involved as a volunteer organizing in Rideshare Drivers United (RDU), the Uber/Lyft driver association based out of Los Angeles. To help his team organize, he started building a CRM that eventually turned into Solidarity Tech.
Ivan’s model took many lessons from the traditional worker-organizing framework developed by labor unions. But the problems of organizing Uber and Lyft drivers, with hundreds of thousands in California alone, many part time, were vastly different from running a campaign to unionize 100 grocery store workers or 1000 machinists at a manufacturing plant.
And there was another problem: no money. Unlike traditional organizing campaigns where well-resoured unions bet big on viable campaigns in the hopes of recouping costs later, RDU has never able to raise more than enough to fund one or two staffers.
To meet these twin challenges, organizers adapted classic labor frameworks, including assessments, the organizer bullseye, and leadership ladders, into an organizing workflow that could operate at mass scale. Assessments became the first line of contact: short conversations or digital surveys that gauged support, identified leaders, and sorted drivers into tiers. The organizer bullseye framework was adapted for distributed conditions: core leaders in the center training volunteers, with volunteers engaging wider layers of supporters over the phone. Every RDU member was asked to become an organizer, with the core team distributing lists to get drivers phonebanking fellow drivers, onboarding peers, and reporting assessments back into the CRM.
And this work often happened in drivers’ own native languages, allowing a diverse handful of driver organizers to reach hundreds and thousands of drivers in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Arabic, Korean, and more. Out of the necessity of organizing a multi-lingual, largely immigrant workforce, and enabled by a technology which easily tracked language preference and assigned calls by language, Solidarity Tech approximated the logic of workplace mapping and the union strategy of building representative leadership committees.
The journey began by answering the question of how to find drivers in the first place. The most direct way was the meet drivers at the airport, signing them up one by one, and following up with them later to recruit new volunteers. But other ways were possible too. At the time, protests against Uber and Lyft received outsized attention – so this ‘earned media’ could be used to capture drivers attention. All of this was coordinated by Rideshare Drivers United through Solidarity Tech, relying on just one paid organizer and a handful of lead volunteers.
The software was built to solve problems of scale and independence: how to mobilize tens of thousands without substantial centralized resources, and how to retain ownership of organizing data rather than depend on institutions that might restrict access.
And with this work, by drivers organizing drivers, they were able to win Assembly Bill 5 in 2019, which kicked off a massive multi-year battle with Uber and Lyft.
When one of us wins, we all win. More importantly, when one of us wins, we all celebrate@ZohranKMamdani joined us for our volunteer appreciation party, giving a rousing call to join NYC-DSA and breaking the 10k member mark in the process. pic.twitter.com/pOaxT6Bc6b
— NYC-DSA
(@nycDSA) July 16, 2025
The Real Secret: NYC-DSA
In theory, Solidarity Tech excels at relational organizing and volunteer development: tracking who knows whom, mapping social and workplace ties, pairing volunteers with lists by language or region, and identifying and tapping organic leaders. In practice, Mamdani’s campaign didn’t make use of all of these features.
This wasn’t because these aspects weren’t necessary, but because NYC-DSA provided much of the relational infrastructure already. As Mamdani field director Tascha Van Auken, former campaign manager for Julia Salazar, outlined in her interview with City & State New York, the campaign began in December 2024 with many of the initial canvassers being DSA members with experience leading canvasses. Van Auken outlines how this effort expanded over time, as volunteers were trained into leads, scripts were sharpened, and the operation was scaled up. And core campaign staff, like Van Auken herself, had cut their teeth on earlier DSA campaigns.
It would be totally silly to argue that the Mamdani campaign was won because of Solidarity Tech, rather than the real secret sauce which was NYC-DSA’s political machine, built up over a decade. But Solidarity Tech played a role in super-charging the growth of this machine, constantly feeding it with new volunteer sign ups and driving increased turnout at a scale which likely would have been impossible to keep up with if done manually.
DSA as the backbone of the campaign also explains why the campaign didn’t need to rely on the relational tools within Solidarity Tech. With dozens or hundreds of experienced field leads integrated into a pre-existing semi-mass city party, the chapter could staff canvass launches, orient new volunteers, and maintain neighborhood continuity without depending on the CRM for leader development.
Instead, the campaign treated ST primarily as a volunteer funnel and reminder system, serving as a bridge between grabbing a supporters attention and leading them on a canvass in person. And even though relational features weren’t maximized in the software, they still mattered in practice. Every volunteer who showed up was greeted by a local organizer—a neighborhood lead who had likely run the same canvass sites multiple times. That consistency created trust and continuity, allowing volunteers to feel rooted in their own community rather than in an abstract campaign machine.
Similarly, DSA had the internal capacity to tap the full capacity of new volunteers who wanted to do more than knock doors. That meant the campaign didn’t need to rely on ST’s follow-up and leadership-development workflows, because the campaign didn’t need to manage those tasks at all; instead, those functions were handled through the chapter’s own committees, working groups, and recruitment pipelines.
In this way, Mamdani’s field operation blurred the line between high-tech automation and low-tech relational organizing. Social media and the CRM got volunteers to the door; DSA organizers kept them coming back.
Moving Forward For DSA
Although the Mamdani campaign was able to forgo some of these features and workflows focused on ‘deep organizing’ in Solidarity Tech, they remain highly valuable for any DSA chapter which seeks to follow in NYC’s lead.
Campaigns outside of New York will have far less infrastructure than what the Mamdani campaign began with, and building up this infrastructure – i.e. recruiting and training volunteer organizers and campaign leads – will require months of work. Even a DSA chapter which has not yet launched a campaign can begin deploying this toolkit, in order to prime their existing list while they decide which campaigns to put forward. The work of organizing a core crew, recruiting volunteers to phonebank, and deploying these volunteers to call through the list remains the same.
This work of priming the list is crucial to activate as many “paper members” as possible ahead of election time, funneling them into trainings or working groups, so that come election day there is a larger pool of potential volunteers, and a trained team ready to scale up outreach operations.
Organizing At Scale
Mamdani’s campaign demonstrated a truth often lost in the consultant-driven world of politics: organizing at scale is not just about quantity, but about structure.
The Mamdani campaign shows how insurgent campaigns can combine mass attention with deep organizing. Social media grabbed attention. Solidarity Tech captured and converted that attention. And DSA provided the relational glue that turned volunteers into repeat actors.
The lesson isn’t just about one candidate or one election. It’s about how the left can own its own infrastructure, adapt worker-organizing models for electoral scale, and prevent its capacity from evaporating once a campaign ends.
For a generation of activists, Solidarity Tech represents a bridge: from the deep organizing traditions of the labor movement, to the scale of modern internet-driven campaigns. The challenge now is to use that bridge not just for one race, but for the long road of building movements that last.
The tools of the labor movement—assessments, leadership ladders, the organizer bullseye—emerged from shop-floor campaigns which were 10x, 100x, or 1000x smaller than the Mamdani campaign. Today, they can be scaled for tens of thousands of volunteers, if the right infrastructure is in place.
With the right tools we can translate deep organizing into the digital age.
Freddy Oswald is a member of Boston DSA and a contributor to Working Mass.
The post Deep Organizing at Scale: How Solidarity Tech Helped Power Zohran Mamdani’s Volunteer Wave appeared first on Working Mass.
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