User would like more information for volunteers

[dorothyyeager]

@fec-issues-bot commented on Fri Sep 13 2019

What were you trying to do and how can we improve it?

I was trying to find more information regarding FEC regulations and volunteer work. In your volunteering section of your website, you touch on the basics, but you don't dive into some of the things organizationally volunteers may do like for example, printing materials (made by them or by the campaign) for their volunteer efforts of knocking on doors. It'd be really helpful to have a website going through so many of the issues volunteers may run against. I think a lot of volunteers go ahead & do these things because it is just too darn difficult for them to figure it out without hiring an attorney, and as volunteers, they don't have the $ to hire one!

General feedback?

Tell us about yourself

volunteer interested in campaign finance regulations regarding volunteer activities

Details

• URL: https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/understanding-ways-support-federal-candidates/
• User Agent: Amazon CloudFront

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@AmyKort commented on Fri Sep 13 2019

cc @kathycarothers and @dorothyyeager

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@dorothyyeager commented on Tue Sep 17 2019

While the page the feedback was on concerned exempt volunteer activities, the comment here makes a good point - sometimes people intend to help a campaign and voluntarily pay for things, which triggers a lot of rules when it's the volunteer paying, and not the campaign. It would be good to alert volunteers on this page about the ramifications of doing that. So we'll move this issue to the CMS and work on adding that kind of information to the citizens page.

Completion criteria

• Draft language for the "volunteering" section of the page (or find approved language) with a heading of “Paying for public communications” and a little explanation of what a public communication is. We’d also want to link to the registering a PAC section, as well as the pages on making independent expenditures and coordinated communications. (For a start, see the approved language on the page labeled "Paying to place an ad on someone else’s website." This could be adapted.)
• Run draft by content team and if needed, OGC.
• Once approved, update the page to add in the new language.
• Second pair of eyes and publish.

[dorothyyeager]

I've got a draft ready for the content team to look at.

[dorothyyeager]

We plan to send this to OGC for review tomorrow.

[dorothyyeager]

This has been sent to OGC for review.

[dorothyyeager]

Moving to 10.4 since we've not heard back yet on this from OGC.

[dorothyyeager]

OGC returned a few edits today. Nothing major, so we'll proceed with updating the page.

[dorothyyeager]

I've updated the page and sent it to the content team for someone to be a second pair of eyes. Once it's OKed, I'll publish. We're close!

[dorothyyeager]

Thanks to @djgarr and George for looking over the page before publication. We've published the updated page and the new section appears at https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/understanding-ways-support-federal-candidates/#public-communications.