David M. Wilson and the business of paying attention

At 22, David M. Wilson found a business opportunity in a dumpster. He was looking for information about political candidates, collecting material and turning it into reports. His name for the enterprise was “mail tracking.” A modest phrase, considering the office amenities. In the origin story he later told, the work began as a one-person operation and grew.

The detail has the advantage of being difficult to confuse with the usual founder introduction. There is no dorm-room revelation or elegant sketch on a napkin. There is discarded campaign material, someone willing to retrieve it, and a customer who might find the resulting information useful. Politics produces a great deal of paper. Wilson had found a reason to pay attention to some of it.

Today he is co-founder, president and CEO of RedDog, the Sacramento company that organizes grassroots communications. His business concerns the practical passage of information between campaigns and people. Following his career from collecting campaign material to managing voter contact offers a view of politics at working height: the research, staffing and conversations underneath the speeches.

A volunteer before a founder

Wilson describes growing up in Sacramento and beginning his political career at 14, volunteering for his local congressman. That puts his first company eight years after his entry into campaign work. The ages matter more here than a heroic origin date. They show a period of participation before entrepreneurship, and an initial business built around a specific task.

It is tempting to make every early job predict the entire career that follows. A dumpster does not contain a business plan for a national field operation. Still, the sequence is revealing. Before Wilson was responsible for sending messages out, he was gathering material in. Campaign communication was something to examine, organize and make usable.

The difficult promotion: managing people

In 2018, Wilson and Jeff Flint founded C3 Public Strategies. As its chief operating officer, Wilson became responsible for an enterprise whose work depended on other people carrying it out. C3's business included mass voter communication, engagement and turnout. By March 2021, he was writing about an operation extending beyond California into Texas, Washington, DC, and Missouri.

In that account, he put management alongside the quality of the work itself. He described patience, understanding and communication as requirements for leading people. The daily range interested him: a company could be dealing with chief executives and college students at the same time. His portrait of the job had room for both ends of the organization.

“Successfully managing a team of diverse people requires patience, understanding and strong communication.”

David M. Wilson · 2021

That is a useful complication in the founder story. Doing a task well gives you control over your own output. Employing others requires a method for explaining the task, seeing whether it happened and responding when it goes wrong. The distance between those jobs can be greater than the distance between two office addresses.

A name the voter had to write

A 2021 C3 assignment in Buffalo makes the mechanics tangible. After losing the Democratic primary, Mayor Byron Brown pursued a write-in campaign. The firm's work for the New York State Association of REALTORS® included explaining the write-in process to voters. Supporting the candidate required knowing what to do with a ballot on which his name would not appear.

C3 reported visiting more than 37,000 doors and having more than 13,000 live interactions in less than a month. Those are the firm's program figures, rather than Wilson's personal tally. They describe the scale of an operation he helped lead; they do not establish how each voter ultimately voted.

The assignment illustrates a particularly literal kind of persuasion. A favorable opinion alone could leave the job unfinished. Someone also had to understand the procedure. In such a campaign, the small explanation at a doorstep can be part of the product. The sentence after “I support him” matters rather a lot.

The distinction also keeps the story honest. Contact totals describe work. Election results describe a collective decision made amid many other influences. An operator has to organize the former while remembering how much of the latter remains outside any firm's control.

A script meets a real person

One of C3's account executives, Mark Davis, wrote about phone-banking in September 2021. His advice included learning the script before calling, so the caller could discuss the issue with confidence. The article belongs to a colleague, but it supplies a close view of the work taking place within the company Wilson was managing.

A script looks complete on paper. On the telephone, it has to survive interruption, hesitation and the possibility that the person answering has something else to do. Preparation can make the exchange less clumsy. It cannot oblige a stranger to listen.

For a manager, that leaves a delicate assignment: make the work consistent enough to organize without pretending that people are interchangeable. The same instructions must accommodate different voices and different responses. Every call tests the distance between a plan and the person receiving it.

The quality argument, before RedDog

Wilson returned to the subject of execution in a January 2022 message to C3 clients. He grouped product quality, data, teams and management together, describing experience with clients, call centers and large canvassing operations. His stated ambition was to deliver work on schedule and within budget while serving clients across the country.

The arrangement of those priorities is worth considering. Data sits beside people. Management sits beside the service being sold. For a field business, each depends on the others. A script needs someone able to deliver it. A conversation needs a way to be recorded. A completed report needs to mean something to the person paying for it.

There is little romance in that list, which may be why it is useful. Elections attract strong opinions and grand language. Running the work also involves instructions, deadlines and the rather ordinary question of whether someone answered. Wilson's public messages repeatedly return to those working conditions.

At RedDog, a conversation has two ends

RedDog brings Wilson together with fellow campaign veterans Bryan McPartlan and Scott Borges. The company recruits and deploys field teams nationally for political campaigns, nonprofits and associations. Its services include canvassing, live calls, texting, coalition building and campaign data work. Wilson is listed as president and CEO; Borges leads operations.

The company's emphasis on two-way communication provides a way to understand the offering. A broadcast can finish when the message leaves. A conversation creates a further obligation: someone may answer. That reply can contain a question, an objection or information the campaign did not have when it started.

RedDog also publishes specific checks on its fieldwork, including location and time-stamp reviews, nightly audits and calls to confirm canvasser surveys. Those procedures concern the credibility of the record. A client receiving a report needs some reason to believe it corresponds to encounters outside the office.

The send button is the easy part

In August 2024, Wilson described problems with earlier texting vendors: messages were difficult to verify, and support did not match the urgency of campaign work. Meeting Prompt.io's leadership at a conference led to a new supplier relationship. His account was a customer testimonial, expressing his experience of the service.

“The two biggest challenges were reliability and customer service.”

David Wilson · 2024

He discussed tools for crew scheduling, surveys and video messaging, and judged texting through delivery and voter engagement. The combination is characteristic of an operations problem. A message has to arrive before its content can matter. Someone has to be available when the mechanism needs attention.

That helps explain why the person behind the software matters in his account. Buying a tool also means relying on another organization. During a campaign, an unresolved question consumes time that cannot be added back after election day. The support desk becomes part of the working timetable, however far away it may be from a canvassing route.

From his first reports to a company coordinating conversations, Wilson's career keeps returning to the movement of information. Someone collects it, someone carries it, and someone else has to make sense of it. The technology changes the route. The work still requires people willing to do the next small, specific thing.