January 16, 2014

NEW REPORT: Grassroots-led Campaigns Transforming Social Change

What Change.org, MoveOn.org and global people-led platforms can teach us about putting members in the driver’s seat

Originally published Jan 16, 2014 at MobilisationLab.org

Saving hospitals in the UK. Blocking “super trawlers” in Australia. Winning local environmental battles in India. Stopping biased education standards in the United States. Suddenly, platforms that allow anyone to start a petition and run their own campaigns are everywhere.

People-led campaign to protect sharks in Australia

This image is from a grassroots-led campaign to protect sharks in Australia hosted by the GetUp! CommunityRun platform.

But the impressive growth of this new frontier in people-powered campaigning brings with it new questions: How do these “grassroots-led campaigns” platform actually work? What kind of impact are they actually having on the world? What are the wider implications of this new approach to campaigning for individuals and organizations? Should every group launch their own grassroots-led campaigns platform? If not, why not?

We answer these questions and more in a new Mobilisation Lab report, Grassroots-led Campaigns: Lessons from the new frontier of people-powered campaigning, which summarizes the wisdom and insight of the people at the cutting edge of grassroots-led campaigns.

Read on for our five key takeaways:

1) If you generate campaigns and test, you will grow. Part of the value of grassroots-led campaigns is that they reach new audiences and bring in new members. If you generate a sufficient volume of campaigns (see #2 — and the full report) and test to see which campaigns recruit new people before promoting them widely, your membership will grow.

2) Campaigns volume leads to growth and impact. Any one campaign could potentially recruit thousands of new members, or have a huge impact. But the reality is that to you need to generate a lot of campaigns each month in order to grow your member base and, to a lesser extent, create impact through winning campaigns.

3) Grassroots-led campaigns win victories and add value, but don’t entirely replace staff-led campaigns. There is no denying that giving people more power to campaign on the things they care about brings real value for everyone involved, and creates real change in the world. But don’t fire anyone — you still need a team to win campaigns on all those big, intractable problems.

4) Invest staff time to be successful. This was the universal refrain from every group interviewed. Grassroots-led campaigns platforms are not Field of Dreams — “If you build it, they will come.” You need to spend resources generating campaigns and helping campaign creators be successful.

5) Initial concerns and expectations are often overstated. This report will help you avoid many of the big red flags that worry groups considering giving more control to their members, while offering guidance for setting reasonable expectations around what grassroots-led campaigns can accomplish.

Want more? The full report reviews the basics of grassroots-led campaigns, spells out their impact on the world, digs into strategic lessons current programs, and offers practical steps to success. It is designed to be quick, helpful resource whether you are an executive director trying to decide whether to invest in this new model, a practitioner tasked with building a program, or anyone who wonders about the future of people-powered campaigning.

Take a moment to read the full report now, and share it far and wide.

Colin Holtz is a freelance writer and digital strategist. He is the former National Campaigns Director of Rebuild the Dream.

August 15, 2013

Time for Progressives to Get Serious About Social

If your social feed is anything like ours, it includes a handful of links to interesting articles, one or two rants about the news of the day, a few articles shared as “must read,” some funny pictures, and at least one list of animated gifs.

Originally published Aug 6th, 2013 on HuffingtonPost

It may not look like much, but this force — social sharing — has already revolutionized the media industry, and it’s completely changing how we encounter information online. Harnessing it will be crucial to the future success of progressive social change organizations.

BuzzFeed, the social media giant that reached 40 million unique monthly views last December, credits social with driving the majority of its traffic. Upworthy has been described as the “fastest growing media site of all time,” with more than 10 million unique visitors a month only a year after launching. Nearly all of Upworthy’s traffic comes from social sharing.

Chances are, in fact, that you are only reading this because of a friend’s decision to share, and a bit of teaser text that convinced you to click.

Social hype has been around for years. What is new is the sheer size of the growing networks, combined with the ability to use data to test approaches and concretely measure success. Instead of false promises to make something “go viral,” we can design pages and craft headlines based on hard metrics. We can run tests and apply best practices to reach an audience of billions of people, young and old, all over the world.

In other words, the powder-keg combination of big data and sharing is finally delivering on social’s long-fabled potential.

In May 2013, CREDO Action recruited 24,000 new activists on a single petition through social sharing, in a large part because they optimized their social headline using the ShareProgress platform. Veterans of the 2012 Obama campaign point to the operation’s targeted sharing tool as one its shining technological accomplishments that married big-data targeting with social recruitment. Upworthy, the fast-growing social site, tests up to 16 headlines on each piece of content.

The massive scale of social makes it a potent force. ARTSTRIKE, a recent collaboration between Rebuild the Dream and CultureStrike, generated 11 million impressions on art, poetry, and music about the December 2012 budget battle. The most-shared works were, in turn, prominently featured in follow-up promotions. Petition giant Change.org has grown to 40 million users worldwide, in part because they pay attention to which petitions get the most signatures from social and promote them widely.

Unfortunately, as Rebuild the Dream President Van Jones has said, the “do-gooder playbook is getting stale.” Most charities and non-profits still rely too heavily on policy papers instead of more creative content. Few optimize their online content to make it shareable. Fewer still incorporate social into their communications strategy. Using analytics to evaluate results remains the exception, not the rule.

Marrying analytics with social sharing will not turn boring content into a giant hit on the internet. But it can put a compelling video in front of new audiences and enlist new people in a cause. It can make sure the stuff that truly makes us laugh or cry will rise above the din.

Conservatives, rarely lacking significant resources, can afford to drop big money on paid advertising to get their message in front of millions of people. Progressives will need to get the most out of social if they want to compete.

Social change organizations need to hire talented writers and designers, and empower creative staff members to tell amazing stories. They should embrace new tools that use data to reveal what people find most compelling, instead of attempting viral videos by committee. They should invest in social-optimized content as a way to put their issues on the map, instead of focusing all their attention on winning a throwaway mention in the traditional press.

Sharing is already reshaping how people consume information. The only question is whether progressives tap this force to create change, or whether they leave a powerful tool lying in the toolbox. There is a fierce wind ripping across the media landscape. Smart organizations will build some windmills.

May 3, 2013

NOI Tips: Identify your goals before writing emails

It’s one of the most basic rules of online organizing: Identify your goals before you start writing an email.

From New Organizing Institute Tips,
March 15, 2012.

Not just what action you want your list to take, but what messages you want to convey, what impressions you want to leave, what information you want to explain. Your audience should be able to answer questions, like: Who are the key players? What is happening? How can I help? Why do it now?
Read the rest of this entry »

M+R Research Labs: Talking Storytelling in Emails

Last week, M+R’s Steve Daigneault and Colin Holtz delivered a live webinar on their new paper, “Storytelling and the Art of Email Writing.” You can view the slides here, and read the paper here.

Originally published May 11th, 2011 on M+R Research Labs

Steve and Colin got so many great questions on the call that they ran out of time before they could answer them – but they wrote them all down! Read on to see what they think about how long emails should be, common mistakes in story-based appeals, and the pros and cons of authentic but unpolished stories.
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Making Stories Work for Your Org: What the Data Says

Everyone is talking about “the power of stories” — social scientists, nonprofit directors, your mother, you name it. Connect emotionally to your supporters and they’ll give! Make them see the issue in human terms and they’ll give more!

Co-authored with Steve Daigneault. Originally published on NTEN

There’s just one problem. Nonprofits are adding stories to their fundraising messages… and they’re not working.
Read the rest of this entry »

April 15, 2013

Turning Online Advocacy into Real-world Change: 5 Tips

Nearly every high-profile national organization uses new media to mobilize grassroots supporters and put pressure on lawmakers. But a new study showing that as many as half of congressional staffers believe online form messages to be fake has renewed the debate about the political efficacy of online advocacy. Do lawmakers really listen?

Originally published at M+R Research Labs.

There have been plenty of long, theoretical arguments on the subject (a few highlights are posted at the bottom of this post). We thought it might be more useful to offer these five quick, concrete, actionable tips on how to maximize your online advocacy program’s real-world impact:

    • “Online petitions” should only be the first step. For most organizations, easy online advocacy actions such as petitions or letters to Congress are the best way to recruit large numbers of new supporters. But don’t stop there. Think of your online petition as an entry point for a new activist or a way to begin engaging your list on an issue, and then build up to higher impact actions like phone calls, letters to the editor, and offline events.
    • Make high-impact advocacy easier. Congressional offices pay much more attention to phone calls than online messages (as long as they’re from actual constituents!). But picking up the phone is much harder than filling out an online form to send a letter, and many supporters can find it intimidating. Make sure you’re guiding your advocates through the process and arming them with information, and consider using online tools to make calling and writing letters to the editor easier. For instance, M+R recently helped AARP create, implement and roll out a tool that helped constituents call their legislators with just one click. When users clicked the “call now” button, a personalized link made action-taker’s phone ring immediately, automatically connecting them to their own Members of Congress — no dialing required!
    • Integrate online and offline work. If you’re offering an offline petition, make an organizational commitment to deliver the petitions at a lobby day or press event, tell supporters what you’re going to do, grab some video or at least a few good photos while you’re doing it, and then report back to your activists on how it went. (This is a great idea, whether you’re delivering petitions to Congress or to a non-legislative target!) Hold virtual lobby days so that your supporters are writing and calling at the same time that representatives of your organization are visiting Capitol Hill. And help your most hardcore supporters meet with lawmakers on their own. The Human Rights Campaign ran integrated campaigns in 2009 and 2010 that helped ordinary supporters set up meetings with their Members of Congress in local district offices. The sign-up tools and promotions were all online, but the online effort was backed by a strong field team that followed up with constituents to provide them with the resources and support they needed to be successful (and to ensure that their meetings actually took place!)
    • Take advantage of social networks. A recent study found that 64% of surveyed Hill staffers think Facebook is an important way to understand their constituents’ views. Direct your supporters to their representatives’ Facebook pages and ask them to write on their walls. Encourage your supporters to tweet members of Congress who are on Twitter. Last year, the ENOUGH Project flooded the Facebook walls of ten members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee with messages in the hopes of getting the conflict minerals bill out of committee. 48 hours and over 500 messages later, two of the ten — as well as another three who had not been targeted — decided to co-sponsor the bill, which passed into law a few months later. During the health care reform debate, Organizing for America built a “Tweet Congress” tool that allowed users to enter their zip code to find their Representative or Senators, making it easy for them to connect and apply pressure via a new medium.
    • Go local. Capitol Hill is crowded and noisy. New tools make it easier than ever to reach supporters, and easier than ever for supporters to contact Congress — so more people are doing it than ever before. To avoid being drowned out, reach out to members of Congress in their home districts. M+R’s grassroots mobilization team puts organizers on the ground in key states and districts to mobilize local partners, recruit and train activists, push an issue in the local media, provide support to national online organizing, and facilitate congressional contact at town halls and district offices. We use online tools to connect supporters to organizers, generate grassroots momentum, and turn out attendance at locally organized events. It’s a highly effective combination!

 

Further Reading:

Malcom Gladwell’s “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

“What Malcom Gladwell Missed About Online Organizing and Creating Big Change” by Ben Brandzel:
http://www.thenation.com/article/156447/what-malcolm-gladwell-missed-about-online-organizing-and-creating-big-change

“The Tragedy of Political Advocacy”:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-brewer/the-tragedy-of-political_b_773734.html

March 3, 2013

Storytelling and the Art of Email Writing

Stories are powerful — our brains seem to be hard-wired for this ancient method of sharing information. As a result, including stories in your emails may seem like a no-brainer. But there’s a problem: Non-profits are adding stories to their fundraising messages… and they’re not working.

By Steve Daigneault and Colin Holtz, Mar 31st, 2011

How can smart organizations harness the power of stories to communicate with supporters and get them to donate?

In M+R’s newest publication, we dig into what makes stories powerful, explain recent test results that can help non-profits avoid falling into the personal story trap, and offer concrete tips for crafting emails that successfully use stories to compel supporters to give.

Click here to read “Storytelling and the Art of Email Writing” now. (PDF)