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.

May 3, 2013

Tech President: Colin Holtz Joins Rebuild the Dream as National Campaigns Director

BY SARAH LAI STIRLAND | Thursday, June 7 2012

Rebuild the Dream, the progressive advocacy group co-founded by Van Jones, Natalie Foster and Billy Wimsatt focused on economic issues, has hired digital organizer and senior strategist Colin Holtz away from the public affairs firm M+R Strategic Services.

Holtz will be Rebuild the Dream’s national campaigns director. The group’s co-founders want to build a movement to reconstruct America’s middle class. They hope to use their organizational expertise to partner with and boost other like-minded progressive organizations on key economic issues.

Prior to M+R Strategic Strategic Services, Holtz was Organizing for America’s senior email campaigner during the administration’s fight to pass the Affordable Care Act. He helped to integrate online, field, press, and fundraising efforts into one national advocacy campaign.

“Colin is wickedly smart and it was a big score to get him,” said Foster. “I’m so excited to be working with him.”

Holtz, 26, will be based in Washington, D.C. with Molly Katchpole, a campaign associate who built a network of supporters on Change.org last year that compelled Bank of America to rescind a proposed debit card fee.

Holtz started his organizing career as an intern at the New Organizing Institute, and then became Internet director for former Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn.).

“From the big picture standpoint, Rebuild the Dream is sitting on top of the issue areas that are going to define American public life for the next couple of years, if not the next decade,” Holtz said in an interview. “From an organizational standpoint, there’s an amazing team, and a lot of potential to do some cutting edge work.”

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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Daily Collegian: Student Loans set to increase without Intervention from Congress

By Mitchell Culler
Collegian Staff Writer
Penn State Daily Collegian

Students relying on Federal Stafford loans could see their interest rate double if members of the U.S. Congress are unable to reach a decision by July 1.

The current interest rate on Stafford loans is 3.4 percent, but it is slated to double to 6.8 percent on Sunday unless Congress is able to send President Barack Obama a bill to sign before then.

Student loans are taken out year-by-year, said Anna Griswold, Penn State Assistant Vice President and Executive Director for Student Aid. For students, this means that loans already taken out will remain at a 3.4 percent interest rate, but students will be forced to pay 6.8 percent interest on future Stafford loans if Congress is unable to reach an agreement.

Congress reached an agreement on Wednesday which bundles the lower student loan rate with a bill to support spending on federal highways.

Congress is expected to pass Wednesday’s agreement sometime Friday, after running into hurdles that prevented them from passing it last night. The agreement, if passed, would keep the interest rate at 3.4 percent for one year, at which time the rate will need to be renegotiated.

“We’re pleased that the Senate has reached a deal to keep rates low and continue offering hard-working students a fair shot at an affordable education,” the White House press secretary said in a statement.

The rate hike would cost 7.4 million students an average of $1,000 each, according to the statement.

Though the legislation to keep the lower rate has received bipartisan support, the problem is in finding the money to support the lower rate, said Colin Holtz, who is the National Campaigns Director for Rebuild the Dream, an organization that has supported lower student loan rates.
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AFP: We Need a Hero: Writing Donor-Centered Email Appeals

There is a lot of emphasis these days on numbers and statistics when showing donors the good things that your organization does. When you are writing the first line of an email, however, you need to be a storyteller, not a statistician.

From the Association of Fundraising Professionals, June 21, 2011

Colin Holtz and Steve Daigneault, authors of the white paper “Storytelling and the Art of Email Writing,” say that it is crucial to tell a story in your emails to donors (and this likely applies to direct mail as well). But they do not stop there. They say that you have to tell the right kind of story–one in which the donor is the hero, not your organization.
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