‘Engagement Organizing’ is a modern roadmap for building people power

There is a lot of talk these days about the relative merits of organizing and mobilizing in campaign strategy circles. In these discussions, mobilizing is understood as the practice of driving your base to take part in collective activities, such as signing petitions or donating online, with a focus on achieving good numbers.

Organizing, on the other hand, is the process of building deeper bonds with supporters and skilling them up to become leaders themselves.

Though many advocacy organizations have put their energies into mobilizing, analysts such as political scientist Hahrie Han and labor activist Jane MacAlevey remind us that without organizing, the campaigns and movements we are building are on shaky ground. It is the painstaking work of organizing person by person, they argue, that builds the robust base of engaged and skilled supporters needed to drive social change and political movements forward.

In the past two decades, new digital platforms have been leveraged towards efficient mass mobilization. The same platforms have also helped organiZing become more agile and compatible with mass mobilization. Matt Price’s book, Engagement Organizing: The Old Art and New Science of #winningcampaigns describes this new practice as combining “community organizing practices, digital tools, data and networked communications to engage people at scale and win campaigns.“

How organizing faded out and why it’s fading back in

Looking through the recent history of progressive organizations and movements, Price points out that most groups working for social change, including labor unions from the 1930s through the 1960s and community empowerment groups such as the Industrial Areas Foundation in the U.S., started building their organizations with ground up organizing. Door to door canvassing and small-scale activation and recruiting meetings were commonplace.

This lasted up until the advent of the “broadcast era” in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, mass mailers to huge membership lists became the norm. Thousands of members could be mobilized to donate or take simple actions at once though these new communications channels. The incentives justifying the hard work of organizing individuals and building their capacity dropped away.

We have become much better at mobilizing in the digital age, Price points out. That is, campaigns excel at sending online calls to sign petitions, donate small amounts of money and focus pressure on corporate or political targets for brief periods of time. Organizations like the U.S.’s MoveOn.org and their global peers in the digital-first OPEN network have blazed the trail here. But over time, these repeated calls to action have hit a ceiling for these groups and some have found that heavy lifts and serious campaign wins are not possible through this kind of light engagement with their members.

Distributed and snowflake models

Resource-strapped organizations can find ways to mobilize significant numbers of supporters with just a few core staff. Most assume, however, that traditional and seemingly high-touch organizing is beyond their means. Here again, the digital age has opened up opportunities for efficient forms of organizing assisted by digital tools and networked communications that have made activating and managing remote leaders possible without great investments in staff, events and travel.

In Price’s view, this next generation of organizing is distributed by nature, meaning that it follows a structure where core organizers train and activate remote leaders who, in turn, guide teams of supporters. To illustrate the distributed organizing method, Price focuses on the “snowflake” model developed and promoted by Marshall Ganz, which was successfully deployed during the Obama presidential campaigns. Here, each remote leader is trained to take charge of 8 people. In the past, such models would have scaled slowly but with the support of digital communications, political campaigns such as Obama’s two races and Bernie Sanders’ primary race have managed to deploy distributed organizing networks that involved hundreds of thousands of supporters.

A new Engagement Cycle

When groups combine the best of mobilizing with new organizing, a dynamic emerges that Price calls the “Engagement Cycle.” This cycle marries issue-framing practices with a distributed organizing process and mobilization moments. It is through this cycle that Price believes modern campaigners score their big wins. He illustrates the Engagement Cycle at work in the evolution of two Canadian organizations from a mobilization-first focus to the practice of “engagement organizing.”