Grassroots organization

Managing a campaign this year means you will have to fight on multiple fronts to have an impact. Here we look at a few things to take into consideration when doing grassroots organizing.

Face to face contact

This one doesn’t go away. If you want to make a real impact at a local level you will need to get out and meet people face-to-face at some point. Whether this is with a canvassing drive or by organizing a promotional event you will want to capture as much information as possible and try to enlist new supporters. Building f-2-f contact into your monthly schedule will pay dividends in the long run.

Engagement tricks

Getting people to engage with your message is the hardest thing in any advocacy work. Consider employing secondary elements with your message to drive engagement - maybe gamify, offer incentives or issue a challenge. People will often agree with your cause but not be sufficiently motivated to take an action on it. It is your job to push or pull them with you.

Using digital tools

Things have moved on in recent years and there are a wealth of digital tools now available to help your advocacy work. Campaign technology developed to service political campaigns is totally transferable and will help you with managing your community database and then reaching out to that database.

Don’t be blinded by partisanship

Allying your organization to certain political ideology can be very useful in framing your message and activating an existing bloc to you. However, it is important to get up above partisanship to see about building cross-party support for your cause. Beyond the obvious benefit of opening up a whole new group of people to enlist, non-partisanship does elevate your cause and give you greater freedom in your messaging.

Following up with email/social - content focus

Take a leaf out of the marketing playbook and focus on content in all your missives. When composing emails or social media output consider your target audience in everything you write.

Seek out your influencers

Think about influential people that might be able to create an impact for you. Brand ambassadors are one way to get attention. You might be able to find someone in the media who is well-disposed towards your cause and willing to write or broadcast about you. Of course, there are many other influential people that might not be so obvious but could be well worth getting in direct touch with so keep an open mind rather than focussing exclusively on grassroots efforts.

See it as a database -don’t be casual, use a CRM attitude

Professionalizing your approach to advocacy work will always help. The return on investment of using a CRM system to manage your database can be very high. Having an overview of your database will drive your actions and facilitate better reporting on your efforts. You will also be able to see clearly those supporters who might be activated as volunteers or see where your next fundraising efforts can be targeted to. Organization is king in advocacy.

Listen - gather your feedback and tailor messaging in response to this

Ending on a very obvious one but don’t forget to listen to your community and take note of their feedback. Building an advocacy organization is a community effort and there is no better way to get consensus and forward momentum than is working community feedback into future messaging.