Over the last couple of months, I have been heartened by massive protests of ordinary people — from all walks of life, all across the globe — demanding that police abuse and police murder of Black people stop. I’ve also been heartened by the outpouring of financial support to advocacy organizations and nonprofits that are Black led or build Black power.
The Associated Press reports: “There have been $2 billion in racial equity pledges and commitments since May 25, 2020. By contrast for the whole calendar year 2019, donations in the same category totaled $166.4 million.”
With this outpouring of support, many nonprofits have had to grapple with the challenges of how to absorb and deploy such large sums of money.
Americans turned to the ACLU in a similar way after the election of Donald Trump. From November 2016 (when Donald Trump was elected president) to February 1, 2017 (one week after President Trump signed the Muslim Ban executive order), the ACLU and our 53 state offices received more than $175 million in contributions.
Over the last couple of weeks, some of my counterparts in other organizations have called to solicit my advice. Following those conversations, I thought it might be useful to share what we learned to help both nonprofits and donors wondering what to do next.
Now more than ever, the community of organizations dedicated to civil rights, civil liberties, social justice, and racial equality needs to pull together for maximum impact. To be sure, what worked at the ACLU may not work everywhere, but here are some key lessons:
Build the program, and expand the staff. As scary as it is to enlarge programs and build staff during a recession, I urge organizations that have received large inflows of contributions to do just that. Increasing job opportunities for individuals who want to change the world is a particularly powerful message in the middle of this recession. More importantly, it will make your organization more effective.
People did not make contributions to the ACLU so that we could stash their funds in our investment accounts. People gave to the ACLU after the election of Donald Trump so that we could launch a full-throated fight for basic rights and liberties. With this unexpected outpouring of generosity in 2017, I made a commitment to my board, staff, and contributors that we would divide up the Trump bump and spend those funds during the four years of the Trump administration.
Consequently, in each of the last several years, we have spent more on our programs than we raise — spending out the Trump bump and staying true to our promise to use these funds to fight the administration.
Our headquarters grew from 386 staff members in 2016 to more than 600 today. This growth allowed us to file more than 389 legal actions against the Trump administration on a wide range of issues, from immigrants’ rights, to LGBTQ rights, to voting rights, to reproductive rights and criminal justice. Just last month we won a major victory against the Trump administration in the Supreme Court and established employment protections for transgender, gay, and lesbian employees.
More recently, our growth in staff also enabled us to develop a docket to tackle the civil-liberties implications of the Covid-19 pandemic. In just four months, we filed an additional 156 lawsuits to address the pandemic’s impact in prisons, jails, and immigration-detention centers; access to abortion; and vote-by-mail processes. Without expanding our staff and core programs, we could never have risen to the challenges presented by the administration or the pandemic.
Invest in volunteer activism, and give priority to state action. With the additional resources we garnered in 2017, we decided to not only hire more lawyers and pursue more lawsuits, but to also build our political program and new strategies to get the public involved in influencing policy.
In 2017, we launched People Power, an online platform for offline activism. Since March 2017, more than 669,000 have become People Power activists. Through this platform, we deployed thousands of our members and activists, making them protagonists in the fight for civil liberties. They helped collect signatures for ballot referendums; they peppered presidential candidates with difficult questions on the campaign trail and extracted policy commitments; they helped pass sanctuary city laws; and they are now leading efforts to defund police departments and shrink the role of police. This mobilization program went beyond online organizing but made full use of new technologies by enabling members to text and call other members in advocacy and get-out-the-vote efforts.
We coupled that experiment with a $29 million investment to expand our offices in key battleground states. The ACLU of Texas, for instance, grew from an organization with a $4.1 million annual budget and 32 employees in 2016 to an organization with an $8.5 million annual budget and 65 employees today. We also invested in state ballot referendums to change the political landscape in key states, spending close to $11 million of the Trump bump in three ballot referendums to expand the right to vote in Florida, Michigan, and Nevada. All were enacted with comfortable margins, expanding the right to vote by more than 2 million new voters in states that will play a determinative role in November’s election.
By harnessing the power of volunteers, and by focusing on key states and ballot referendums in those states, we built power for the long haul — regardless of the dysfunction in our federal government or the nation’s capital.
Invest in infrastructure. As a leader of an organization that is always trying to make a difference in the world for people who lack resources or power, I have tended to scrimp on expenditures that felt like “overhead” and “infrastructure.” But with some of the fundraising pressure relieved by the Trump bump, I could take a closer look at the infrastructure, leadership, and human-capital needs of my organization. We leaned into hard conversations on management, culture, equity, and inclusion.
I hired ACLU’s first chief of staff, first chief equity and inclusion officer, first chief analytics officer, first chief digital officer. We moved to a new constituency-relations-management database. We launched a department to focus in a centralized way on digital communications, outreach, and fundraising. We created a data and analytics department that allows us to do serious data crunching on our own operations and on the issues — including analyzing arrest data by race, demographic data for redistricting, and Covid-19 infection rates in jails. We hired statisticians, demographers, computer scientists, and epidemiologists to work alongside our lawyers, lobbyists, advocates, and organizers. We took a fresh look at compensation across all positions — especially the newly created ones — to ensure internal equity and external competitiveness; this revamp cost the organization more than $4.5 million in additional costs over two years. We built coaching and training programs for staff and just recently launched a leadership-development program for employees from diverse backgrounds.
By focusing on infrastructure, staff morale, and advancement, and by building a culture of belonging, we hoped to build durability for our programs and resilience among our staff. To be clear, we still have our share of internal problems and unrealized potential, but the ACLU is now stronger internally than ever before. That’s because we finally made our internal work as high a priority as our external work.
What Didn’t Work
Mistakes will be made. We certainly had our share. Some experiments didn’t pan out. Some new endeavors were not worth the money or effort. Some personnel decisions were painful and challenging.
We hired so many people so quickly that we subsequently realized that we were doing an inadequate job of helping new staff members get acquainted with the organization, thereby creating some friction between seasoned staff and new colleagues, between lawyers and activists, between the state offices and headquarters.
We needed to update communications systems across rapidly growing headquarters and state offices — creating new discussion lists, Slack channels, and cross-departmental and cross-office groupings of staff to improve those communications.
Fast growth fundamentally challenged even the best of managers. Some had to leave; others were trained and coached. People Power was initially controversial among some staff members who hadn’t worked alongside large numbers of volunteers before, were already overwhelmed, and now needed to share the work with volunteers who were newer to the issues and advocacy. At times, we had to hit the brakes and work through the challenges and problems. It was often hard work, but always worth it.
To my fellow leaders: Think boldly. Act decisively. Without fear. The world demands that of us right now. Large surges in financial and volunteer support don’t come around often for advocacy groups. But when they do, those of us in leadership must make the most of them and devise multiyear plans for transformational change. Know that we are cheering you on, and my ACLU colleagues are here to support you.