The news of mass events like the People’s Climate March, the rallies against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Women’s Marches around the globe spread through social media. But behind the scenes, email was king.
That’s thanks to Action Network, a nonprofit whose email-driven platform has helped provide the infrastructure for charities and activists aiming to support progressive movements.
Action Network platform provides tools, free to individuals and small organizations, for fundraising, creating petitions, organizing events such as demonstrations, and asking supporters to contact their legislators.
The Chronicle spoke with Brian Young, the network’s executive director and a veteran of digital political organizing, about what charities can learn from some of the success stories built on the platform.
How do you define online community?
It’s an important term to really think through because you need to understand the limits of it. It’s not a community of people who see each other every day and that necessarily have deep relationships with each other.
Twitter is great place to throw messages out and have them bounce around, but followers are generally not that engaged. Facebook is similar. But with email, you’ll often have a much closer relationship with people when they sign up to a list.
With online organizing, how do you maintain a sense of cohesion at the national level while still allowing for flexibility at the local level?
Action Network allows federated organizations to organize within a networked structure. So, for instance, if a large, national group has a number of state chapters, this system gives them the ability to create draft emails or actions that they can syndicate down to the local groups. The local groups can adapt that content as little or as much as needed and send it out to their members. Then the results of those actions, such as new email addresses on petitions or RSVPs for events, flow up to the national group.
This allows for sophisticated, networked campaigns, with guidance from the national group helping their local groups build stronger relationships with their members and more effective campaigns, and the data flow creates clear metrics throughout the organization.
Nonprofits are stepping up efforts to help their supporters bring in new donors online. In this special report we give you examples of what’s working, explain the tools you need, and provide guidance on how your charity can get started.
One of the ways you remain relevant to your audience is to target your messages to the people who care, whether that’s at the level of a state or county or targeting people based on their interests.
What kind of technology has been most effective at keeping people engaged with a cause?
It’s definitely a mix. People like to do different things. Meeting people where they are is the best way to move them into action.
We talk about the ladder of engagement. There are some things that are very easy to do, like signing petitions, and then there are other things that are a bit harder, like going out to a march. People don’t necessarily start at the bottom and then move their way up. It’s really making different on-ramps into your organization available to people.
And then there are the super activists who do everything. The key is to find those people and try to develop them and give them more leadership with some of the localized tools.
The Women’s March is an example of a movement that mobilized online quickly and used your platform. What’s unique about the way they’ve organized?
It did pop up very quickly on Facebook and Twitter. While it’s good to get events posted there because a lot of people can see them, you’re not building any long-term power for your organizations.
The Women’s March organizers realized there was an opportunity to build an organization well into the future, and so a lot of the events existed in multiple places, on Facebook and Action Network, allowing them to capture the email addresses of both the organizers and the people who RSVP’d. That becomes the infrastructure for an organization to go forward.
Compare that with Occupy Wall Street, which was completely social media-driven and a great series of events over a couple months’ period but didn’t turn into a long-term organization because there was no infrastructure in place.
The Women’s March was able to turn that one-day event into a really sophisticated and powerful organization almost immediately.
So far that movement seems effective at keeping people engaged. What factors have been key to its sustained momentum?
They’ve been really smart about suggesting different styles of action that people can take and pacing out those actions. They’re very intentional about building a community with their people at the local level.
The real interesting metric for the Women’s March was the huddles: small, local events throughout the first 10 days or so in February.
They ended up having over 5,000 of those. There are organizations that have been around for decades that couldn’t create that over a 10-day period.
But because they had all those people to go back and contact from that single event, they were able to build on that. The quick move into these local events helped keep people in contact with each other.
That’s what these tools are really about: capturing the energy of the moment and turning that into a long-term organizational boost. You start to build a relationship with all of these people, as opposed to just having one event.
And they’re not always ramping up. They had a moment where they were explicitly telling people to read up and recharge.
Are there smaller-scale examples that have been successful?
The Network for Public Education had a fairly small email list, but it was durable. They kept this community going for quite a while. After Trump was elected, and with the appointment of Betsy DeVos, the immediate threat to public education was clear, so they started to do more actions, and it really caught on very quickly. They saw that as a big moment to rally around and they grew their list exponentially.
This is the promise and limit of email-based organizing. It’s difficult to create energy and drive energy, but when you have a good program and you keep a base of support there and stay relevant to your community, you can capture those moments.
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
