Political Marketing
Civic Tech
Other Stuff
How might you give your team the digital campaign tools to reach the right people, right where they are?
How might the right tech support your team to punch above their weight with clever digital solutions?
When it comes to social movements, activist campaigns or community groups - we’re almost always trying to do more than we have the capacity or resources to do. This urgent need to cut to the chase and find opportunities to punch above our weight is the most readily available point of leverage we have.
We’re trying to do more, with less. We’re not afraid to try things and we need to be brave and agile, because that’s the leverage we have. Which begs the question . . where else do we see intelligent and powerful ideas, under-funded teams and scrappy resourcing produce sometimes brilliant output? as someone who is mildly obsessed with new tech and nocode, I reckon the answer might just lie in the tech startup world. After all, tech is changing at the speed of light, new ideas and cross-category trends emerging across the board and millions of indie hackers sitting in their bedrooms at home are figuring out just that - how to do more, with less.
So now that we’ve established a good source of inspiration and innovation might come our way by stealing* ideas and technology from the startup world - the next question becomes . . .
How might we steal productively from startup tech as a useful frame of reference for community campaigning?
Ps. I use the word ‘stealing’ intentionally here in the most creatively respectful context - 🎩 HatTip Austin Kleon ‘Steal like an Artist’
Our own tech capacity (and the the speed with which new tech startup platforms emerge), undoubtedly has the potential to overwhelm the structures we have in place for shared deliberation and decision-making. This democratisation of transformative tech, indeed the emergence and swift adoption of the nocode movement as an example - exemplifies the challenges and opportunities to be found here.
<aside> ⚡ In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it's the fast fish which eats the slow fish.
Klaus Schwab
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There’s something exciting and ballsy about being an outlying player in any space. Books like Eating the Big Fish and Small Giants give us some clue about how we might galvanise our teams in the face of bigger incumbents.
According to entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant, there are 4 types of leverage:
Labour and Capital represent constrained permission-based leverage points, they require someone to want to work for you (and for you to be able to afford to pay them) or for someone to want to give you money, and these resources are not unlimited.
Code (Tech) and Media (excl. broadcast) by comparison, are open for the taking. It doesn’t mean they’re easy to leverage; what it does mean - is that they represent the opportunity for disproportionate leverage AND they’re closer to your control than labour and capital 🤔
<aside> ⚡ Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.
New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.
Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
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collective intelligence (CI)
, def.
Effective, decentralized, and agentic decision-making across individuals and communities to produce best-case decisions for the collective.
Self-organized, agile leadership promotes collective intelligence and higher performance
Collective intelligence is really just the ability of groups to outperform individual decision-makers. That is, a self-organised group of well informed people, will make better decisions than an individual alone. We also know from research that people who have accurate information make decisions quickly and in turn, provided better information back to the group.
<aside> 📌 Check out the Civic Tech Field Guide 👉 here
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Everything we’ve talked about here 👆 requires additional expertise that can be difficult to define, much less find.
Are you looking for a volunteer who is an IT person or a traditional web developer or a marketing hobbyist? Well the truth of the matter is . . . any of these volunteers might be able to fill the gap. The kicker is that they understand the team’s mission, how this relates to information architecture, workflows and community building - and the ways in which technology can be an enabler of it all.
The key to really defining and making use of this role - is understanding what the point of the role is.
The real aim here is to use technology, process, and working practices to create a high-performing team. To create an operational framework that provides for the key enabling factors, whether they are:
It’s really important that technology is never used for technology’s sake; but only in the context of understanding and supporting a high performing team. To create an environment that builds high-speed agile work capability, and the ability to iterate and pivot rapidly, your technology framework needs to both reflect and shape the structure of your team’s operating framework.
The key objective is to arm your teams with the appropriate technology and align them with the right information architecture, to minimise dependencies, reduce the time cost of cross-collaboration, and improve the autonomy of each individual (whether paid or volunteer) so they can self-lead in their own domain, to speed up decision-making and increase the quality of work being done.
It’s also super important for whomever helps with this role, to really understand the operating context of your team, the priorities and responsibilities of other members of the team who might be operating in very different circumstances with different challenges or pressures. So the goal here in highlighting this opportunity for leverage; is to find your own answer to this question . . .
How might we . . intentionally design our information and communication architecture, technology stack and operating workflows, in a way that supports collective intelligence?
The end result which might hopefully deliver:
<aside> ⚡ ****We’re talking about an eco-system that enables collective cognition, coordination, and cooperation.
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It’s easy to be overwhelmed when talk turns to tech or indeed information architecture or workflow process planning. These terms can feel like the domain of a fat corporate - to which the understandable response might be. . . “that’s all well and good for a big company but we’re a team of ordinary volunteers”.
So let’s bring it into real-practice and see what the most basic version of it might look like.
Let’s say that the list below represent some of your biggest day-to-day operational challenges:
It’s worth noting that the above-mentioned challenges aren’t particular to social campaigning or community movements. They’re the kinds of things all businesses (especially small-to-medium businesses) struggle with every day.
So here’s a quick and dirty example of how this kind of thinking might play out in practice…