Political Marketing
Civic Tech
Other Stuff
We're at a pivotal moment in time. Where we know the importance of high-attention short-term events like elections, voter engagement pushes, and community outreach. The challenge in whatever group you find yourself in now is to shape these moments into long-term power building opportunities for your community so that when you have a candidate - you're ready to go with not just a base of supporters, but a mechanism of how to engage and activate those supports for impact.
As we see the increasing emergence of independent political groups and disruptive campaign teams unseating supposedly "safe" candidates . . what we're seeing is this exciting intersection of distributed political organising and technology, together with grassroots community action . . all coming together.
Opportunity sits at the intersection between grassroots political organising + technology.
We know that the opportunity (and the challenge) in front of us is to understand how to integrate political engagement movements and community organising, by redistributing power, inviting local people and resources - using high tech and low touch, mobilising community members and finding the leaders amongst us - to propel that energy towards action and impact. It's also about building community spirit, being inclusive and inviting less-engaged people into the conversation, and most importantly, it's about understanding how to drive our activity toward impact.
<aside> ⚡ It's not just about building supporters, but about building a mechanism of how to engage and activate those supporters for impact.
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The social media and technologies that connect us all, are catalysing structural shifts and changes within grassroots community action groups. These mediums are inviting ordinary people into important conversations and enabling everyone to access and understand information in new ways that might have been too difficult or complex to engage with before.They're enabling politics to be more inclusive and amplify community voices of those who might otherwise not have participated.
We're seeing more More Progressive Platforms - New York VC Firms backing platforms like "Run for Something" to strategically support new young candidates. Acting almost like a startup hub incubator helping with:
- Communications strategy
- Social media strategy
- Tactics, campaigns, messaging frameworks
This kind of organising model is sometimes called ‘relational organising’, others call it ‘distributed organising’. Whatever you call it, the aim here is to support, encourage and propel the movement we’re starting. Often a movement will be led by committed volunteers and sustained by the core group who initiated it, but relational organising takes it out of the "top down" controlled approach (think Big Media Broadcast TV) and shifts the frame toward - enabling autonomous, bottom up, self-organised action. From there, the paths each of us take to get the work done , and the specific one-on-one conversations we’ll have with community members will vary, but one thing's for sure . . . With the strength of the community behind us and the mechanisms which invite and enable all community members to share, contribute, collaborate and engage - anything is possible. Think of like . . . Enabling Autonomy + Self-Organisation for Greater Impact.
<aside> ⚡ The power of real collective organising by people who really care . . . is hard to beat. Regardless of your fancy campaign budget.
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It's not just about building supporters, but about building a mechanism of how to engage and activate those supporters for impact.
This is really your growing team of community members doing outreach to spread the word and build a supporter base before you have a candidate.