A New Way of Organizing Online

The following is an excerpt from writer Britt Bravo's podcast interview with Rosalyn Lemieux, Executive Director of the New Organizing Institute (NOI), a grassroots program that trains political organizers to work for progressive campaigns and organizations. In this interview, which first appeared on NetSquared, Lemieux discusses how organizers can use the social Web for their work.

Britt Bravo: You have been doing online organizing work for quite some time now. How has it changed in the last five years?

Rosalyn Lemieux: I think what has changed more than the principles, and more than even the tools, is just how many people are using the Internet to get information, to participate in politics, to participate in activism. What has changed is what I think is the most interesting, and most applicable to progressive organizing, is how integral the social Web has become to [the average person's] life, so that [people] are more comfortable voicing their own opinions in the many forums that now exist, and better able to sort out reliable information from unreliable information, and comfortable using the Internet for the primary source and venue for their political engagement.

BB: When you think of organizers using the social Web for their work, are there any particular success stories?

RL: Yes, I think there are quite a few. And I guess it depends on how narrowly you define social Web, right? Obviously, the other kind of standard success story is MoveOn.org [which helped to create NOI]. What they did that was ground-breaking at the time — and now, hopefully, has become much more standard — is to really engage with their own members in a way that's meaningful, and that extends much beyond "Here, sign this petition."

Asking people to hold house parties, to write letters to the editor, and even do legislative visits — it's really changing the level of engagement of the members and supporters in the campaigns, where they understand all of the steps between what they themselves want to see — the change they want to see in the world — and how engaging with that organization makes that happen.

BB: What is the biggest challenge of using the social Web for organizing?

RL: I think the biggest challenge is internal to organizations, especially organizations that have been around since before the Internet was something that everyone used, before it was kind of part in parcel of what you have to do to have an effective campaign.

The real challenge is shifting organizations. Shifting how they relate to their supporters and their members, from kind of a broadcast mentality, where they have a message and they broadcast it out to people and they're looking at their email list and their Web site as just another mechanism to get out that set message. That is not an effective way to engage people online, and it is not an effective way to [increase] the number of people who are engaged with your organization. A major stress that [the social Web] has created is that people have an expectation of being asked what their opinion is, and being engaged in a meaningful way.

It's very difficult for organizations that aren't used to operating in that manner. To give up control enough to shift their operation. Starting first with asking their own members, "What do you care about? How do you think we should go about this? What can you contribute to make that happen?" And then in reaching beyond their current membership, going out and finding potential supporters where they're already at, looking for where there is already activity around their particular issue, and bringing people in in a way that's respectful that says, "Hey, you're already doing this terrific thing — we're doing something that's aligned with you" and treating them as equals and potential partners rather than passive recipients of information.

That's a pretty major philosophical shift for a lot of organizations and one that seems scary, because when you put your campaign in the hands of people who you only know online; essentially, it feels like loss of message control. It feels like giving up control of your campaign to some extent, but what it's actually doing is allowing many, many more people to become engaged with it in a way that is deep and meaningful to them and that will encourage longer-term relationships.

BB: What kind of social Web tools still need to be developed for organizers?

RL: Prior to inventing anything new, I think there's an awful long way to go in taking advantage of the things that are already out there. I don't think that a lot of the exciting tools out there are necessarily new. I think a lot of organizations could get 10 times or 100 times the campaign juice that they're getting out of them just by shifting the way that they're using [existing tools]. Part of that is shifting resources internally to integrate their Internet strategy more fully with organizing, fundraising, membership relations. Some of that is using the tools that exist to find supporters where they're already at given the tools that they have. From what I've seen, the tools that you think of almost as boring or passé are still largely untapped for progressive organizing.

Blogger outreach is just now becoming a standard thing for organizations to integrate into their Internet strategy. There's a ton of potential left just with blogs and integrating with Blogger outreach into Internet strategy. There are social networks like Facebook and MySpace, which, again, are just starting to be built into Internet strategy for organizations. Even though if you've been working in [the social Web], they seem like old news. These are not a cure-all, but they help to build buzz and identify volunteers. Since some of the footwork can be done by volunteers, it is also an opportunity to keep in a relationship with current supporters.

There still haven't been a lot of campaigns that have used social networks in a ways that are innovative. One idea that I've heard that I thought was smart, but I haven't seen anyone do, is partnering with a band or some group who already has a huge following on say, MySpace to co-brand. Bands have predictable spikes in traffic. So when they're going to launch a new album, a great way to use MySpace is to partner with that band and say, "Can you just put our campaign banner at the top of your page on the day you're going to launch a new album?" and that's a huge, free influx of traffic. That's using MySpace in a totally different way than most organizations think of it when they're building out their Internet strategy which is: We put up a MySpace page.

Obviously, YouTube [is another social Web tool nonprofits can use]. I think video has had a big explosion in the last year, but organizations still have not made it standard operating procedure to take decent video of the interesting things that they're doing and just pop them up on YouTube. It still hasn't sunk in for organizations that this should be part of standard operating procedure. It doesn't take you any longer, it doesn't cost you any money, and you're reaching people where they're already at.

To answer your real question, on the front of what new tools should be developed: I don't know what this would look like, but no one's nailed the mobile text thing yet, so if there's a magic text widget that makes that easy or cheap for organizations to be able to integrate that mobile technology into their campaigns — right now it's still expensive and unproven, but maybe at some point there's some movement on that front.

Volunteer Engagement

I think that the next huge potential that I see, especially for organizations, is to engage supporters in more complex ways than they have been. I think organizations have done a really terrific job engaging people offline in meaningful ways for their campaigns. It's still been kind of this throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall kind of approach, asking everyone to do the same thing, and the truth is that people have all kinds of varied skills that they can contribute that add up to potentially a light-year leap forward in the growth of a campaign.

But there isn't a tool out there yet that's become dominant, that makes that easy for campaigns. There are two out there that have potential that I'm aware of. One is VolunteerForChange, which is something that Working Assets put together. It's nothing more than a standard volunteer management tool, but what's nice about it is that it's in this neutral space, where when you sign up to volunteer for one organization's campaign, you then become a potential volunteer for other organizations, and I think that is a good model, where separating the tool from the organization or the campaign itself allows over time for the larger movement to benefit from the work that other campaigns are doing. So if I hold a big campaign and I engage a lot of volunteers, next time some other progressive organization has a big campaign, they've got a pool of volunteers to draw from.

I think that is true to, and takes advantage of, this next phase of development or phase of evolution that we're in online, which is separating the tools, and allows a larger pool of people to engage. It's similar to the reason why it's better to post your video on YouTube and link back to it on your site than to host the video on your site.

And so that's one volunteer engagement tool. The other one, Green Media Toolshed has developed something like the Yahoo Mechanical Turk, where basically as an organization, you can go in and say "Here's this 10 minute or 15 minute piece of work, that if 1,000 people did that 15 minutes of work it would add up to us actually getting something significant done."

So you can go as a volunteer to this site and say, "I have 15 minutes, and I have this skill," and it'll pull up a task for you to do. The idea being, if there's enough traffic to this site, thousands of people can do 15 minutes of work, and you actually accomplish something significant.

But neither of those has completely taken off yet, so we'll see what happens there. But I do think that the tools that find a way to engage people in a way that actually uses their individual skills, their individual talents, their particular availability without requiring a lot of staff overhead to manage them, that's a huge potential place of innovation.

And then, the other thing that could be developed is not so much a particular tool, but a resource where people trying to leverage technology and use the Internet for progressive organizing can go to figure out what's already out there for them.

I think there's already tons of neat little widgets, and there's already tons of tools that exist, and one individual online organizer in an organization has a really hard time knowing about all of them and knowing what's been tried and what works well and what doesn't.

So I think a go-to place, or a resource library, or some kind of an experts' network where people doing this work can go and find out what's available to them, and how well it's worked for other people, that would be a great development.

There's a few projects out there that look like this. There's the Organizer's Tool Crib, which was developed by dotOrganize, and that's a very simple directory of tools for nonprofits and peer ratings.

And the NOI is working, in partnership with a couple of other organizations, to try to pull together a resource library which anyone could add to — hopefully to be launched in the next six months or so.

On March 7–9, NOI will present an online organizing & political technology training in Washington, D.C.