How the Poor People’s Campaign used mobile messaging to stage one of the largest virtual rallies ever
Over 2.5 million views, 300,000 letters to elected officials, and 40,000 marchers, together in solidarity but socially distanced in their own homes
A virtual rally wasn’t exactly what the Poor People’s Campaign had planned when they picked June 20, 2020 over a year ago for the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington. Like so many other in-person events in 2020, this crucial day of action had to move online in response to COVID-19.
“It was planned for an in-person, regular march on Washington,” Amy Miller, who runs the Poor People’s Campaign’s Action Network account, told us last week. “Then in mid-March, we decided it needed to be a virtual rally. We didn’t really know what that meant, but we figured it out pretty quickly.”
The Poor People’s Campaign had spent months organizing and collecting RSVPs for the event through in-person organizing, peer-to-peer texting, and phone banking, but they knew that day-of mobile messages to everyone who had RSVPed would be crucial to driving turnout.
“On that weekend, we were having three broadcasts, and we knew that blast texts would help convert people right then and there,” Amy continued. “Unlike an in-person rally, where you make plans and you know how you’re going to travel there, with an online event, you may not remember right at that moment that it’s happening. So we wanted to use the mobile messaging blast to say, ‘Tune in right now!’”
The organizers discovered only days before the event that the tool they had been using for blast mobile messaging might not work this time around.
“We wanted to use the mobile messaging blast to say, ‘Tune in right now!’”
“We had to do a pretty quick turnaround,” added Christian Norton, a consultant with the firm Concerted Action which provides digital support for the Poor People’s Campaign. “We found out pretty late in the game that the other tool they were using for mobile messaging wasn’t supported anymore, so it was about 24 to 48 hours between our initial thought, ‘We’ve got to do this with Action Network Mobile Messaging’ to ‘Let’s hit send.’ We set up everything we could real quick.”
The team signed up for Mobile Messaging on Action Network and cued up a series of messages to go out to their list ten minutes before the events started. The result was an historic gathering of poor and low income people that succeeded in reaching people around the world.
“We had millions of views on Facebook, and tens of thousands of people took selfies of themselves with their rally signs, as if they were at the march, so you could look through the crowd virtually on the website,” explained Amy.
“We sent almost 300,000 letters to Members of Congress, governors, and other elected officials promoting the policy platform of the Poor People’s Campaign, and we got a lot of great feedback from all the poor folks around the country who were organizing.”
“We didn’t set out thinking that we needed to change tools 48 hours before one of the largest digital rallies ever held, which was a little daunting,” added Christian. “But we did it successfully, and it was extremely helpful to turn people out for the campaign.”
Amy and Christian both cite the benefits of Action Network’s integrated, all-in-one mobile messaging tool in the campaign’s success story.
“The great thing is that it’s a unified tool. The same tool that we use for organizing, that we use for emails, that we use for advocacy campaigns, is now the same tool we use for blast mobile messaging.”
“We’ve spent years training volunteer administrators across the country on Action Network,” Amy explained. “With mobile messaging on Action Network, now we don’t have to train them in a different tool — we just have to show them this little tweak. It’s so intuitive, and there’s nothing more you have to learn.”
“The great thing is that it’s a unified tool,” Christian continued. “The same tool that we use for organizing, that we use for emails, that we use for advocacy campaigns, is now the same tool we use for blast mobile messaging. That is a huge advantage for the Poor People’s Campaign and many other organizations I work with.”
While the campaign had spent months organizing and encouraging supporters to RSVP, Amy thinks that the blast mobile messages made a big difference.
“Everybody’s got their phones in their hands, so there’s power in that. I know that people looked at those text messages. In terms of getting someone’s eyes on a quick message, I don’t think anything beats a text.”
Want to learn more about Mobile Messaging on Action Network? Join us for a live demo! RSVP here: ActionNetwork.org/mobile.
Learn more about the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, which is continuing Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s work to build a broad, fusion movement that can unite poor and impacted communities across the country.
Learn more about Concerted Action’s work helping non-profits and unions with advocacy, organizing, and the digital tools that power grassroots movements.
