Five Insights for the Road Ahead
RALLY works on issues ranging from national educational equity to backyard oil drilling in Los Angeles County to services for black women with HIV-AIDS across the state of California. Our team is chock full of experience across a similarly wide range of issues, locales, and tactical expertise — from campaigns to organizing to media relations.
With protests every weekend, major policy shifts every day, growing political and cultural divides and a seemingly intractably fractured information context, what should those of us working every day to build a better world have in mind? What are the insights that will help us all get there from here?
Our list below. Busy getting stuff done and just want the headlines? Here you go:
- Move faster — accelerated decision-making and constant rapid response are the order of the day.
- Know power — for some battles, tapping into the energy of protest to leverage a highly mobilized base is where the power is. Know when to play the inside game versus building new audiences.
- Be actionable — your people want to help, now more than ever. Be the resource they trust to help them plug in.
- Make connections — facilitating meaningful action in the context of real connection between people and groups is the missing link. Be more to your donors than a place to put outrage money.
- Poke the bubble — information is fragmented and it’s easy to see only that which confirms biases and weakens strategic decision-making. Ensure your information sources challenge your assumptions.
- Move Fast(er)
The pace of politics, policy, and media right now is faster than what most organizations are set up to manage. Just when you’ve worked out where to land on messaging around the women’s march, your team, the people you serve, the politics you’re navigating and the headlines you’re chasing are dominated by the Muslim travel ban and the protests around it. Hours later, a Supreme Court nomination battle is set to launch and three more possibly relevant executive orders have dropped. Your advocates, grasstops leaders, and media contacts are out in front of you, or maybe right there with you, or maybe behind you. Things are moving so fast that the listening systems you’ve got set up aren’t keeping up, either, so it’s hard to say where your people are.
We’ve all grown accustomed to working against strategies and plans that span weeks, months, or even years — and working within analysis and decision-making processes that match. The new context requires process and infrastructure to walk and chew gum at the same time; we’ve got to work long term while we’re making good strategic decisions in real time about responding to the extremely short term.
It’s time to set up the war room (at least a virtual one), the checklist, and the accelerated decision-making system.
2. Know Power.
Things feel binary right now: you’re with us or you’re against us. And on many things coming out of Washington, DC, these last few weeks it’s true — on immigration, climate change, the Affordable Care Act, and more, being part of a resistance is the new strategic reality. Especially if you’re sitting in a coastal city, opposition looks like the default.
Being smart about power, and who we need with us to win the important battles we’re waging, is as important now than ever. Are you fighting a battle that is best won by tapping into and leveraging opposition? Have at it! Are you sure the progressive left is all you need, though? How about people who have been or are disengaged? Or people who are apolitical but affected by your work? Do you need them, too, to win? Are you fighting DC, or contextualizing a local question?
We are working with clients on projects that are niche enough that it has been difficult to find an audience and champions for them, but that align perfectly with the energy around the women’s march. Elevating the issues within the base will be a next level win, and a shift in strategy to focus there is smart.
We are working on other projects that need some energy from outside the base — this moment of protest isn’t clearly helpful and we’re helping clients work out how to build on it, work around it, or connect it to a larger strategy.
Some battles are inside jobs and the energy of protest and opposition can be game changers, bringing progressive energy to conversations that have been essentially progressive all along. But even now, most things we’re working on will require working beyond the base — or at least building the base. Working out how and when to engage with the energy of protest will demand an ever clearer analysis of power and what it takes to win.
3. Be Actionable.
Millions of people marching in the streets, hundreds of thousands donating to progressive organizations, and thousands of people hosting “postcard parties,” knitting hats, downloading apps, joining Facebook groups, and calling their political friends for advice are wondering what to do now. They’ve marched, they’ve donated, they’ve called Washington DC and signed all of the petitions. But they’re still fired up, ready to go, and want to be useful.
Be a kind, generous, and accessible resource. Lend some of your development staff resources to your advocacy staff and help your new community of activists feel and be productive. If you’ve got dollars but not staff, hire help (Side note: at RALLY, we love to help.) Beyond writing you a(nother) check, what would you have people do to maintain momentum, build a movement, sustain hope, and establish the infrastructure to wield power?
Grassroots advocacy isn’t organization’s focus? No problem. Maybe it should be, for a while. Or partner up with an aligned organization that is situated for grassroots infrastructure and send them your incoming.
4. Make Connections.
Organizations that form the connective tissue between people will win. Reach out to people hosting grassroots parties and offer to connect them to each other. Offer resources for people to meet up in person — in your office, at City Hall, with your team. Go local, build that infrastructure, and it will form the basis for sustainable and powerful activity for the battles to come.
5. Poke the Bubble.
From our offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, it looks like the entire world is protesting the Muslim ban. Our social media feeds are wall-to-wall protest, our local news is wall-to-wall coverage, and everyone on our teams knows someone who held a sign at the airport over the weekend. So we’d be likely to offer some iffy advice to clients if we didn’t know that, prior to last weekend, somewhere between a plurality and a majority of Americans supported the ban, at least in concept.
That our news and information is exceptionally fragmented is well documented; ways to make sure that fragmentation doesn’t impede smart strategy, messaging, storytelling, coalition-building, and planning is quite a bit less so. The best communications are well-informed communications. Poke your bubble and make sure you’ve got all the information you need.
Shayna Englin is a Principal at RALLY, a communication firm that works to influence the way people think about and respond to political and social issues.
