Going digital during a pandemic: Moses ACTION’s pivot to online relational organizing

Written by Marium Navid on behalf of the Cooperative Impact Lab

Special thank you to MOSES Action, Cooperative Impact Lab, The Movement Cooperative, The Resilient Democracy Fund, and Way To Win.

The Problem

MOSES Action already has a strong community where actions and messaging are dispersed organically through the community The problem was tracking these experiences and amplifying the effect with tools for staff to better manage programming.

During COVID, MOSES Action also started testing more digital tools than they had used before to better reach their community virtually especially considering the decrease in in person events and gatherings. Through the Digital Innovation Fund, MOSES Action received a $60,000 grant, as well as digital strategy coaching to support their digital organizing experiments.

Key Questions

• How can relational organizing tools like Outvote be integrated into organizing strategy?
• How can traditional grassroots organizations transition to digital during the pandemic?

The Learnings

Top Takeaways: Digital tools serve as a complement not a replacement for executing successful campaigns and community building. If you’re investing in relational organizing tools, it’s important to build out an external organizing structure that incentivizes volunteers to take action using the tool, but also take other actions used in organizing.

Outvote super users reached 1250 direct contacts to create voting plans

296,202 voters created voter plans via peer-to-peer texting (over 500K texts were sent)

400 voters created voter plans through social media

208 new volunteers were recruited

Outvote

MOSES Action started promoting the Outvote app before COVID started, to begin formally selling the idea of relational organizing to their base. They organized town halls, events, and 1:1’s to encourage community members to practice using the app. The first campaign they tested Outvote with was around the 2020 Census. They found their people were gravitating towards using the app. One organizer even reached 600 contacts in one Sunday afternoon during tea.

During the election cycle, MOSES Action started recruiting “Faith Captains” or “super users” within the congregations and trained them on how to use the tool. The two criteria they had for this role were:

• The super user should have an existing network where they were well known
• They should be good communicators and have experience doing outreach either through text banking or social media

The purpose of the super users was to build teams with leaders managing community members on the app and encouraging them to take action.

Even though people were using the app, the primary challenges to work through was the tendency for people to replace the full scope of organizing with the actions on Outvote, and measuring the impact of messages sent through the app. It is clear that even though an app can help make things more efficient it’s not a complete replacement of traditional organizing.

In the future, MOSES Action plans to build out the peer to peer action in Outvote more. They found that sending provocative messages through Outvote was a great way to get people to interact and even show up to events.

Expanding Digital Strategy During COVID

MOSES Action did not have a digital framework before working with the Digital Innovation Fund, so being a part of the grant incentivized them to think of how they can move people online. They used Facebook ads for the first time, experimented with short codes in peer to peer texts, tested ActionSprout, and expanded their use of Instagram and Twitter. They also worked with 8 influencers during the election cycle to kick off their voter registration campaign.

Before COVID, MOSES Action found it easier to engage older leaders in a traditional canvassing strategy. During the pandemic they needed to adjust their plans. They provided multiple trainings in order to build faith leaders’ confidence in using digital tools.

MOSES Action found that the larger the group of volunteers you can train on digital tools, the better it is for long term sustainability. Volunteers will cycle in and out so you want a minimum number of people to be available at all times even if they’re rotating. They also found that they needed to maintain ongoing training opportunities and connect the training to the empowerment people feel through volunteering.

Using social media did help expand their reach, but the downside was that it gave a false sense of community and did not always result in action. Actions promoted on social media needed to be complemented with follow up outside of the social media platforms.

Friend-to-friend texting on Outvote seemed to be more effective in getting people to take action. While the number of people reached this way was fewer than peer-to-peer texting, the messaging through trusted messengers was a far more effective way to get people to take a high bar action.

MOSES Action plans to invest in the continual building of a network of trusted community messengers who can deliver messaging to their personal contacts and expand their social media ad strategy. They now have a full time digital organizer who is working on developing volunteers to be digital organizers as well.