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Labour + Industry

A New Blueprint for Organizing for Change

‘Engagement Organizing’ offers insights on effective campaigning for unions, parties and social activists.

Paul Willcocks 18 Sep 2017TheTyee.ca

Paul Willcocks is a journalist and former publisher of newspapers, and now an editor with The Tyee.

Despite years covering politics and policy, I don’t know much about campaigns and the nitty-gritty of winning elections or building grassroots support for change.

Which might not matter that much, as Engagement Organizing, a new book from Matt Price, suggests that much of what people think they know about organizing is wrong.

Conventional wisdom for the last few decades was that campaigns were won with tight central control and big ad and communications budgets.

But Price, who has spent 20 years working on campaigns in the U.S. and Canada, offers a new model supported by a dozen case studies from Dogwood Initiative to Barack Obama’s campaign to the BCGEU. (Although in many ways, the model still depends on the some of the approaches that unions and organizers like Saul Alinsky used effectively before the Second World War.)

Price draws a distinction between mobilizing and organizing, while recognizing the value of both at different stages of a campaign.

“Mobilization asks supporters to do a task or to give money, whereas in organizing, leaders step up to help define campaign tasks and take responsibility for working with others to get these tasks done,” he writes.

Both are important. People who were mobilized to dump a bucket of ice water on their heads might not have been organized, but they raised $20 million for ALS Canada. And mobilizing people can be a step toward engaging them and encouraging them to take a larger role.

It’s easier than ever to mobilize people. Technology, from social media to apps to manage contacts with supporters, has made it simple to capture supporters’ emails, learn about their interests and what triggers a response, and then target them with messages. Political parties, NGOs, non-profits and some unions have embraced the approach.

But Price has a cautionary note about this kind of mobilization.

“Whether this translates into building power depends on the ability to forge solidarity and leadership in those communities, which requires attention to organizing principles,” he writes. Identifying potential supporters and reaching out to them doesn’t build a sustainable movement for change.

The 2008 Obama campaign is often cited as a triumph of social media, data management, modelling and testing. And it was. “The campaign knew to the penny, for example, how much it cost to get a new email and how much it was worth for fundraising,” Price writes. “It tested various splash pages on its home page and boosted email signup by 40 per cent.”

But the campaign also focused on organizing. In the early stages, Price notes, the team didn’t prioritize voter contacts, the holy grail of political campaigns. It focused instead on recruiting and training 3,000 volunteers to help 1.5 million people take an active role in the campaign. “If you have folks that invest early in the volunteers, you start a bit slower, but the growth that you see in the end is explosive and much more so than what you could do if you had just staff-based activity,” says Mitch Stewart, a campaign director, quoted by Price.

The model requires campaign organizers to give up some control, compared to a typical hierarchal campaign where leaders — generally paid — devise the strategy and volunteers are sent out to do the grunt work.

Price devotes a chapter and two case studies to union organizing, one of the toughest challenges out there for the last several decades. He’s blunt. “To date, the Canadian labour community has not demonstrated the necessary ambition in terms of scale and creativity in organizing needed to reverse its decline,” he concludes. Unions have often become service agencies, treating workers as clients, rather than focusing on ongoing organizing in existing and new workplaces and supporting “organic leaders.” They’ve been slow to embrace technology and the lessons of modern mobilization and organizing.

With exceptions. Price offers case studies — of UNITE HERE Local 75 and the BCGEU — that show organizing approaches that are working.

Engagement Organizing might be of most interest to people already interested in effective campaigning, but it’s a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the principles and practical examples of building an effective organization.

If you’re involved in making change or building community — from a political party to a school parent advisory committee — you should read the book.

And if you aren’t — well, you should be.  [Tyee]

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