Any organization lives or dies by its capacity to balance multiple factors including resources, time, and volunteers. Likewise, building a strong grassroots presence invariably depends upon your ability to balance two different, yet complementary, strategies that we will outline here. But first, there are a couple basic concepts with which you ought to be familiar.
Organizing
Organizing essentially means, building the capacity to engage on an issue. When you’re organizing, you’re identifying passionate community members, engaging activists, training members and creating a connected group of people who can advocate on an issue. It’s about building the muscle behind your message and creating potential power.
Mobilizing
Mobilizing means simply turning potential power in to actual power. It means using the advocacy strength you’ve carefully fostered through leadership building and training to engage on issues in concrete ways. This can include letter-writing, visiting with legislators, marching, rallying and all sorts of other muscle-using kinds of endeavors.
Creating a Grassroots Growth Cycle
The important thing about organizing and mobilizing is that, though they’re entirely different concepts, organizing and mobilizing cannot be done in isolation from the other. The best way to organize is to give folks something meaningful to do; on the other hand, the best way to mobilize is to build a dedicated group of advocates.
Grassroots organizing cannot happen in a vacuum. If you’re only ever focused on mobilizing, you’ll miss an opportunity to recruit new advocates, and train your current ones, resulting in attrition, burnout, and an eventual lack a dedicated group of people to carry out your actions. If you’re only focused on organizing, issues will never move forward and you will lose advocates as fast as you can recruit them due to a lack of engagement and meaningful action. Organizations must cycle between organizing and mobilizing, doing both simultaneously but understood separately in order to improve their ability to do each one.
It’s a delicate balance, to be sure, but with each campaign the process will become more comfortable and refined until you’re an unstoppable powerhouse of advocacy.
Questions? Thoughts about effective ways to balance organizing and mobilizing? Contact us or leave a comment below!
