Refocus to Change the World

I missed it at first in the “snowmaggedon” that swamped our area over the last couple of weeks, but I did finally land on colleague Michael Silberman’s excellent post over on Frogloop on the challenges of applying innovative online organizing to the complexities of changing the world.

Michael was on the ground for the climate movement’s efforts in Copenhagen a couple of months ago, and came away with an impression of a policy making process largely immune to the outputs of the movement’s work.  He proposes a refocusing, noting, “it is incumbent upon all of us to avoid getting so caught up in the art and craft of our online engagement and online campaigning work that we’re blinded to the reality of the people we’re trying to influence — or the landscape in which we’re operating.”  It’s a brave and insightful post and I hope you’ll read the whole thing.

In support of refocusing, we’re offering up a trio of ideas that we think can guide the way toward more effective more world-changing work, online and offline.

1. Measure for outcomes, not just inputs and outputs. It sounds obvious, but as a sector we focus relentlessly on inputs (how many emails did we send, how often did we tweet, and what’s on our campaign website?) and outputs (how many calls to legislative offices did we generate, how many people visited our website,  and how many of them signed up for our email list?), but very little on outcomes.  As we noted in a December Three Things on measuring outcomes, we tend to focus on inputs and outputs because it’s incredibly difficult to figure out how to measure outcomes in a complex environment with many moving parts and murky causality.  Difficult as it is, it’s a vital next step.

2. Remember that organizations don’t have friends. The buzzwords in online organizing are “community” and “engagement.”  Communities are great and cultivating and engaging them is a time-tested touchpoint of grassroots organizing, but mission-driven organizations need donors, activists, volunteers, grasstops leaders and sound connections within well-thought power maps.  Engagement for engagement’s sake can lead us to generate a ton of outputs (ie. Facebook fans and Twitter followers) unconnected to meaningful outcomes. We wrote about this before, too, here and here.

3. Become a power mapping pro. Most, if not all, of the policy change work we do depends ultimately on the decisions of a very few people, be they members of Congress on key committees, policy makers in the US administration, business leaders, high profile members of the media or a city council member or two.  Online campaign strategists should bring to the table a commitment to understanding what really influences those people, and endeavor always to keep investments and activities narrowly focused on those pathways of influence.  Sometimes mass grassroots actions are the right way to go, other times they’re not.  For a terrific example of power mapping in practice, check out this write up of the successful campaign to get Lou Dobbs off of CNN, in part using Facebook ads mictrotargeted to CNN/Time-Warner employees.

Clearly I’m missing some things in this list – and it might be the wrong list altogether, I’d love to know what you think! – but if we can get more focused on outcomes, on relationships that move our mission, and on focusing our efforts only where they can have an impact on decision-makers, I think we’ll see more of the change we’re working for.