Grassroots organizing has become an increasingly powerful force in our democratic society, giving voice to ordinary citizens who may not have the resources or connections of larger advocacy organizations. These movements are often initiated by a small group of people who share a common concern or belief and use community organizing and social media campaigns to raise awareness and build momentum. Grassroots movements have become effective advocates for change, driving progress on issues ranging from climate change to voting rights. However, these organizations face unique challenges, including decentralized communication and limited experience in legislative advocacy. In this blog, we will explore the tools available to grassroots organizers to address these challenges, empowering them to make a meaningful impact in their communities and beyond.
What Is Grassroots Organizing, and Why Is It Important?
Grassroots organizing is done by ordinary people who organize and work together to bring about change impacting their own community. These organizations can be local, regional, or national in scope and have proven to be effective advocates for change that wouldn’t be considered without their work. Part of the power of grassroots organizing is that it is a genuinely bottom-up approach to advocacy, where the people most impacted by public policy participate in collective action to influence decision-makers.
Grassroots movements are often initiated by a single individual or a small group of people who share a common concern or belief and decide to take action. Lacking the resources that larger, more structured advocacy organizations and corporations have, grassroots organizations often focus on community organizing and other forms of direct action to raise awareness and build momentum for their cause.
In our democratic process, these civil society organizations have become an effective response to issues that are not adequately addressed by existing power structures or institutions. Increasingly, grassroots movements are defining the high-priority political issues of our time, including climate change, public safety, and voting rights. Successful movements are able to use the power and passion of their community to build visibility and momentum around an issue, eventually ensuring that policy leaders are unable to ignore their calls for action.
Tools for Grassroots Organizing
Because their organizing is done by ordinary people, rather than professional lobbyists with experience in the political domain, grassroots organizers must leverage technology to reduce any efficiency or effectiveness gaps that exist between them and more traditional, professional advocacy organizations. Often, grassroots organizers leverage technology to solve two challenges that they face: decentralized communication and domain research and awareness.
These organizations, especially early in their lifetime, usually have very few, or no, full-time staff working on advocacy. The nature of their origin, often coming from a community, also lends itself to more democratic organization structures and less top-down decision making. This lack of time and distributed leadership can make communication a challenge. Technology to address this challenge must reduce the amount of time they spend recruiting and communicating with members and ensure those communications are effective.
Another hurdle that grassroots organizations tend to face is limited experience within legislative advocacy. While the goal of a democracy should be to involve its citizens in the legislative processes, it is often the case that individuals will only have experience interacting and lobbying with lawmakers if they have done so professionally, or if they have grassroots organizing experience. Knowledge gaps and imposter syndrome can be serious threats to morale and motivation within grassroots organizers. If a citizen feels overwhelmed or intimidated by the process to affect change, it will be a greater challenge to engage them. Legislative tracking and research tools can reduce these gaps and empower citizens with the knowledge and confidence they need to focus on their advocacy.
Networking and Outreach
Grassroots advocacy organizations overwhelmingly focus on their successes, their collective actions, and their unique power — it can be easy to forget that these organizations are often incredibly large and complex communities. A grassroots advocacy organization like Moms Demand Action, with nearly 10 million supporters, requires powerful communication tools in order to keep their community engaged, and to recruit new advocates. Even smaller, local organizations can benefit from spending less time tracking down volunteers or emailing newsletters.
Among the technology that these organizations use are CRM and fundraising management tools like EveryAction, ActBlue and Salesforce, outreach tools like Mobilize or one of the many peer-to-peer texting and calling solutions, and more commonplace communication technology like Zoom, Slack, and social media to keep their community updated on their actions.
Legislative Research
For organizations working to affect change in the legislative process, a legislative tracking and research tool is a particularly valuable solution. These tools simplify the legislative process, and ensure that organizers are spared from navigating clunky state websites or studying the confusing web of procedures and actions a bill takes on its path to become law. With a powerful policy intelligence tool, finding, tracking, and impacting the legislation that matters to an organization can be intuitive and efficient, rather than intimidating and time-consuming.
Legislative tracking tools couple powerful search engines and user-friendly design with boundless legislative data to ensure that a new volunteer making their first trip to the state capitol has easy access to the same information as a veteran professional lobbyist. Additional features, depending on the quality of the solution being utilized, may include artificial intelligence-driven insights, customizable alerts, or collaboration tools. Read on to learn more about Plural, the best legislative tracking solution for grassroots organizations.
Tagged Bills for Grassroots Organizing
A key similarity in the work of most, if not all, grassroots organizations is an intention to communicate with their community about their work, and the issues impacting their community. As mentioned above, the legislative process is opaque to many, and this can make a community less receptive to reports on progress, or calls to action. The “tagged bills” feature withinPlural serves as both a networking and outreach tool and as a legislative research tool, making it a particularly valuable solution for grassroots organizations.
Within Plural, users can easily categorize legislation into “tags”. These tags are user-generated, meaning they can serve any organization’s purpose, they can be built and maintained collaboratively, and they allow for teams to efficiently align on the status of a category of legislation of interest. Unlike other policy intelligence tools, Plural prioritizes collaboration by granting unlimited seats. However, public tags can be shared with those without a Plural user account. In this way Plural empowers an organization’s policy team to customize their view of the policymaking process, and to share that view with their community.
Case Study: Plural for Regional Workers’ Centers
As an example, let us think of how a regional workers’ center based in Virginia might use a tool like Plural’s tags to assess legislation impacting their community and to engage that community in their advocacy. Throughout labor history, workers’ centers have fought alongside labor unions against certain labor practices. These organizations are often formed by and made up of individuals without access to the collective bargaining process, including immigrant, low-wage, and contract workers, making them grassroots by nature.
Our example workers’ center may have just a few full-time staff, perhaps just one working on policy, and a large community of members who both benefit from and participate in the center’s legislative advocacy. The full-time policy worker cannot spend all of their working hours simply tracking legislation, as they may need to do if they were using only a state website. Instead, a policy intelligence tool like Plural would let them set up a series of saved searches and tags to ensure that they automatically captured and categorized all of the legislation pertaining to their community before the legislature. Pulling exports of these tags, or making them public, would allow for this legislative data, including important public hearing dates and bill movements, to be accessible amongst the community, thereby improving their engagement with the work.
Workers center advocacy can often focus on raising the minimum wage, especially considering they represent many communities in low-wage jobs. Beginning in 2012, the grassroots Fight for $15 movement has highlighted the fight to raise minimum wage’s through local, state, and federal legislation and has engaged many workers’ centers in the process. Among the tags our Virginia workers center might create and maintain for public access and transparency would be one tracking legislation aimed at changing the minimum wage, an example of which can be seen here: VA Minimum Wage Bills 2023.
