Resource Type: Tips & How-Tos

The power of organizing is the ability to apply enough people-power to win – and keep – the changes we need for a future in which we can all thrive. This power is a renewable resource built through the trust and mutual accountability fostered by the relationships the organizer seeds between members and the organization, members and the organizer, and members and other members. This session will equip you to apply organizing principles and evidence-based advocacy insights to your work with volunteers.

Does “evaluation” sound judgy, “research” feel like a luxury, “testing” pointless, or “data” too technical?
Then we welcome you to explore with us how developing a culture of testing, evaluation and learning is crucial to multiracial, cross-class organizing in the climate movement. Evaluation and learning allow you to get real-time feedback about what is working (or not), and the space to grow from your experience and make shifts to your work. So it’s crucial to understanding the areas we are successfully building power and where we need to experiment and iterate. If we can’t track and improve, how do we know if we are on the way to winning?

The heart of today’s Insight is a guest column from Deb Lavoy at Reality Team. Billing themselves as “reality’s marketing team”, they take on the challenge of combatting disinformation of all sorts by competing directly for the attention of those people most likely to consume and believe it. Deb outlines the team’s program design of 10-second ad son Instagram, the successes, and how they measured its impact. It’s a compelling read. Hear from her yourself by registering for the Lab’s webinar on fighting disinformation.
Before we dive in, here’s one last plug for the Lab’s Spring Training for Impact Cohort. Applications close on Monday, February 28th. We have 25 spots and we’d like you to force us into hard decisions about who gets them. Pass the word on or apply yourself!

The recent winter storm over a huge stretch of the country—including parts of Texas—has brought back memories of almost exactly a year ago, when beginning on February 14th 2021, a deep freeze in which hundreds of Texans lost their lives and more than half of the state was without power or water service for days. A year after that traumatic catastrophe, the state remains susceptible to similar extreme weather events and a freeze-vulnerable natural gas supply still powers many homes and contributes to climate change. Today we highlight lessons from innovative and evidenced-based online campaigning surrounding this one-year anniversary to hasten the end of natural gas.

In 2022, the Climate Advocacy Lab is giving an 8-part Campaign Planning and Organizing training series. In part 1, we delve into the use of the SMARTIE framework for goal setting in alignment with organiztional strategy. We position the use of SMARTIE within the context of organizing and campaigning with a multi-racial cross-class lens in order to build the people power necessary to win a just transition.

Learn how to improve your advocacy (quickly) with state of the art research techniques. The perennial conflict in research – quality vs. speed – is a compromise no more, with quick-turn-around numeric tools and always-on focus groups you can trust, rigorous public opinion research and detailed audience engagement measures. Join Potential Energy as they share tips on research methodology and tools, and how you can get for-profit insights on a non-profit budget. Find out how to get deeper audience understanding that will make your messages truly connect with your audience for greater impact.

When I joined the climate movement in 2013, fossil fuel divestment campaigns were surging across the country on college and university campuses. At the time, I was a student and compelled by the narrative of stigmatizing the fossil fuel industry and taking away its social license to operate. The vision that captured my imagination of what is possible centered on people and building a world where everyone can live a dignified life.
The foundation of this vision embodies roots from the environmental justice movement. From Native people’s resistance of colonization to Latinx farmworkers’ determination for safe workplace conditions to Black and brown communities demands for basic human rights: clean air and water; organizing for what people deserve has always been the pathway for how we win.
So what does it take to do the necessary and bold work of multiracial, cross-class organizing in the climate movement?
The Lab recently engaged in dialogue on this question at Celebrating Our Community Power. Over 80 members joined in and learned from one another. Below, we highlight the most relevant insights that came out of the discussion and recommendations for how you can apply them to your work.