Deep Mobilizing

Deep Mobilizing is new way to bring people to action

Let’s say there is a specific group of people who should do some small action that is for the good of a cause institution they care about, for society, or for the planet.

In this case, deep mobilizing (DM) is an effective method to make that happen.

Here is how it works:

1. Identify the specific group of people that should act.
2. Identify the specific act they should undertake.
3. Identify the subset of activists that are motivated to work towards that end and will take responsibility for doing so. The subset can be small or big. The difference will be how long it will take, now how successful it will be.
4. Identify who among that subset of activist across all demographics of the larger group can be contacted and persuaded to join this effort.
5. Help these activists to select ten or so people they know well.
6. Commit to help those activists help these friends to act. Listen to them. Understand and learn from their experiences. In exchange, these activists will commit to doing their best to encourage the action among their designated friends.
7. Have a clear way to keep track of the activists, the people they will help to action, and whether the action has taken place.
8. Only the activists can directly communicate with their people about this action, not the central entity.
9. Train and help those activists who have stepped up and connect them with each other.
10. The activists should encourage some of their people who may be so motivated to join and help some of THEIR friends to action.
11. Focus on the single act but use the network to constantly engage in relevant ways in the service of the original goal.
12. The entire process must remain not only voluntary but positively motivated throughout.

How DM is different from traditional campaign organizing (CO)

1. CO is run by staff, and may or may not have volunteers. The volunteers have little or no responsibility or influence, and are temporary. With DM, the volunteers have responsibility and also power, they ARE the effort and their work does not end with a specific action or event.
2. CO is deadline focused, it does little with volunteers before the deadline, intensifies towards the deadline, then disperses when done. DM is focused on building a network or scaffolding. Once built it remains and each time it is used, it is strengthened.
3. CO uses messaging, deploys content through mailing, media and social media, cold calls, block walks, texts, and rallies. Its contact is from stranger to stranger. It focuses on messaging to the target slice of the overall target group. DM is implemented through strong pre-existing relationships and the messaging is from friend to friend and unique to each.
4. CO is a hierarchy with those on the top making the decisions. The volunteers follow instructions and work from lists. Those who should act are treated as customers, users, or people on a list. But there is little accountability. DM builds a network with the leadership simply supporting rather than leading that network. There is precise accountability.
5. There are many different campaigns at different times and places working off different lists. CO requires expertise and great expenditure but little remains after the event focused goal. DM is time consuming to build but inexpensive to maintain once in place. The older and stronger it is, the cheaper it becomes.

Examples of DM v CO

Alumni Fundraising Colleges all try to raise funds from their alumni with varying degrees of success. The CO method would be that the college has an “alumni office” or “college relations” composed of people employed by the college. They have lists of alumni, with contact information and perhaps sports, majors, etc. Each year they send out solicitations, perhaps with return envelopes, magazines, cases for support, etc. This may be part of an “annual campaign” or some other manufactured campaign. Often the classes will be asked to compete against each other and often each class will have a chair who will sign letters and organize temporary volunteers, usually students or alumni. They may phone bank from provided lists among their class. Colleges raise funds for two reason, one is simply for the funds, to increase the endowment and operating capital, the other is because the percentage of alumni who give, no matter how much or how little they give, is taken by statisticians as a measure of alumni satisfaction and influences rankings. No college in the United States has over 60% of alumni give with the numbers at top private universities usually from 20% to 40%. The overall mean is 10%.

Via DM, the college would ask activists from among the alumni to choose ten people they would contact each year to get them to give, but also to encourage them to support the college in other ways, by interviewing prospective students, hold and attend events, and finding lost alumni and updating their contact information, with the understanding that there would be no additional solicitations. Their asks would be appropriate to the individual friend/alum. Their success would be measured, and the percentage of participation would increase and with time, the total amount of funds would increase.

Voting Currently CO voter turnout is the responsibility mainly of candidates, although some non-profits also work on GOTV. The efforts operate largely by recruiting volunteers who then phone bank, block walk and batch text in the month before the election but it is usually stranger to stranger. There is also significant messaging via media and social media. Rates tend to be around 20–50% of voters, depending on the election date and year. Recently there has been an interest (and several apps) that focus on “relational organizing” which encourages friends to contact friends, but has no accountability mechanism, and does not build a structure.

Via DM, activists would choose around ten people to take responsibility for. They would first of all ensure they are registered, that their questions and concerns are answered, that they know their specific voting plan, and that they vote as early as possible. Each election would strengthen the network.

Vaccination Currently, vaccinations are encouraged in various ways, through subsidies, through media messaging, through school or visa requirements. If there is a campaign, it generally involves increased funds for advertising but still focus on messaging or perhaps stranger to stranger outreach. There has recently been a focus on Community Health Workers (CHWs) which are much less centralized and live among the target group, but are paid staff, work full time, and there are usually one CHW per several thousand people.

A DM approach would take a specific group that needed to be vaccinated, for example everybody with young children in a particular province of a particular country. Then those whose children are already vaccinated and are easier geographically to reach would be enlisted to join the effort, choose ten other parents and so on. There would need to be a method to record which parents vaccinate their children and which did not. And there would need to be a way for this network to grow over time to harder to reach areas so that all parents are involved in the ongoing effort. Once the network was set up, there is no reason it couldn’t be used for childhood nutrition information or other relevant topics. And it could be implemented by CHWs, rather than the CHWs focusing on direct persuasion themselves.