Increase member engagement with opportunities to build community and improve messaging

Most people who are active in politics are involved because of the work organizations do to mobilize them. Organizations want to increase engagement among their members, moving them up the activist ladder to build people power. Some strategies organization leaders deploy are better at this than others and research can play a critical role in making informed decisions that lead to organizational growth and campaign success. Perhaps most importantly, this is about creating a politically salient social identity and aligning communication strategies to emphasize activating that identity (Lacomb 2019). Below, I share a couple of case studies based on my research to demonstrate how research-based decisions can help organizations achieve their goals. 

Case Study 1: Building an activist base through offline community building

While online activities provide a broad base for member engagement, building the fuel to build power requires a committed membership base that will be there when the time calls. As Han shows in her book How Organizations Develop Activists, transformational organizations are much more effective at developing activists who will show up to help build the organization. Transformational organizations emphasize building community through relationships in addition to building a collective identity.

My research shows that organizations can build relationships and collective identity by encouraging in-person, offline activism (Han, Sparks, & Towery 2018). The most effective way to encourage repeated participation is by having organizers do what they can to get members to attend in-person events. This is demonstrated in the figure from the article below. Although many more people may initially get involved online, the number of people that stay active remains much higher for those showing up to offline activities.

On a human level, this makes intuitive sense. We are social creatures and like to do things with friends. We can build those relationships best when we are actually with people, not just clicking on links online. Although this type of organizing requires more capacity and resources, it will pay off in building long term power through relationships.

Case Study 2: personalized messaging can dramatically increase activism

In my dissertation research (Sparks 2021), I narrowed in on a very specific type of messaging. I was interested in how getting people to think about how political issues affected them personally could increase their willingness to write a message to their member of congress. 

I randomly divided participants of my study into two experimental groups. One group (treatment) saw a message prompting them to think about how the issue they selected as most important impacted them personally. The other group (control) was just asked to write their member about the issue. I then recorded whether or not the respondent wrote a message to their member or clicked on a link to contact them directly. 

Remarkably, despite this very subtle difference in messaging, I found that the mean percentage of the treated group was 11% higher than the control group. This equates to a difference of 3,300 more people taking action for a group consisting of 30,000 members. 

When organizations want to increase engagement among their members, they don’t care about narrow academic theories to test a very specific psychological mechanism. This provides the opportunity to employ a “kitchen-sink” approach, where multiple, research-informed messaging strategies can be folded into one high-impact tactic. 

Conclusion

Having people join an organization and getting on the mailing list is a huge resource that leaders must use effectively to realize the change they want to see. Simply providing information via updates or messaging around events or topics that are not personally meaningful to members wastes the opportunity organizations have to build real collective power. 

Effective messaging and providing opportunities for members to build relationships with each other and with local leaders can help develop effective organizations. Based on your specific type of organization and relevant research, the Sparks Lab can help leaders use their member list to its full potential in building real power.

References:

Lacombe, M. J. (2019). The political weaponization of gun owners: The National Rifle Association’s cultivation, dissemination, and use of a group social identity. The Journal of Politics, 81(4), 1342-1356.

Han, H. (2014). How organizations develop activists: Civic associations and leadership in the 21st century. Oxford University Press.

Han, H., Sparks, A. C., & Towery, N. D. (2017). Opening up the black box: citizen group strategies for engaging grassroots activism in the twenty-first century. Interest Groups & Advocacy, 6(1), 22-43.

Sparks, A. C. (2021). Climate change in your backyard: When climate is proximate, people become activists. Frontiers in Political Science, 3, 666978.