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Helping Citizens Establish Winning
Goals, Strategy, Messages, and Organizations
INTRODUCTION top
When an event of terrible urgency occurs — a proposed power plant or highway expansion, massive storm water runoff from your neighbor, illegal dumping — people trust that the public officials and regulatory agencies they put in charge actually are serving citizens as intended. Too often, though, that is not the case.
- Government accountability has diminished along with civic participation. The problem is often a lack of political will either to respond effectively, or to try a more imaginative and less damaging alternative. Even officials who try to do the right thing often are stymied by a lack of constituents taking a stand to support them.
- Officials usually see real people only when they show up to complain. However, they see lobbyists for business interests, who are paid to curry favor for crucial permit and zoning decisions, all the time.
- Answers that seemingly should be easy are hard to come by because the 20-year campaign to shrink government also has weakened its ability to serve.
- Ordinary citizens have a difficult time getting their ideas and arguments past the squadrons of attorneys and public relations specialists who often intimidate local officials and overshadow citizens. Business executives, accustomed to confrontation and armed with data and money, easily win over government boards inclined to approve any project that comes with the promise — real or not — of new jobs and tax revenue.
AN EFFECTIVE RESPONSE – GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING top
The Coalition of Asheville Neighborhoods (CAN) strives to help citizens gain experience in organizing effectively, understand ing government processes, gathering facts, forming strategy, and developing messages that will resonate in their communities and lead to changes.
PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZING AT THE GRASSROOTS top
Here are some basic principles for citizen groups to successfully organize at the grassroots.
1. Conduct probing and ongoing research to understand the scope of the problem top
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2. Develop achievable goals and stick to them top
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Keep the list of goals succinct and to the point. The key to winning at the grassroots is to make your priorities the priorities of the governing councils you are trying to influence. Too many goals tend to weaken a campaign’s focus, especially in the early months when groups are just forming and their capacity to do all that’s necessary to win is not nearly as great as it will be as the campaign matures and members become more seasoned.
3. Develop messages and a communications program to disseminate them top
There is only one way for grassroots to compete with the money, insider influence, and power of wealthy opponents. Citizens have to build a large public constituency to support their goals. And the only way to build that public constituency is to develop urgent and simple messages, and to establish a communications programs to disseminate them persistently. Public policy debates are essentially a competition over ideas. Thus, the heart of a successful campaign is how effective a group’s messages are, and how well they are communicated and disseminated. Indeed, what the Institute has learned is that for a community group to mount a successful challenge to unwelcome or poorly conceived development, it must have better data, stronger ideas, and a more capable public information and communications strategy than its opponent. It must also be persistent and be able to sustain its challenge.
The objective is to set the public agenda and not to continually respond to the messages of opponents. Groups that achieve this objective generally win.
4. Build an organization top
In too many cases, promising grassroots movements fail because too few people do most of the work. Burn out is an occupational hazard in community organizing. Successful groups develop the organizational capacity to spread the work around, and efficiently manage publication schedules, deadlines, event planning, letter writing, and other core activities. Building organizations, like developing a successful campaign, starts with planning and setting clear goals. What is the group’s geographic reach – the community, the region, the state? Will the group seek nonprofit status? What kind of board is needed and what are the responsibilities of its members? Will an office be established and staff hired? All of these decisions and many more can be formalized in guidelines and bylaws that set the foundation for what the group is, its goals and mission, and its organizational structure.
5. Turn to other organizations for assistance top
It’s the rare grassroots organization that can take on an issue by itself and win. Victories most often come when small organizations join with other groups that share similar goals. Other organizations are likely to have already developed many of the successful strategies and tools for working at the grassroots, and most are more than willing to share what they know. Forming coalitions is as important to success as any of the other basic building blocks of effective organizing.
6. Raise money top
Successful organizing costs money -- for paper, postage, phone calls, travel, office supplies, attorneys, staff,publications, you name it. Successful campaigns depend on persistence. It takes months, and often years, for grassroots campaigns to reach a conclusion. It’s not unusual for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to be spent.
7. Recruit members top
Members are the soul of any successful public interest organization. And a growing membership is probably the most visible indication of a group’s influence and success in achieving its mission. Members provide financial support, new ideas, civic energy, and much-needed emotional strength. Attracting new members and keeping existing members involved and satisfied is a core activity of a successful public interest organization.
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