At Rally we talk a lot about engagement and it’s not just us! The wider sector is talking a lot about engagement as well. To the point where it’s rapidly becoming the new buzzword.
So when we’re talking about engagement, what do we actually mean?
Let’s start with what we don’t mean. It’s not a rebrand of fundraising to detoxify previous bad practice. It’s not advertising. It’s not a chatbot. Or a survey. Or a Tote bag. Or a welcome call. Or a thank you postcard. It’s not tactics.
It’s a mindshift, it’s a cultural shift, it’s way beyond fundraising. It’s an opportunity to connect the public at scale with the cause you are fighting for. And most importantly it’s the way you can unlock the power of people and bring them into the fight for change. The key words there are PeoplePower, Scale and Change.
One of the best things we’ve ever read on the subject is the chapter on Engagement in the Mobilisation Lab’s Cookbook. The Cookbook is a guide written for Greenpeace on how to bring People Power into every part of Greenpeace’s mission.
We gasped when we first read it and to be honest, it’s central to what Rally is and what Rally here is here to do. It’s had a huge impact on our thinking and how we want to do things.
We’d urge you to download a copy and read it today.
The engagement chapter makes the following point.
Lasting, radical change requires broad and deep engagement. Deep engagement supports people in becoming leaders and influencers who take on significant roles and responsibilities, such as organising their own campaign or investing their time in an organisation-led project.
Meanwhile, broad engagement touching many people can establish trends, alter behaviours and shift public opinion with an idea or call-to action that cannot be ignored. Broad but engaging work moves a campaign away from singing to the choir towards a more mainstream audience.
Breadth and depth are two sides of the same coin. Without deep engagement our victories could be short lived or superficial. Without breadth we cannot achieve the scale of change needed to tackle the root causes of our problems.
When we talk to clients we summarise it as follows...
Engaging the public at scale and maintaining & strengthening that engagement is important to deliver long lasting radical change.
Broad engagement is achieved via mobilisation. Mobilisation gives us breadth, it’s how we activate and grow our audience in order to harness the power of the mass.
Deep engagement is achieved via organising. Organising gives us depth: it’s how we build the long term structures based around people to deliver on our values and vision.
Mob Lab sum it up in this amazing diagram. It’s come to our attention that pyramids are coming in for a lot of stick recently. While we understand the drive towards a non pyramid way of showing this, we aren’t going to mess with perfection. And anyway, the steps illustrate how many people you’d expect get involved in each level of action.
We love this because transactions in the form of small cash donations, petition signs or slightly bigger actions that require more investment of time, effort or money are in the middle.
Those actions are not the destination. They aren’t the actions that will bring about long lasting radical change on their own. In this model, the real change happens at the top: this is when the crowd we’ve attracted to us, our values and our mission are so passionate about the change they and we want to see that they are prepared to lead. The engaged become the engagers.
Honestly. It was written in 2016. Download it. Read it. And share it with everyone you know.
We really believe that our sector needs radical change. And we aren’t going to achieve it by rebranding what we’ve always done. We actually have to do something different.
Paul de Gregorio
Main photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash