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Creating Grassroots Movements for Change: A Field Manual
Chapter 4: Building Discourse
So, now you’ve got a lot of members—how do you keep them active and engaged? Building a lively—but civil—discourse is crucial to the life of any movement. Here’s how you can keep your membership interested—and talking to each other.
Before you can get started, you will need:
- A computer with internet access
- Online platforms, like blogs and message boards
- A sense of diplomacy
Follow these steps to keep your members committed to the movement:
Step 1. Be authentic. Even when communicating on behalf of your movement or organization, always speak in your own voice, as a real person who is passionate about your cause. Tweets, posts, or status updates that sound like commercials or marketing jargon will turn off followers.
Step 2. Stimulate conversation. Stimulate conversation. Liven up the discourse. Come up with interesting topics that are relevant to your group, and invite everyone to discuss them on your blog or social networking site, or via your Twitter accounts. Don’t be afraid to ask your group for input. Ask questions and consider current events, ongoing controversies, studies, statistics, and big-picture ideas—the more galvanizing the subject the better. Your group must engage the world passionately and honestly to maintain its relevance.
Step 3. Be accessible. Respond to any questions, concerns, and crises raised by your group. Let contributors feel that their voices are being heard, and assure everyone that they are integral to the community. Allow members to vote on group actions, or at least explain decisions you or the group leadership makes.
Step 4. Moderate the discussion. Play the mediator when the discussion gets heated. It’s your group—it’s up to you to keep it together. Emphasize mutual respect, and keep the discourse well mannered and civil. If factions develop, remind members that while they might disagree on some points, they all share a common goal.
Tip 1: However, if someone flagrantly crosses the line—and refuses to apologize for their comments—don’t hesitate to ban them from the discussion. It is your responsibility to keep the conversation not only useful but civil.
Step 5. Organize your content. On your forums and message boards, designate your key conversation starters to be “sticky topics,” which means they’ll stay at the top of the page and not get buried under less-important threads. Organize your tweets by using hashtags, a way to identify tweets related to a certain topic. Designate a word or phrase related to your movement by prefacing it with the hash, or pound (#), symbol. Other users can then easily search for posts on that topic, and use the same hashtag when they're discussing it, helping to spread your message further..
Tip 2: Don't overuse hashtags, or you risk diluting the usefulness of your updates and coming off as spam.
Step 6. Keep content fresh. Continue to refresh your online presence, posting new updates, pictures, links, and videos to your web sites, discussion boards, and blogs. New content is crucial to keep members engaged..
Step 7. Encourage involvement. Recognize that your members will have differing interests. For some, just joining the group will be enough, but others will want to take a more active role. Encourage their participation by offering a variety of ways to engage beyond discussion, like submitting logo designs, distributing materials, uploading photos or videos, etc. It will give your members a sense of community and help the group flourish.
Step 8. Prepare to scale. If your group grows faster than you’re able to manage, your members will lose interest. For example, most social networking sites like Facebook limit group messages to relatively small memberships, meaning large social networking groups cannot send out mass communications. Stay organized. Maintain databases of email addresses and/or mobile phone numbers from your inception so when your group grows you’ll be able to stay in touch via email even if you can’t use your social networking site to do so.
Did you know: Youth for Tolerance, a group promoting respect and acceptance of diversity in Lebanon, created a Facebook game called “Whack-a-Politician,” which let players bonk politicians with a virtual gavel to prevent their inflammatory speeches. Visit Youth for Tolerance at http://youthfortolerance.org/
Case study: The organization SOS Mexico, which began in 2008 to combat violent kidnappings, allows people to submit videos, comments, tips, and photos to their web site and social-networking pages, turning every citizen into a security monitor.
To edit this chapter, visit the Howcast wiki guide at http://www.howcast.com/guides/2450-How-To-Create-Grassroots-Movements-For-Change-4-Building-Discourse
