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lang: en

Community organising

7 step journey — follow in order:

1. 1 Organizing
2. 2 Coalition Building
3. 3 Audience Segmentation
4. 4 Leadership Development
5. 5 Volunteer Management
6. 6 Public Narrative
7. 7 Evaluation

Your campaign lives or dies on its people. This path is the people-side of campaigning — the relationship-building, leadership development, and distributed-power work that turns a list of supporters into a constituency that can move a target.

This is the path to follow when you already have a campaign plan (or you’re scaling one that’s working) and you need to grow the base, develop leaders, and keep volunteers engaged across cycles.

The journey

1. Organising overview — why this next: the organising pillar holds the people-side craft. Read this first for the mental model: organising is the work of building relationships that convert private concern into public action. Tactics are downstream of it.

2. Coalition building — why this next: a campaign grows fastest when allied groups bring their own constituencies to the table. Map who else is working on adjacent issues, identify the gaps only you can fill, and approach them with a concrete offer.

3. Audience segmentation — why this next: your base isn’t a monolith. Segment supporters by relationship to the issue, by capacity, by how they prefer to engage. Tailor asks and channels to each slice — same campaign, different entry points.

4. Leadership development — why this next: every campaign needs more leaders than it started with. Identify potential leaders early, give them real work with real support, and let them grow. The campaign’s legacy is the leaders who came out of it.

5. Volunteer management — why this next: once you have a base, the question becomes retention and depth. Volunteer management covers ladder-of-engagement, role design, recognition, and the rituals that turn signers into long-term participants.

6. Public narrative — why this next: relationships deepen through shared story. Marshall Ganz’s public-narrative craft — story of self, story of us, story of now — is how you turn a strategic frame into a one-to-one conversation that recruits.

7. Evaluation — why this next: the people-side of campaigning is hard to measure, but the campaigns that learn are the ones that scale. Set indicators for relationship depth (one-to-ones held, leaders developed, volunteer hours), review them mid-cycle, and adjust.

Wrap-up

You now have the people-side of a campaign plan. Pair it with the strategy path if you haven’t built the broader plan yet, or with the digital path if the next stage of growth is online scale. For the case studies of organising-led campaigns, head to the hub.