Entries Tagged 'leadership' ↓

So, after complaining about how we always need to start from scratch to come up with campaign plans or other lessons from other community organizers, I turned to the true font of all wisdom and knowledge, Google, and found a few resources to help with ballot initiative campaign plans.

First of all, the Campaign Plan for the Florida Minimum Wage Campaign is quite interesting. The fact that this version is hosted on a conservative website tells you something, though. If nothing else, when running a ballot initiative, don’t say that it will change the outcome of a presidentatial election right there on page one. That’s a no-no.

Next, we have a PowerPoint presentation about successful transit funding ballot initiatives. There are some very interesting points in there about how to frame the issue and neutralize opposition. It also led me to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. There’s not much on their website, but I’m hoping for some good things from them.

And finally, the Sierra Nevada Alliance has a great organizing manual that includes both a chapter on campaign plans and a sample campaign plan.

There was plenty of other information on candidate campaigns, but I’d still like to see more campaign plan swapping for both ballot initiative campaigns on non-lobbying 501(c)(3) campaigns.

In Forces for Good, the authors spend a lot of the time emphasizing that the great nonprofits they studied weren’t always the best managed.

Fair enough, but there’s a danger there. They may not need to be the best managed, but they do need some level of management.

Their research even proves this point. When discussing adaptation, they quote Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators who note that the “limits of innovation have less to wo with creativity, and more to do with management systems.”

You need good management and systems to get good innovation.

Crutchfield and McLeod Grant  even have a full chapter on “sustaining impact” that argues for investing in people, infrastructure, and systems.

Yes, great nonprofits are about great focus on mobilizing people toward the mission. That external focus is essential. Management is not the point and shouldn’t get the top focus. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore it.

(Maybe I’m defensive here because right now Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice in Ann Arbor is in the midst of doing a lot of management updates. We’re spending time getting our books in order, creating procedures for adopting new programs, and creating clear personnel policies. These won’t make us a great nonprofit, but they will make us a better one.)

The Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco, has made what appear to be some horrendous business decisions.

They started out okay. They built a top-notch experiential learning museum that gets kids touching and expereincing science education, not just staring at dusty vacuum tubes.

Then, after developing this great model, they gave it away. 

They encouraged other museums to copy it. They even paid to train other museum staff on their model. And until recently, they didn’t even charge other museums to use the Exploratorium’s own exhibits.

And what happened?

They revolutionized science education and museums.

Across the country they have had a dramatic impact in how science is taught. Their impact extends far beyond their own facility.

This “terrible business decision” worked because they aren’t a business. They are following a mission. And they will help other educators who are also following that mission.

And that’s a big reason why they have been featured in Forces for Good as a high-impact nonprofit. It’s a lesson we can all take to heart.

I’ve just started Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. It’s a hot book in the field right now.

I’m to early in the book to make a judgment on it, but I am intrigued by the idea that nonprofit “greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than how they manage their own internal operations.”

Of the six practices the authors found, four relate to how the organization works with the outside world: other nonprofits, government, business, and individuals. (It’s interesting to note that the organization’s clients aren’t on this list.)

It’s a basic lesson, but easy to forget. Keep your focus on your mission and recognize that you, cool as you are, can’t achieve your mission on your own.

For another take on the danger of focusing too much on organizational considerations, see “Grassroots Rot.”

An article in Fast Company de-bunks the great dot-com myth of two guys starting a business from nothing in their garage and going on to create YouTube, Apple Computer, or Dell.

The myth isn’t that they start in a garage, or that they go on to become successful. The myth is that successful startups start from nothing.

In reality, all of these successes come out of somewhere. These “go-it-alone” entrepreneurs started out in established businesses in the same sectors. Their success comes from the training, background, and connections they built in their jobs with established companies such as Atari, PayPal, or HP.

What does this have to do with organizing?

I’m always meeting freelance activists with a passion for justice who want to stake out their own claim and start a group to advocate for their issue. They are the nonprofit equivalent of a dot-com garage startup.

And they can learn from the successful startups. The successful startups don’t start from nothing and nowhere. They start with skills and connections.

Likewise the activist startups also need to build a basis of skills and connections, and the best way to build those skills and connections is to work with existing organizations.

Just like an aspiring chef begins as an apprentice.

Rather than starting out on your own, you can learn how to lobby, how to work with the media, how to organize events, how to supervise volunteers, how to pull together a coalition, how to go door-to-door by working with existing organizations. And just as important, you’ll start to build your network of potential partners, funders, decision-makers, and volunteers. It’s great preparation before you go out on your own.

And when I say “organizations,” I include businesses in there. Business marketing has a lot to teach nonprofit marketing. Sales has a lot to teach fundraising. Nonprofits can learn a lot from principled business management–and both sectors benefit from this cross-pollinization.

Persuasion is getting people to say “yes,” and if somebody tells you to “get out of your car with your hands up,” are you more likely to listen to a police officer or a bank teller?

As progressives, we may not like this power of authority, but it’s a reality,  as Robert Cialdini explains in “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.”

Thankfully, there are many sources of authority. The police officer has one type, but there’s also moral authority, like that exhibited by religious leaders and humanitarians. There’s knowledge authority, which is seen in scientists and researchers.

Our job is to recognize what types of authority are available to us and how we can use them with integrity.

Integrity and effectiveness.

Cialdini tells us that titles, clothes, and trappings are three cues that help people recognize and respond to authority. The title “doctor.” The priests’ robe and collar. The attourney’s Brooks Brothers suit. These are all cues that we use to identify people in positions of authority.

What does this mean? If we’re using the moral authority of a pastor, she should wear her collar or other vestments. We should call her “reverend.” We should bring out all the cues that will let our audience know “hey, here’s someone with authority. Listen to her.”

I’m continuing my analysis of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” by Robert Cialdini and what it means for community organizers.

Sometimes you don’t need a Ph.D. to tell you this stuff. In chapter 5 he makes a basic point: people are more likely to say “yes” to people they like.

So, the first organizing lesson from this chapter is simple: don’t be a jerk.

Those are the basics. Thankfully there’s more.

For example, Cialdini talks about the role that attractiveness plays in liking. Simply put, we’re more likely to say “yes” to someone who we find attractive.

I guess we didn’t need a Ph.D. to tell us that either. I saw it when I canvassed for U.S. PIRG and the women talked about how they raised more money when they wore low-cut tops.

Cialdini also identifies similarity as a factor. We tend to like people who are more like us. Again, no surprise here. That’s why “like organizes like.” If you want to organize Catholics, send a Catholic. If you wnat to organize restraunt workers, a restaurant worker will be most successful.

What else contributes to liking? There’s also compliments. As my friend Jamie Browning says, “flattery will get you everywhere.”

These are the simple parts, Cialdini also describes more subtle factors, like conditioning and association. That is, people tend to like things associated with other things they like. Hence the scantily clad models in beer comercials. At a subconscious level, there is an association of “scantily clad women are good, so the beer must be good as well.” It seems silly, but it works.

There’s one more part of liking the Cialdini references, contact and cooperation, but that one is interesting enough to be worth it’s own post.

One more observation about social proof, as described in “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” by Robert Cialdini. It can be extremely powerful at events.

For example, a few weeks ago I was visiting a church to give a workshop for their adult Sunday School, so I attended their worship service before hand. As with most churches, they passed around the offering plate, and I had to decide “do I put some money in?”

What did I do to decide? I looked around me to see how many other people were putting their money in the plate. I relied on social proof. And when I saw a lot of people not putting money in the plate, I figured I could get by doing the same.

Now, I’m sure most of the folks who passed the plate on are giving to the church, but I didn’t see that. Social proof told me it was okay not to put money in the plate.

Lots of people make the same decisions when they attend an event. They look around to find out “should I wear a nametag? Should I sign in? Should I give my email? Should I make a donation?”

That’s why a smart event organizer makes sure that enough people know what they are doing at an event that other people copy them. They know to wear a nametag. They know to write clearly when they sign in and to give their full contact information. They know to give a donation.

That way, when the people who don’t know what to do come in, they see good examples of people who are fully participating in the event and modeling the behavior you want from everyone.

One way I use this at events is to never send around a blank clipboard. I always sign it first, and I always fill out it out completely and check the “I want to get more involved” box. That way, when the next person takes the clipboard and wonders “should I give my email,” they see that yes, they should. After all, that’s what the first person did.

I grew up in a logging town in northern Wisconsin where there wasn’t much interest in pristine etiquette. Indeed, too much formality was scoffed at.

So in college when I attended my first formal dinner, I spent the whole meal watching what everyone else was doing. I figured they knew how to behave in a setting like this, and I knew I certainly didn’t.

As social beings, we humans decide a lot of how we should behave or what we think by looking around at people like us to see what they do. That’s why laugh tracks on sitcoms work so well. Robert Cialdini calls this “social proof” in his book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.”

Usually, this process of watching what everyone else is doing works well enough, but sometimes it fails.

For example, in 1964 there was a notorious murder in New York. The murder took a half hour to complete because the killer was scared off twice but finished the murder the third time. All this took place in front of 38 witnesses, none of whom did anything until after the murder. They didn’t call out “stop that.” They didn’t even call the police until after the woman was dead.

Cialdini does a great job exploring the research that uncovered why there was not response, and I highly recommend reading the whole book. The conclusion they found is that is was precisely because there were 38 witnesses that nobody responded. Just like looking around at the formal dinner table to see which fork to use, they were all looking at each other to see what they should do.

This breakdown of social proof is called “pluralistic ignorance,” and it is most pronounced when bystanders face uncertainty, especially when:

•  they are uncertain of the nature of the event;
• they are uncertain about how to respond; and
• they are uncertain who should respond, or if anyone has.

I think this has important implications for anti-racist and nonviolence work. I know I’ve found myself in a situation where someone has made inapproriate comments and I’ve been paralyzed by the uncertainty above. I’ve wondered:

• Is this racist?
• How should I respond?
• Is it my place to respond?

There’s an opportunity here, then to help people intervene in cases of racism by overcoming these uncertainties. When we teach them how to identify racist comments, how to effectively respond, and why it is their duty to respond, we help them overcome the uncertainties that would prevent them from acting.

And whats more, we begin to turn social proof to our favor. Then, while everyone else is looking around to figure out “what do I do when someone uses the N-word,” they see social proof for actively responding rather than just letting it pass.

It’s an example of grassroots, micro-level leadership. And it can help produce followers (or better yet, future leaders) for justice.

As progressives, we tend to spend too much time trying to get people to think what we want them to think rather than to do what we want them to do.

In fact, we’ll often be more successful if we first focus on getting people to act, then focus on the beliefs behind that action.

Robert Cialdini explains why this is in the book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” Chapter 3 of this book focuses on “commitment and consistency.” It shows how once somebody makes a public commitment or takes a clear action, they are then much more likely to think it was the right thing to do and to take similar actions in the future.

Here’s an example. At a racetrack, betters are likely to be much more sure of a horse’s chances of winning after buying a ticket then before. The action of buying a ticket and betting on a specific horse helps convince them that the horse will win.

What does this mean for community organizing?

It means that we should focus on getting people to take a clear action or to make a public commitment to the issues we’re working on.

Let’s take the war in Iraq. We could argue all day about the stupidity of the war just like we could argue all day about which horse will win in a race.  And after all that talk, the person will still probably be more or less undecided.

Or, we could try to get someone to take an action (come to a rally, sign a petition, write a letter to Congress) saying the war is wrong. And just like betters are more sure of their horse after placing a bet, the person will be more solidly opposed to the war after taking an action. In both cases, they’ve made a commitment and their mind will try to be consistent with that action.

And here’s where I also get on my soap box about follow-up. After they take that first action, I see a window of time where you can come back to them and say, “Thank you for signing that petition. It’s important that there are people like you who are willing to speak out against this war. To keep moving on this, we need you to …” This follow-up reinforces that initial commitment and increases the person’s desire to be consistent.