As defined in the article “What is Mobilising”, mobilising is directing existing supporters towards the specific campaign tactics necessary to win your campaign or election.
These mobilising tactics can include having as many people as possible:
Mobilising tools are applications and software available to enhance your ability to mobilise people to take action.
While tools are a crucial ingredient to improve success, they are not a replacement for strategy. It is key that you have a good strategy on how to mobilise people, that tools can support with. This is done by having a strong campaign with good messaging and a method to spread your messaging, see Campaign Strategy. With a clear strategy, tools make your work easier and smarter.
Customer Relationship Management tools (CRMs) are an essential piece of technology to keep a list of your supporter contacts that can be mobilised in an instant to take action, with features to help you do that.
A good CRM is key to streamlining the digital campaigning work you do. It allows you to analyse data and trends in your supporter base to optimise ways to move these supporters towards your goals and action. There are many CRMs, which have a wide variety of different features, with pros and cons for each. Picking your CRM depends on your specific goals, audience, price range, technical knowledge and more.
For working out the best CRM tool for you to enhance your mobilising strategy, see our article “CRM”.
Make sure you’re aware of the social media tools and ad distribution is essential to your ability to mobilise large numbers of people.
If your time is limited, have a think about which social media platforms your supporter base or target audience might be using. If you’re the Young Greens trying to mobilise young people, Instagram should be a main focus. If you’re targeting a journalist to organise around an issue, look to Twitter as that’s where many journalists go. If you’re looking to partner with organisations to build a coalition - using LinkedIn for good leads could be your best bet.
If you have a small budget, social media ads can enhance these efforts. The following tools are vital ways you can expand your mobilising tactics:
Petitions are a key way to mobilise people and, most importantly, track people’s data so that you can call upon them later to take further action. A large base of people signing your petition means you are able to mobilise people to take further actions and organise them. See Petitions.
Writing a letter to the government can now be done with ease through online tools. Campaigning and organising CRMs allow you to create functions that allow you to mass email your target by asking people to take action. The more emails sent, the more your target has a clogged up inbox, further pressuring them to take better action. Bonus: allowing people to personalise their messages makes their voices resonate further, as opposed to the same message repeated.
CRMs that have a “write a letter” functionality included are:
Mobilising people to a large scale event is also an important way to demonstrate power. There are multiple tools available to capitalise on this. Facebook events are a great way to make quick public events such as protests or sit-ins that bring people in. Eventbrite is also a useful and free tool people can use to organise events around. You can also use a CRM that tracks people’s data to register to attend events.
For digital events using an online conferencing platform are great ways to bring people together. These include:
See Events.
If you have a list that includes consent to use people’s mobile phone numbers, using peer to peer texting apps is a useful way to quickly mobilise people to take an action like voting or going to a rally. The way peer to peer apps work is that the app creates a script tree for you that you can fill out. This script has pre-filled in answers based on the person’s response of yes or no.
Services that offer peer to peer texting include:
Mobilising is directing existing supporters towards the specific campaign tactics necessary to win your campaign or election. There are a number of tools that can help you with this.
Foremost, having a CRM and existing social media platforms set up with ads is key to starting the process. From there, you can escalate the tasks of the people you're mobilising through a series of actions, or a ladder of engagement.
It is vital that tools are used only to enhance a strategy, rather than using a tool for the sake of it because tools can be costly and take a while to master. A straightforward strategy with a select range of mobilising tools tailored to your needs is the best way forward.
Last updated: June 2022