When it comes to the uses of relational organizing, GOTV gets almost all of the attention. It’s understandable— especially in a presidential election year. But after Election Day, what happens to all that careful planning and outreach? For a political campaign, it vanishes. For an organization working on long-term goals, it lasts.
OutreachCircle is built on the importance of community relationships, whether that means reaching out to your own connections through relational messaging or building new ones through peer-to-peer texting. Those relationships can be leveraged for an election, but a network of friends and family can take action to make long-term, lasting change in their community without waiting for an election. OutreachCircle is equipped to help you do just that.
Building a Community
At its core, relational organizing is about reaching out to your connections to build a network, and working together with a network to achieve a goal is the basis of community organizing. There’s plenty of research about how relational organizing increases persuasion rates and how warm contact makes more of an impact than cold contact. But OutreachCircle can also help organizers build a community in their own organization.
Supporters of an organization are already united through a common goal, but if everyone is working on different tasks, it can be hard to feel like a cohesive group. That difficulty is highlighted when social distancing means that most organizing is happening remotely. With OutreachCircle’s peer-to-peer texting, organizers can build long-lasting relationships with their supporters, which increases participation and completion.
Building relationships in your organization helps supporters stay motivated and engaged, and it kick-starts the process of forming close connections with community members. In turn, using relational organizing to recruit more supporters helps you find people who will be invested from the beginning.
Using the Supporter Action Hub
Once you’ve got your network, the Supporter Action Hub offers plenty of different actions that you can use, and you’re that much closer to creating lasting change in your community.
There are a lot of ways to get creative with the Supporter Action Hub, from gathering signatures on a petition to sending out invitations to a (virtual) block party. You can even apply GOTV strategies in election years if they’re relevant to your mission. Organizations on any plan, free or paid, can use OutreachCircle’s Supporter Action Hub to mobilize supporters effectively long-term.
Making an Impact
The variety of community organizations in the world means that no two groups will use OutreachCircle the same way. Some groups might canvass regularly, while others need a way to stay in touch with volunteers, and others are looking to spread the word about events.
Ultimately, every organization is different, with different goals and different methods for reaching them. OutreachCircle is built with that kind of variety in mind, and we add new features all the time. No matter your goal, OutreachCircle can help you organize your community to achieve it.
Amelia Huchley is a writer and content strategist at OutreachCircle, a relational organizing and P2P texting platform that makes it easy for anyone to support the causes they care about.