Grassroots activism: building support from the ground up.

The task for all online activism; for NGOs, nonprofits and charities, is to build support from networks who offer their time, money and effort. And once you have that support, what do you do with it?

It can be a lengthy process and difficult to coordinate effective action amongst many people. Especially if you are coordinating a massive online campaign that sends messages to politicians. But the greater the number of people who participate, the louder the message becomes, the harder it will be for that message to be ignored.

Passive support is not enough. To really grow awareness for your cause, you need to turn passive supporters into next-level activists, people who not only agree with the cause, but are also instilled with a need to share the message to their friends and followers.

Turning grassroots supporters into grassroots activists

Identifying your supporter base is the first step. The next step is turning those supporters into activists. The grassroots supporters need to be engaged by the message. The message that is hear is one that provokes retweeting and sharing on social media. For maximum impact, it is vital to make your message easy for your audience to understand. The steps to reaching the biggest audience are as follows:

1. Create compelling story about your mission or cause.
2. Alert your supporters from your existing mailing list and social media networks.
3. Map out the ways in which your supporters can participate.
4. Use simple but effective tools that make it easy enough for many people to take action with you.

5. Leverage the influence of activists to share your common beliefs via social media.

Strength in numbers

For Do Gooders, the power of collective action promotes our beliefs in the context of social, political and civic participation. Activism that we partake as many people demonstrates what we believe to be important, in the way we exist as communities, whether we are trying to make our lives better as a school group, a town, or a nation.

Tools for grassroots activists

Sometimes the action that needs to be taken is direct communication with elected representatives, or with decision makers in like board-members of corporate entities. Beyond the ballot box, direct communication may be in the form of petition, or by calling and emailing the offices of decision-makers.

The Do Gooder platform is designed for organisations that are doing activism online. Do Gooder offers a suite of tools that are great for getting your message across, from your base of supporters to the decision makers. Here are five reasons why activists use Do Gooder campaign tools.

1. Fundraising tools made possible with PayPal integration

Campaigns need money to operate and raising money from your supporters is made simpler by using Do Gooder's integrated payment system with PayPal. PayPal integration is a feature available on most plans.

Tips for online fundraising with Do Gooder

Make it easy for your supporters to donate to your PayPal account. When you are asking for donations, it's a good idea to explain what people are donating their money towards, whether its for campaign materials, legal assistance or operating costs.

If your fundraising is urgent, explain why - are you preparing for an occasion such as an election day, or a planned protest event? Make sure you plan for the additional time for fundraising to finish and for funds to clear escrow.

2. You can promote your campaign to other progressives on Do Gooder

Thousands of supporters take action on Do Gooder every day. When you are building support for a campaign, it might be a good idea to advertise to other progressively minded people. Build a campaign who would be interested in supporting causes like your own. Read more about this feature in the documentation.

3. You can coordinate your emails and phone messages to politicians.

If you want your supporters to send a common message to federal or regional politicans, Do Gooder includes an amazing directory of politicians that you can look-up by zipcode/postcode. Just setup the action tool with your location and create a message template for your supporters to use to phone or email their political representatives. The politician search feature is available for USA, Australia, United Kingdom and Canada.

If your campaign is designed to influence local politicians, or school board members, you can add a custom dataset to your campaign. Supporters can send an email to up to 20 recipients at one time.

4. A picture is worth a thousand followers

In this era of activism, almost every single person sends pictures from their phone to communicate the events of their day. Do Gooder created their Selfie Tool to allow you to tap into that resource, because your activists need to demonstrate that their support visually, with photos and images to spread to their networks.

5. You can keeping track of your campaign's effectiveness

Visualise your campaign interactions in realtime. If you build your online campaign with Do Gooder activist tools, you as a campaign creator can visualise the actions taken by your supporters on a map that is updated in real-time. Gain insight into what's working for your campaign action, where people are engaging with your campaign and where you need to focus your attention.

Can you start using Do Gooder right now?

If you need to start campaigning online, why not use the tools that Do Gooder has created for campaign managers just like you, to take the stress out of coordinating effective action amongst many people. If your message needs to be taken up by supporters to affect the decisions of politicians and other officials you can leverage the tools other activists use to turn their grassroots movement into a public victory. Try Do Gooder now and see if it's the right fit for your organisation.

... and one last thing. If you were looking for the book, Tools For Grassroots Activists, Edited By Nora Gallagher And Lisa Myers; that book that is published by patagoniabooks, here is the link.