Digital Organizing: Meeting People Where They're At
You are listening to the second episode of our second season. It is an episode I, Antje, was particularly looking forward to, since it focuses on many questions that are central to my personal work in the labor movement: How can we move from digital outreach to offline engagement? How do we get someone from the WhatsApp group into a meeting? These are questions, we need to answer if we want to use the full potential of our movements. Over the years, I have seen very good campaigns that wasted parts of this potential. There are these campaigns that have very well developed digital outreach strategies, with specific target groups, and easy to access tools for first contact, but then they fail to move people beyond the digital spaces and down the conversion funnel of engagement. At the same time, I’ve encountered other campaigns that have well developed connections into their community, well developed slogans and demands but lack connection to the digital spaces that their respective bases of concern are actually at - a bummer, one can say. So, in this episode, we are talking with Bianka Nora, deputy director at the Online-to-Offline Strategy Group (O2O) about their work. The organization formed in 2017 as a project of United for Respect – a retail worker organization in the US, particularly known for their Walmart Campaign, fighting for better payment and working conditions in one of the biggest retail chains in the US. O2O began as a project to train organizers at United for Respect, who were confronted with strong anti-union legislations and a hostile employer. In this context, O2O taught innovative methods and tools to strengthen the important work organizers were doing on the ground - and helped them to some remarkable wins. Over the years O2O has worked with dozens of labor unions, workers centers, and other social justice groups to develop high–impact campaigns to improve working conditions, pass legislation, and more, all by focusing on crafting digital outreach strategies to amplify the engagement strategies of organizers. For us, it's particularly important to look at digital organizing as a tool, rather than a model, that can dramatically expand our collective potentials when used as part of a broader organizing and empowerment strategy.