organizing

Man vs. Method – Person vs. Process

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It was just a regular night and we’d started with a discussion of Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor of New York. “What do y’all think?” The resulting explosion of thought wasn’t really about him of course. It became a well worn discussion about how change actually happens. Like your friends arguing about whether you need a better recipe or a better chef to make a great meal.

“Find a Hero”

Russell spoke about a faith in extraordinary people. For him, the key is finding a leader with character, that being, a person whose entire life was a credible pattern of making the hard, principled choice on people’s behalf. Only someone like that, he argued, could walk into the corrupting halls of power and not be bent by them.

“We need a system that is designed with incentives in mind. One that aligns representatives’ interests with the many over the few, … Read more

Setting Appointments

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When we met, you were you were just a baby. and you met in person and in set availability. and we made an appointment, but now you’ve gone through so much. you know so many things about how to organize that it’s time for you to get on the other side of the glass. it’s time for you to be the person that people look to and meet and talk to. there are lots of tools that will let you do this appointment setting and availability. I’m gonna teach you fluent booking because that’s what Mosaic Atlanta uses.

so if you are set yourself up for availability inside here, like you’ll just have it. now this is easy to install. you can go into the WordPress dashboard, search for fluent booking, install it, and activate it, right? but however no matter what you’re using, most of these steps will still … Read more

Host Productive General Meetings

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General meeting happens once a month. And a well made general meeting will take about a month to create. If you take a week to relax, the meeting will probably not be as good. That sucks. But it is just true.

We do these things for a good reason though.

And if you can do a good general meeting, you barely have to worry about anything else for the month.

A well produced general meeting will create a month of activity inside your organization. Good meetings are a building block of organizing. It needs to happen on time and it needs to respect the time of everybody involved. If we can do those two things, we’re really flying.

It’s not like issues aren’t vital and shouldn’t be discussed to their full detail. But also, you’re just gonna have some people who love arguing, like as a hobby or they’re passionate … Read more

Posting On Social Media

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Alright, so the actual mechanics the of making a post, this is less about strategy and more like I don’t use social media. How do I make a post? Well, first of all, what social media platform do you want to post on? Really? You want to pick something that fits your audience. Like if you’re a Facebook user, get it ready for Facebook. If you’re a Twitter post person, write some tweets.

If it’s it, you know, whatever it is, odds are you will need an image in that size. So you may need to look at, you know, image dimension boundaries in terms of defining your goal. What’s it for? Remember that we use this for format. You know, agitate, educate, inoculate, organize. When we talk about union, we don’t mean when you agitate, educate, inoculate, organize, you win.

No, what really happens? You’re gonna have to get … Read more

Theory Of Social Media

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Hey, y’, all, I want to talk about social media. I want to talk about posting later. Before we get to, like, how to post, I want to talk about, like, why to post. And that’s a pretty important distinction. Let’s just talk about how to post on social media because it’s important that we remember that we are in an ideological struggle and how we talk has an impact on how we are seen and received. In union organizing, there is a phrase, A, E, I, O, U. You agitate, educate, inoculate.

We kind of have to do all three at once. But in. But what’s most important here, at least for this conversation, is inoculation. Because we’re going to be outreaching to new people all the time. And we do not always know our relationships with the people that we meet because we’re going to be meeting the … Read more

RSVP page

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Hey, y’, all, let’s start talking about creating an RSVP page. We’re going to clone a page in the awesome Thrive Architect. Thrive makes creating these RSVP pages very simple to do, and the pages that it creates are very engaging. It also integrates that RSVP form with all of the fancy tools, which is really useful for building relationships. Here we go. And you can see this is a RSVP page. It’s got a few core elements here, right?

We’ve got a nice image, we have a Google map, we have the date, we have a time, we have the location. We mentioned that this is a hybrid format, so we are covering just a whole lot of ground. There are some design elements here that make the page stand out. First impressions are definitely everything. You know, if you have good color coordinating and it’s an inviting design … Read more

Outreach At Scale

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So this is about black hat outreach. Lmao. Black hat, but whatever. You know, when people don’t understand something, they think it’s magic. I do want to introduce you, though, to the idea of outreach at Scale, because I want you to think about the math of growth. Like, how many people do we need to talk to in order to get one new member? Once we introduce ourselves, how strong does our message need to be?

So I want to talk about outreach at scale tools. And there are a lot of these. Like, what if you need to talk to a thousand people? You know, what if you need.

How do you do that? You know? And you’ve also got to remember that the more people that you reach, the more broad your messaging has to be. So you may be just sort of in a mix between … Read more

Build Strong Networks: FluentCRM for WordPress

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WordPress. We talked about this in the last video, we talked about setting up your own WordPress. But I want to be more specific in this one. First of all, from a literal perspective, you know, legally it’s our role to teach you how to network with socialist organizations. We’re literally helping you build these tools that you control on your own server so that you, if you choose, can be independent, create your own branch in the future. Everybody knows what the tools are, how to use them, yada yada yada, why do that? Why not like you’ve got your own goals, pursue them.

Don’t let me be in the way. Self benefits, self hosting, you’re going to host this stuff yourself. You can either host on your own computer, you can rent space on a server. This is not back breaking or expensive. Pay three or four dollars … Read more

Relationships

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It’s really all about relationships. I mean, organizing takes a lot of effort, especially if you’re keeping track of people, their interests and events. It’s just hard to get anything done without that. Customer relationship management tool can make a huge difference. CRM tools like fluentCRM, which is the tool that we use here that works with WordPress, it can help you maintain connections and track engagement and build a better network. And this guy kind of will help you understand why these tools are very useful for organizing our outreach and just how you can use it as well. First of all, it helps you centralize your contacts.

You know, if you’ve been doing some of these exercises, you’ve probably been dealing with a lot of contact information. Like you’ve got maybe more than one spreadsheet by now. This is going to help you centralize that information and avoid … Read more