Give your changemaking a boost with these reports, toolkits and guides from Mobilisation Lab.
Campaign Planning Frameworks
Winning campaigns offer a bold vision, tell a compelling story, and engage people in meaningful ways. Check out these frameworks to guide and assess your work.
The 21st Century Advocacy Playbook
Use this checklist to assess your team’s readiness to campaign for—and win—change in the modern landscape.
Campaign Canvas
From vision and strategy to storytelling and metrics, the canvas ensures you’ve touched on all the essentials of an effective campaign. Inspired by the Business Model Canvas, working through each element of this canvas will ensure your bases are covered for a solid campaign. We recommend printing it out as a poster and using post-it notes to fill in your best thinking for each box. Then you can regularly check in with your team to update your strategy and tactics based on real-world inputs from your campaigning.
The Anatomy of People Powered Campaigns
People bring power and value to campaigns with vision, collaboration, data and nimble action.
Six Elements of Open (People-Powered) Campaigns
This worksheet outlines the many ways in which a campaign can be opened up for wider ownership, leadership and participation.
Engaging People
It takes a movement of many to create and sustain a better world. Learn more about integrating people power into advocacy campaigning.
Measuring People Power in 2020+
How do you measure gifts of time, expertise and leadership? What indicators can you use to assess grassroots power building, organising and volunteer initiatives?
10 Ways People Power Can Change the World
From boycotts, workplace action and memes, to political campaigns, disaster relief and civil disobedience.
Engagement Pyramid
Use this tool to visualise the different ways a person might get involved with your campaign, from the lower commitment activity of observing and endorsing to taking up active leadership. The Engagement Pyramid is a tool that enables us to map how people can engage at different levels of “depth” in our campaign — and recognise that more people are likely to engage when the level of commitment required is lower.
You can also use the pyramid to work through how you might “level up” people and to ensure that you’re adequately catering to people who are willing to commit in different ways. Try not to get too caught up in the specific categorisations; you can use those as helpful prompts, but what a low-, medium-, or high-level of commitment for one organisation or campaign is could be very different for another.
Beyond the first click: How today’s volunteers build power for movements and NGOs
We examine best practices of engaging top-tier supporters and giving volunteers the freedom to take action on behalf of organisations.
The Mobilisation Cookbook
Learn the “key ingredients” of people-powered campaigns and approaches for becoming more engagement-centric.
Grassroots-Led Campaigns Transforming the Landscape of Social Change
What is the real impact of all these campaigns? What does it mean for the future of social change? What lessons can we learn about how to be successful? We asked the minds behind the biggest grassroots-led campaign platforms these questions, and more.
Measuring Impact
How can we effectively capture and communicate our successes in changemaking? Dig in for a few ideas.
Measuring People Power in 2020+
How do you measure gifts of time, expertise and leadership? What indicators can you use to assess grassroots power building, organising and volunteer initiatives?
Beyond Vanity Metrics: Toward better measurement of member engagement
Metrics should help you improve how you invest in and plan campaigns.
Organisation and Team Dynamics
Nimble and creative teams are a product of open, collaborative and well-structured environments. Learn more about how to build and sustain such a working culture.
The Mobilisation Integration Toolkit
To win big, teams need to work seamlessly together. Take a look at systems and tools used by Greenpeace offices around the world.
Do Better and Win Bigger by Taking on Marginalisation
Culture, race, gender and other differences can lead to marginalisation of team members. Here are tips for building stronger, equitable teams.
Detangling Digital
Instead of a centralised place for all things digital, here’s a model for integrating digital skillsets back into every department of an organisation.
Creating a team culture
Capture the shared purpose, values and behaviours of a team. This worksheet is useful after a team has worked together on a project in a very different way than they are accustomed to doing. It allows us to capture what team members would like to bring back into their day-to-day work and codify those values and behaviours with the rest of the team.
Safety and Security
Campaigning for change can be risky work. Check out some strategies for staying safe.
Creating a Rapid Response System
A network of allies and a checklist can protect victims of political persecution and build movement power.
Campaigning in High-Risk Environments
How do organisers and campaigners keep working for social justice when the environment they’re in becomes high risk? Tactics include investing in analysis, adapting and responding rapidly, listening to communities and treading lightly—especially with media.
Storytelling and Content
An effective campaign tells a compelling story that inspires action and shifts values, beliefs and behaviours. Check out these tips and tricks to create one.
Call to Action Worksheet
Use this worksheet to detail how you talk about your campaign to motivate people to take action. Adapted from an exercise developed by Center for Story-Based Strategy, this tool provides an easy framework to think through the necessary elements of how you will talk about your campaign to public audiences to inspire and motivate action.
Four magic steps to creating shareable, purpose-driven social media content
To create content that engages audiences beyond your current supporters, put your efforts into spotting, creation, distribution and listening.
Understanding the Problem
To create lasting change, we must look deeper to understand the root cause of the problem we’re trying to solve. Here are some tools to map a campaign issue.
Systems thinking for campaigning and organising
Systems thinking provides campaigners and organisers with an overall approach and a set of tools to understand the entrenched problems we work on and more strategically engage with the complex systems.
We developed this guide in collaboration with Blueprints for Change to look at systems practice as an overarching approach that can help our campaigns and organising strategies be more effective at driving systems change. This approach is grounded in some key principles including focusing on relationships and patterns, working to unlock the forces of change, putting pressure on “leverage points”, planning to adapt and engaging multiple perspectives. We also go through a broad, flexible process that can be used to focus campaigning and organising strategies on driving systemic change. This is achieved by developing an understanding of the system you want to shift, identifying levers of change in that system and developing an adaptive strategy to put pressure on these levers to achieve your goals. We hope this guide will help you set up an approach for your campaigning and organising work that can analyze the different systems in play, not just the concrete issue your campaign or organisation seeks to address.
Iceberg Worksheet
Deepen your understanding of the problem, moving from “what just happened?” to “what beliefs keep the system in place?” Developed by Northwest Earth Institute, the Iceberg is another way we drill down into the root cause of the problem our campaign aims to address — shifting our focus from the current event into underlying societal structures and mental modes. It can also help us move more directly into thinking about interventions in societal and cultural institutions.
System Map
Identify who and what upholds the system underlying your chosen problem and surface leverage points to target in your campaign. This template can help you think through the key relationships that uphold the current system, which in turn upholds the problem that your campaign aims to target. By mapping these relationships, you can identify possible leverage points to target in your campaign.
Problem Diagram
Use this diagram from Mobilisation Lab to chart the causes of the problem that your campaign aims to address and how that problem affects people differently. This tool helps identify the “root cause” to tackle in a campaign or even in a set of campaigns. Begin with the main problems we see standing in the way of our vision in the “core problem” circle. Then work outward from there to explore underlying causes (one of which is likely the “root cause” to address); the effects you identify can serve as campaign hooks with different audiences, as they represent ways the problem is felt by people.
Context Map
This tool allows a team to foster out a collective understanding of the overall context in which a campaign is happening. Work on different chunks in small groups, and then reconvene to build it out all together.
Attribution CC BY