Press 1 to pledge calling your congressperson next week.
Press 2 to invite a friend to attend a local meeting with you.
Those are your choices. Twenty minutes of stories from the field have primed you to care and want to act. Something has to change. You press one of these numbers to commit to doing something within the next week.
Since the inauguration, I have attended a few MoveOn meetings and nationwide action calls. Wearing my nonprofit hat, I have found it interesting how MoveOn (an established voter engagement organization) and Indivisible (a new movement that arose out of the publication of the Indivisible Guide) have jostled and found their unique brand and purpose within the social change marketplace. Wearing my educator hat, I have to say “Hat’s Off!” to both for showing us how to move people to action.
Some lessons from the Resistance:
Emotions drive people to act. Each call starts with stories from people doing some pretty heavy lifting in communities across the country. We have heard from Latino community organizers, women’s movement marchers, and first time leaders from both red and blue states. I carry with me the story of one woman—seemingly older from her voice, seemingly working class from her language, calling from West Virginia where she finds herself the only progressive among a sea of Trump supporters. She asked for any help that MoveOn could provide to sustain and connect her. Immediately following, we were asked to press 1 to pledge to call our congressperson, or 2 to invite a friend into the movement.
Information allows people to act. Within five minutes, a MoveOn representative answered her plea. There were several activist chapters in the area, and she gave a website on how to find them. When people get stuck, it is often because they don’t have information. They know they need to connect, but in this sea of data and desert of trust, how would this woman find the right people? The organization asking her to take action took action and gave her what she needed.
A simply-written manual guides people to act. The Indivisible Guide has become the go-to manual for the progressive movement. Its crisp directives make it easy for any new activist to step in and do something for the first time. Its availability in multiple formats and in Spanish make it accessible to people who don’t live and breathe activism. It gives us easy to follow steps that the target audience –everyday citizens— can follow.
A simple choice moves people to act. We were given 2 choices. Bam. None of this 33 ways to engage, 27 opportunities to learn, 10 things you should know. Two. We know from research that the human brain can only handle up to 4 things at a time. Folks who study choice and decision-making tell us that someone is more likely to choose if the number of choices before them doesn’t lead them to paralysis. Parents know that our kids will get dinner faster if we offer pasta or tacos, not instruct them to open the refrigerator and stare into the abyss.
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to move people to do things differently. The resistance is succeeding to moving a whole lot of people to do things that they weren’t doing in October.
Press 1 to commit to finding one story that would move a key person in your work to action.
Press 2 to create information that help that person take one action.