Every organizer has THAT moment. The Showdown, the Fight Scene. The moments when you gather your supporters and march out, magic wand held high, ready to defend what is right and cast your great spell. Great as those moments are, they don’t happen every day. And if you spend all your time thinking about the big moment instead of focusing on the details, you won’t be prepared when it arrives.

Email is a very personal communication medium, and the emails people look forward to getting are most likely from family and friends. So when you’re writing an email, it’s important not to sound like a newsletter or legal brief. Here are a few things to think about:

One of the biggest differences I've seen between the priorities of corporations and governments and the priorities of campaigns is IT security. For example, it’s not uncommon to see passwords stored in Google Docs accessible to the whole staff, or organizations using a common password for every service. Since it’s important to keep our tools and data secure, let’s focus on some basic policies that can keep you safe online.

We’re required to re-draw congressional and legislative districts after the census every 10 years. Redistricting sets the playing field for candidates and campaigns for the next decade. Wish you could control who got elected for the next ten years? As we speak, politicians across the country are taking advantage of this opportunity. Redistricting is an opaque process. An accurate map requires detailed demographic and electoral data. The data is difficult to find, often contained in

Want to really get a legislator's attention? Petitions, faxes, and calls are great, but a face-to-face meeting with passionate constituents is a fantastic way to get your legislator to notice you and move your members up the ladder of engagement. Here are a few key logistical and tactical steps I always take to pull off a great meeting:

A lot of organizers I know work remotely, but I often hear people say they have a hard time working from home or a non-office setting. A few weeks ago, I offered some suggestions on ways to stay productive when working from home. One of the hardest parts of working remotely is feeling isolated. Here are a few ways I mitigate that and keep myself focused.

At some point, pretty much every organizer ends up negotiating with a service provider. Most of us aren't trained in negotiating, and I've seen many campaigns and organizations sign bad deals because they missed a step, or overextended themselves. I've already made some suggestions on negotiation tactics, but there's one critical aspect you need to remember if you hope to be successful: Project confidence in all your dealings. If you project uncertainty, it's easier for a vendor to get what

Trying to figure out how to better engage your communities online? Wondering why people don’t seem to be finding or participating in the action items on your website? Good web design and engaging content are obviously key. But if you want to know where people are getting lost, Google Analytics can help, with their Goals and Funnels features. It sounds wonky, but they’re actually easy to set up, and can be invaluable for helping your organization’s website direct visitors to take a

Like millions around the country and world, I stayed up past my bedtime to catch the final installation of the Harry Potter film franchise when it opened at midnight last Thursday. I was 9 years old when the first book came out. In the 14 years since then, I’ve developed as an organizer alongside Harry, Hermione, and Ron. There are so many things I’ve learned from Harry Potter over the years, and in honor of becoming an adult at 2:48am as the credits rolled Friday morning, here’s some

Have you ever attended a training but not really been clear on what's on the agenda or who else will be there? When attendees have a clear sense of what to expect, they'll be more present and engaged from the beginning, but how can you make sure people are on the same page? One way to make sure your participants come prepared for your training is to start a conversation early. We like to use online groups to create space for attendees to "meet" and interact ahead of time (you can host them

If you’re like most people, and especially like most managers, you probably get interrupted through the day by people who want “just one minute to ask you something.” While in general you want to be accessible, if you’re constantly being interrupted and it’s disrupting your ability to focus on important projects, you might need to find a strategy to carve out some distraction-free time. Especially in advocacy and campaigns, there’s always something popping up that can distract

Have you ever exported a list to Excel and opened it to find that Excel, thinking that it knows better than you, had made its own (wrong) decisions about how your data should be stored and displayed? Excel loves to do this is with zip codes that start with a zero. Unless you explicitly tell Excel that you want to retain the zero at the beginning of a number, it automatically drops it, leaving you (in this case) with four-digit zip codes. I've also encountered this problem in a spreadsheet