How do you turn activists into members and members into activists?
Lots of traditional organisations are facing a huge challenge at how to adapt to the new activism that has been unleashed thanks to the power of the web. They are trying to tap into this new activism but grappling with how to turn their existing members into activists for change. Failure to do so means less activism and a lower profile than insurgent campaigns. To them, the stories told by Clay Shirky, Seth Godin et al must feel both tantalisingly close and desperately out of reach.
But this isn’t just about the up-rooting of traditional organisations as the winds of change sweep away the old and bring in the new. The new movements which deliver one-off activism, observed by Shirky and Godin, are also struggling; with how to create longevity and lasting impact. If they fail to turn activists into members, they lose influence to the next group of insurgents.
No one has yet found out to use the internet to create lasting change. Every prolific social networker wonders what having 10,000 followers on Twitter really means. The Twitter evangelists will point to Barack Obama as a successful campaign for social change thanks to social media, forgetting Howard Dean’s defeat 4 years earlier. But as Alan Rusbridger mused, if The Guardian could only monetise their Twitter followers, newspapers would not be in crisis.
Or on another level, Twitter may be a great way of organising a single campaign to prevent the deportation of an asylum seeker but it’s not going to deliver justice to all asylum seekers. That requires a sustained effort. So people concerned about his deportation need to be directed towards the campaign for Gary McKinnon (for example) .
The challenge then for new movements is turning the one-off activism into a more meaningful, long term relationship to deliver lasting change (healthcare reform, for example). For them, too, membership must feel tantalisingly close and desperately out of reach.
If we do not have a concept of activism that builds long term relationships with like-minded people then we won’t create sustained momentum for change. Prosaically, reinventing the wheel each time will become as tiresome as going along to the monthly Labour party branch meeting and big picture, governing the country becomes more difficult as thousands of single issue groups refused to compromise.
I don’t believe that membership in the traditional sense is an outdated concept. It’s by belonging to an organisation that we help shape our identity in our communities. With membership comes ownership (nominal or actual) which means responsibility and accountability – a greater sense of purpose and richer sense of belonging.
But if organisations with membership models die, then we will all be left bowling alone and (to extend the analogy to breaking point) merely opting in to having companions at our convenience. Anyone who only calls friends when they want to go out will gradually find no friends to go out with. An activist group succeeds not just because they are united by a cause but because bonds of friendship are formed that transcend a specific campaign.
So the challenge is this: how do traditional organisations reform so that memberships become active, so that they can compete with the single issue start-ups and how do single issue start-ups reforms so that they can translate one-off activism into meaningful long-term engagement?
I’m not aware of any easy answers. It will require experimentation and failure – and learning from both. It’s will be about using the tools of the internet to their full capacity and rediscovering how social movements are embedded in communities. It isn’t easy but the prize is lasting influence and power.