Building a Group

Once you have a core group you can do outreach on a much larger scale. It is essential to the success of any long-term campaign to continually involve new people who are interested in the group or issue, and to constantly reach out to potential supporters who might not be able to be directly involved right away.

The point is not to get everyone to a meeting but for them to become active members of your group. You want to develop a large base of supporters who can provide funds and be helpful as needed.

Outreach and recruitment should be central to all of your group's events and activities. You should provide opportunities for people to become informed about an issue and to show support. Often new people are curious about the group and need some extra encouragement before they decide to get more involved.

Building a Broad Support Base

The best way to recruit new members is one-to-one contact. After you talk to a potential member at an event, information table, or door-to-door, follow up with a phone call. Find out what they are interested in and give them easy ways to get involved. If you have envelopes to stuff, phone calls to make, posters to hang, a booth to staff, signatures to gather, etc. see these simple tasks as opportunities to involve newcomers. With a commitment to recruiting and nurturing new members, your group will have people who stick around to become leaders in the organization. You also have to continually recharge your group with new people and energy as old members leave. Long term members are less likely to burn out if responsibilities in an organization are delegated and rotated to newer people.

Longer time members should also be encouraged to take on more responsibilities and leadership roles within the group. It is especially helpful to encourage women, working class and low income people, people of color, and others from groups experiencing oppression to become officers and spokespersons for the organization. Having many members with leadership experience means the group won't have to depend on just one or two people when crises arise or public action is needed. A diverse leadership also means the group will have a more flexible or creative response to such situations. Diversity also means the ability to attract new members from a greater cross-section of the community.

The steps in building support are basically the same, no matter what size the group is in the beginning:

Keeping Track of Supporters

Gather all the names of people who have expressed interest in your activities and create a "master list." You may want to divide the list into four sections: 1) active members who come to meetings, 2) volunteers for specific tasks who do not attend meetings, 3) supporters who will come to events, and 4) donors to the group who are not otherwise active but who could join one of the first three categories if approached later. When people sign a list, you could ask what kind of involvement they are interested in so that you know who to call for what and which list to put them on.

Many groups maintain their membership list on a computer. This allows them to print out mailing labels and create lists sorted by various categories.

Other ways to keep people informed and involved include: sending out minutes or a newsletter to keep supporters involved and up-to-date; having social events for less active members who just want to support your issue; involving people in a long-term planning so that they can feel more "ownership" of the organization; and holding regular meetings at regular locations so that less-involved members can rely on your organization and know where to go if they want to get more involved.

Using Computer Technology

Find ways to use computers that enhance record-keeping and communication without excluding non-users or neglecting more direct contact.

As of the year 2000, over half of all households in the U.S. have computers, and the percentage continues to increase. Computers can contribute to the problems we struggle to solve, such as the globalization of the economy. However, they can also allow activists and organizations to communicate with each other and to educate themselves and their members. A lack of access to computers may put some groups at a disadvantage in their peace, justice, and environmental work; organizers will be most effective when they can overcome this "digital divide."

While the uses of computers are changing almost daily, there are already many aspects of organizing where community organizers can use computer technology to their advantage. The most obvious use is word processing. Computers can save time and energy in producing well-written and easily readable statements, meeting notes, press releases, etc. They help make flyers, brochures, guides (like this one), and signs more effective through the use of page layout programs. Mailing lists are easier to set up and maintain when using a database program. Financial reports and budgets for future planning can be produced quickly and accurately with spread sheet programs.

Electronic mail (email) and the world wide web are becoming popular as well. Email allows people to quickly and cheaply send information to others via computer networks, saving paper and postage costs as well as time. Email can even be used for meetings, although face-to-face meetings and conference calls are more effective ways of communicating and decision-making. The world wide web is a research tool allowing a person sitting at home or in an office or library to gain access to information from around the world. While some information is only available from books or other sources, more and more resources are available through the web.

Computers can't take the place of the personal contact and action that organizing requires, but it can contribute significantly to the information and reasoning people need to take action. Computer resource groups and technical support staff help activists and social change groups to use computers more effectively.

Funding An Organization

Make fundraising a regular part of the program, involve as many people in the group as possible, plan on more than one source of income, and keep good records.

Since money is so central to capitalism, people who work for progressive social change tend to have mixed feelings about it. As long as we live in a money-based economy, however, fundraising will be a necessary part of our organizing.

Raising money is ideally just another aspect of building and maintaining our organizations, a regular part of our outreach and program. Everyone involved with an organization should be seen as a potential fundraiser. As long as we remember that the people who believe in our mission want to support it, including with their dollars, it is just a question of deciding who will ask for that support, when they will ask for it, and how.

With that in mind, remember that your program should always come first. As noted elsewhere in this guide, your group needs to have a clear mission statement and a list of goals. Based on your program, the treasurer, or a budget committee, needs to project as accurately as possible the group's expenses for things like postage, telephone calls, photocopying, program/event expenses, staff pay, and office rent. This will determine the amount of money to be raised.

Your group may want to have a fundraising committee. In many organizations, the board of directors serves that function. Larger groups may have fundraising as part of the job description of paid staff. In any case, an individual or sub-group needs to be responsible for coming up with a fundraising plan.

A good fundraising plan includes a number of different sources of income. An organization is more financially stable when it has more than one or two kinds of income to depend on. However, your most reliable funding source will always be your members or supporters.

A community organization that I worked with in Providence once undertook a two year campaign to open up membership in the United Way to more minority and non-traditional agencies. One result was that the group itself became a member agency!

We thought this was the ultimate victory! No more spaghetti suppers, no more grant writing, no more scratching around for free paper for the mimeo--easy street. When a big federal grant came down for anti-crime organizing, all other fundraising ground to a halt, everybody got a raise, the group bought a van and moved into a nice office.

The dark side soon surfaced, though. The highly motivated but formerly low paid staff started to get resistance from leadership when it came time to challenge the real power brokers downtown--those folks arebig in the United Way! We're going to be cutting our own throats! Leadership started to bid for the job openings, which now were much more lucrative--and those who didn't get hired felt that they had been put down unfairly, and stopped volunteering--if their fellow leader was going to get to take home all that money, well he could make the phone calls!

The final straw was the fight over the van. Who gets to drive it home at night--the new director of the anti-crime project or the president--the fight was vicious and bitter. The staff that thought they'd signed on for a crusade left in disgust, and the organization took a two year nosedive, leading to de-funding by the United Way and death.

The group thought they wanted respectability and acceptance, and were willing to pay any price to get them. In the end, they lost their power and they lost their integrity, and finally, they lost their very existence...

--Dave Beckwith, Community Organizing: People Power from the Grassroots (P. 13).
Reprinted with permission

Individual contributions from working and middle class people are the largest single source of charitable giving in the U.S. Any organization can accept gifts from supporters; if your donors want to be able to deduct their contributions on their income tax returns, you will need to either incorporate (through your state) and apply for and receive tax exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, or find a group who already has tax exempt status to serve as a fiscal sponsor to accept tax deductible donations for your group. Regular mail appeals or telephone calls to your own list of supporters will be a basic part of your plan. Remember to always thank your donors and to provide recognition for them on a regular basis.

Other sources of income include: passing the hat at meetings or events; selling literature; selling other items (videos, T-shirts, etc.); charging fees for services you offer; holding events with entrance fees such as film showings, concerts, or peace fairs; garage sales; run, bike, dance or other "a-thons" for which people pledge individual participants; corporate donations; foundation grants; government grants, etc.

The fundraising plan should not only include the different sources of income you intend to go after, but how much you hope to raise from each source, when you intend to do it, and who will be responsible for it. It's best to lay your plan out on a calendar to be sure money comes in throughout the year; this will hopefully avoid cash flow problems.

Good record-keeping is key to carrying out successful fundraising. Neat and easy-to-understand budgets and finance reports, evaluations of your various fundraising strategies, and clear notes on donors will simplify the fundraising process and increase your supporters' trust in you. An annual report, summarizing your program accomplishments and financial situation, is a good way to keep the people in your organization informed and aware of what their dollars are doing. See the Resources section for books on fundraising for community organizations.