We’re a nerdy movement: Evidence-based suggestions for volunteer recruitment and teams

Watch these two videos to improve your ability to recruit volunteers and build volunteer teams by using insights from social science.

You'll learn:

  • why you shouldn't screen out volunteers based on whether or not they agree with the goals of the organization (and what to do instead)

  • how to make it easy for people to say yes to big asks, and

  • how to structure effective volunteer teams

The content below is an excerpt from the We’re a Nerdy Movement study group — a 6-week online program to learn evidence-based methods for recruiting, retaining, and mobilizing volunteers, activists, or members and become a better organizer, campaigner, or digital strategist.

When you enroll in the program, you’ll join a global cross-movement community of people like you who are supporting each other to use research-backed insights in building people-powered campaigns.

Enrollment is only open a few times a year. Learn more about the We’re a Nerdy Movement study group.

 

Part 1: Evidence-based suggestions for volunteer recruitment

Resources

RECRUITMENT
The sociologist Ziad Munson found that almost half of the participants in the anti-abortion movement were pro-choice or had mixed views when they first joined the movement.

Consider the anti-abortion movement. The sociologist Ziad Munson has found that almost half of the activists on the front lines of the anti-abortion movement — those who protest outside abortion clinics — were not anti-abortion when they attended their first event. They attended because a friend asked them, they had just joined a new church, or they retired and had more free time. They stayed, however, because at these events, they found things we all want: friends, responsibility, a sense that what they are doing matters. By finding fellowship and responsibility, these people changed not only their views on abortion but also their commitment to act.

Want Gun Control? Learn From the N.R.A., Hahrie Han, The New York Times

Ziad Munson draws this conclusion from his research.

My findings about how people actually become pro-life activists have larger implications. Because the pro-life movement itself creates and sustains the beliefs that underlie it, the movement is likely to remain robust even if U.S. public attitudes about abortion become less polarized. Pro-lifers recruit from broad pools of people with various pre-existing views, not just from the ranks of those already firmly opposed to abortion – and not only from the politically organized Religious Right. Pro-life Americans have long-standing, vigorous groups and ties into many communities and social settings. For the foreseeable future, they will continue to be able to reach out and draw even initially ambivalent fellow citizens into their cause.

How People Become Pro-Life Activists, Ziad Munson, Scholars Strategy Network

Help people say “yes” to big asks

Several barriers keep people from taking what social scientists call “risky political action” — i.e., unfamiliar, uncertain outcomes, or social interactions with unpleasant or hostile people, like meeting with an elected representative or canvassing in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

Research found that acknowledging or “legitimizing” activists fears about a specific action — i.e., including language such as “I know you’re feeling nervous, and so are others, and that’s totally ok, but it’s important that you act anyway.” — leads to increased rates of action taking. Read the paper Legitimizing Nervousness Motivates People to Take Risky Political Actions to see examples of how organizations have used this method at in-person events and via email.

 

Part 2: Evidence-based suggestions for volunteer teams

Resources

Team structure

Research found that the structure and processes of volunteer teams matter more than the amount of free time the members had or the individual’s commitment to the issue. The researchers found three factors had the most influence on the amount of time an individual committed to the organization:

  • More interdependent

  • More equal division of labor

  • Less time in leadership meetings

Read a 4-minute summary of the research or read the full 30-page paper. I recommend reading the full paper because there are other valuable insights in it.

A survey of Sister District Team volunteers found that team structure and relationships among team members has a bigger effect on levels of participation than demographics, like age, race, and gender.

Psychological safety

Researchers at Google also found that team effectiveness was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together. In order of importance:

  1. Psychological safety

  2. Dependability

  3. Structure and clarity

  4. Meaning

  5. Impact

Google has a practical guide with 28 behaviors everyone can practice to foster psychological safety. This is the same content that is shown in the video above.

Watch this 11-minute TEDx talk from Amy Edmondson, the person who first identified the concept of psychological safety, to learn three simple things individuals can do to foster team psychological safety:

  • Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.

  • Acknowledge your own fallibility.

  • Model curiosity and ask lots of questions.

Amy is also the author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.

Some organizations attempt to foster feelings of connection and community by encouraging staff and volunteers to share stories of deep pain and trauma. This can have the opposite effect and destroy psychological safety When a leader chooses what to share and shares stories from their personal history, it can lead to people with less rank being coerced to share sensitive information to fit in.

Learn how to build teams

Watch Marshall Ganz’s online course “How to Build a Team” at the Resistance School.

Presenter

Randall Smith is a director at PowerLabs, a consulting firm that supports organizations to design and run people-powered campaigns.

He specializes in training, coaching, and strategic support to help organizations create the strategy, tactics, structures, and processes to allow them to scale through the work of volunteer leaders.

Randall has helped dozens of organizations apply insights from social science to their work and they have used those insights to:

  • grow from 50 volunteers to 150 chapters in 18 months,

  • organize a day of action with 700 simultaneous events,

  • mobilize people to hold 2,500 house meetings on a single day, and

  • create 300 action and political education teams

Organizations he has worked with include Courage California, Forward Together, Free Press, IfNotNow, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Movimiento Cosecha, MPower Change, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Sunrise Movement, and United for Respect.

Learn more

Build more powerful campaigns with social science

Social science research offers a wealth of insights related how individuals think and act — individually and en masse — and how those behaviors scale (or don’t) to create the conditions necessary to build political power and create lasting social change.

Watch this webinar recording with Jack Zhou and Carina Barnett-Loro of the Climate Advocacy Lab to learn some of the essential takeaways to improve your organizing with insights from social science.

Turning grassroots activism into durable political power

To win change at the scale that we need, organizations must build and maintain broad constituencies that persist through the ups and downs and whims of different administrations.

So, how do we build the kind of movements that generate the collective action necessary to shift existing power dynamics?

Watch this webinar recording with Carina Barnett-Loro and Jack Zhou from the Climate Advocacy Lab to learn the basics of social movement theory and how those insights can be applied to building durable political power.

Summer Heat: Tips for organizing in-district meetings with elected representatives

In response to the Trump Administration’s threats to the open internet, Team Internet volunteers held 600 in-district meetings in two months and then organized a day of action with 700 coordinated protests.

These actions led to the passage of legislation in both the Senate and the House and garnered support for Net Neutrality from 70% of incoming first-year members of the current Congress.

Watch this webinar recording to learn tips from Brandon Forester and Mary Alice Crim to help you organize member-led in-district meetings with elected representatives.


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