Let's work together
PowerLabs helps organizations design and run people-powered campaigns.
We've worked with Sunrise Movement, Free Press, IfNotNow, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Movimiento Cosecha, Leadnow, the Red-Green Party of Copenhagen, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and more. 1,000 organizers from 20+ countries have joined Nerdy Movement, our cohort-based course on evidence-based approaches to recruiting, leadership development, and building strong member teams.
We offer program assessments, campaign development and support, and one-on-one coaching for leaders in hard moments or working toward long-term growth.
Email us at [email protected] to start a conversation.
Strengthen your volunteer and member engagement
You're trying to recruit the right people, move them into action, develop leaders, and build teams that get stronger over time.
Rapid review
Something isn't working and you can't tell why. People sign up but don't stick, or a handful of leaders carry everything while the rest drift. Or maybe you think your results could be better and want an outside perspective.
Send us your context, data, and materials. We spend a half day analyzing them, then share our prioritized findings and suggested next steps on a call with your team.
Deep-dive assessment
You want a fuller picture than a rapid review can give.
Over about four weeks, we go through your program the way a newcomer would (finding you online, signing up, and beyond) to understand what they experience. We also interview your staff and members, review your content, and dig into your numbers.
You come away with a clear picture of what your program needs and a specific plan for what to do next.
Campaign development & support
You're mounting a major campaign and need a partner in the work, not just a plan.
A multi-month partnership where we work alongside your team: facilitating, coaching, training, and helping you design and learn from experiments as you go. We help you win, and we leave your team stronger for it.
A few campaigns we’ve worked on:
Free Press. We advised a coalition that mobilized hundreds of thousands of volunteers for Net Neutrality: 600 congressional meetings, 700 protests at Verizon stores nationwide, and one and a half million calls and 16 million emails to Congress. The effort moved legislation through the Senate and garnered support from 70% of the incoming class of Congresspeople.
I think of PowerLabs as an extension of our team, and I'd recommend them to others without hesitation.
– Mary Alice Crim, Free Press Action Fund
Sunrise Movement. Since 2017, we've supported Sunrise organizing and mobilization programs, contributing to the recruitment of tens of thousands of volunteers, hundreds of thousands of voter contacts, and hundreds of local groups built.
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. We co-facilitated their campaign design process and advised their staff on implementation: a campaign for a people's clean energy plan with 1,200 Kentuckians across community conversations in every congressional district, house meetings, and a two-day conference.
Training program design & support
Your organization needs a serious, structured approach to developing its people.
We work alongside you to design programs to develop members into leaders. We work together to identify learning needs and create the training content, and stay engaged through implementation with regular check-in calls, help evaluating metrics, and troubleshooting as the work progresses.
Sunrise Movement. We supported Sunrise staff in designing a program combining political education, relationship building, organizing skills, and action. A pilot created 90 groups of young people organizing climate strikes; the second iteration built 500 teams before COVID closed school campuses.
Short-term program leadership
A key seat is open (distributed director, mobilization director) and the work can't wait for a hire.
We step in and run the program for a defined stretch. Get in touch to explore if we're a good fit for your needs.
Support for you
The same organizing and campaign expertise, focused on you instead of a program.
Coaching
We coach organizers and leaders who want to increase their impact. Sometimes that means leading more effectively where they are. Sometimes it means a transition: a new role, a new organization, or a new chapter of leadership.
"The process [Randall] facilitated for me was simple, deep, and creative. He asked good questions, probed thoughtfully, and enabled me to consolidate a new sense of direction that I love. I've got a renewed vision, and new skills to make it real."
– Fletcher Harper, Green Faith
"The campaign honestly exceeded my hopes for it and our organization is much stronger now than it was before. We used a lot of teachings from the Nerdy Movement Study Group and the coaching from Sophia was really useful. The campaign would not have been so successful without you."
– Stefan Larsen, Enhedslisten Copenhagen
"I'd worked with coaches before, but Randall's curiosity was incredible. The clarity I got through coaching has been a guide for the rest of the year. What a gift!"
– Adiel Pollydore, Momentum
"Probing questions helped me explore my ideas. Some of the most positive feedback I got from members was about the systems I developed through Randall's coaching."
– Emma Keeshin, Showing Up for Racial Justice
Our team
Randall Smith has worked with dozens of organizations to use evidence-based approaches to build high-commitment, high-participation people-powered campaigns where members thrive. He has coached and advised organizers to:
Develop and run a campaign that resulted in 600 visits to Congressional offices and a day of action with 700 rallies. The campaign resulted in the passage of legislation in both the Senate and the House and garnered support from 70% of incoming first-year members of Congress.
Build a political education, skill-building, and action program that created hundreds of student walkout teams
Create dozens or hundreds of teams advancing organizations' strategies in their communities
Build an organization's capacity to learn, innovate, and win in complex and uncertain environments
Previously, Randall led a team that provided strategic support to user-generated campaigns on Change.org's platform. His work at Change.org helped people win life-changing (and life-saving) victories, including freeing loved ones from prison and changing the policies that govern lung transplants for kids. His team at Change.org garnered millions of dollars of earned media and added millions of users to the platform.
Randall also led the digital program at Corporate Accountability, an international NGO that protects people and the environment from corporate abuses. He's also worked in the immigrant rights movement, built tenant unions in Arizona, and trained thousands of people across the US during the global justice movement.
Sophia Zaia
Prior to joining Randall at PowerLabs, I worked for five years with the Sunrise Movement, doing local and distributed electoral organizing.
In 2020, I built a voter contact program with fifty volunteers aged twelve to their early twenties across six teams. This program organized thousands of volunteers to make six million dials and send one million postcards for progressive candidates.
I also served on the senior leadership team at Sunrise, where I supported leadership teams as they aligned on their purposes, goals, and work practices.
I’ve worked on electoral campaigns from the inside and out, leveraging the youth vote in support of Kendra Brooks’ and Nicolas O'Rourke's at-large city council races in Philadelphia, and working as deputy field director on Jessica Cisneros’ 2022 campaign for Congress.
At PowerLabs, I co-coordinate Nerdy Movement, our six-week training for organizers, and have supported:
The team at Vot-ER in resetting their team purpose and work practices, formalizing their decision-making processes, developing cadences for planning and strategizing, and using new approaches to ensure the team draws on its members' diverse knowledge, skills, and experiences,
Organizers at the Sunrise Movement on designing their 2024 distributed and decentralized voter contact programs,
Organizers at Leadnow to design a relaunch of their organizing program,
And the Organizing Director and Executive Director of the Red-Green Party of Copenhagen on designing a year-round small group organizing program. Check out our webinar on the program here.
I am currently becoming ICF-certified as a leadership coach through the Brown University School of Professional Studies’ Leadership Performance Coaching Certification program.
I offer:
Consulting support to organizers designing leader-full organizing programs or interested in building teams that learn, adapt, have fun and do excellent work,
And leadership coaching to organizers looking to explore what’s next in their leadership journey, confront persistent challenges, address burnout, or simply looking for a partner to champion their growth, learning and problem solving along the way.