Article by Daniela Blei: “Alex Dildine used to run the digital organizing program for the nonpartisan group Organizing for Action (OFA), an offshoot of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. During her tenure at OFA, Dildine managed the former president’s digital assets, using email lists and social media to organize communities that had become civically engaged by joining the campaign. In her work helping create leaders remotely, Dildine encountered an array of problems: decades of declining social capital, volunteers in far-flung locations struggling to find meaning online, and low response rates on digital platforms.
Dildine is now a doctoral candidate in political science at Johns Hopkins University, and her dissertation research asks how organizers can build a sense of community in ways that sustain long-term engagement.
“When Trump was elected in 2016, I watched as volunteer participation rates skyrocketed,” Dildine says. “But I knew that without the organizational infrastructure and an intentional effort to create a sense of community, virtual or otherwise, people were not going to know how to continue their engagement.”
What tools, Dildine wondered, could help practitioners turn online enthusiasm into offline action? Was there a way to assess the depth and quality of engagement online, and whether people found meaning, community, and purpose in organizing?
To answer these questions, Dildine’s dissertation delves into historical cases; draws on interviews with organizational strategists; and mines organizational databases, training materials, and annual reports to chart the patterns of volunteers over time, spanning an earlier era of optimism about the internet to the more pessimistic present, thanks to years of accelerated data gathering and online surveillance. Microtargeting campaigns have offered one easy way to find supporters to back a particular cause, for example. But moving those individuals targeted by campaigns to fight or even take risks for a political cause remains an unsolved challenge. Most organizations lack proven online strategies and must compete with a barrage of emails and notifications to capture people’s attention…(More)”
