Solidarity Sunday: The Role of Organizing and Advertising
I had a subscriber to Solidarity Sunday send me a terse note after our last edition.
"This may work for some people but we don't have time to coddle them which is what is being suggested here."
The article was based on the 4-stages of decision-making and how we can use advertising to enhance our organizing efforts. I can see where he may have been confused. The article was written more about how to use advertising to benefit your organizing, and I wanted to take this opportunity to clarify that point. But it also got me wondering...
Where does advertising fit in the process of organizing?
Does advertising work for some organizations and not for others? How does a local union's brand matter when our organizers are out in the field talking to workers? Do persuasion techniques in advertising differ from persuasion techniques in organizing?
I took this opportunity to do some digging.
Firstly, I looked at the similarities between successful advertising and organizing campaigns. Both are all about building relationships, and relationships are all about trust.
If we are going to grow our local and influence future members, we're going to have to have a strategy that reaches young people long before they need us. We're going to have to talk to them in places where they naturally spend time, on and off the job. That place is social media.
Like most successful advertising campaigns, most union organizing campaigns take months at a minimum, and they often take years. Both deal with the process of talking to workers, recruiting work leaders, and building majority support.
Secondly, I compared what I wrote last week about the 4-stages of advertising with the stages of organizing:
- Engage - Grabbing someone's attention in a meaningful way by using something of interest to them, presenting it in an engaging entertaining way, and inserting that message in a place they naturally spend lots of time. (We mainly use video social media channels)
- In your organizing efforts, this is engaging a person in conversation by Identifying the issues that person has with has in his or her workplace.
- Enroll - Convincing them that you understand what they're going through and you can help.
- In your organizing efforts, this is Agitating around those issues, which means asking questions that signals that you understand what they're facing, and you are helping them confront the reality of the problems those issues cause in their lives.
- Educate - Providing the details necessary to validate their decision as transparently as possible.
- In your organizing efforts, this is introducing the Plan to Win…details on how your local union can help change things for the better, how a collective bargaining agreement can win guaranteed annual raises, create a safer work environment, institute a hiring/firing/discipline procedure with due process, create a proper grievance process to enforce your rights, etc.
- Activate - Asking for the business. Show them the path of least resistance to do business with you to get them where they want to be. Make it easy to get and stay in touch with you.
- In your organizing efforts, this is Making your Ask. Sum up the conversation on how joining/forming a union addresses the needs they told you they have. Show them the path, and the choice available to them. "Now you have a choice: you can either continue with the status quo, which as we talked about isn't sustainable for you. Or, we can stand together and demand better and command the respect that we deserve." Ask for the business. Ask them to stand with you and fight for your union. Ask them to sign the card to join the union.
Advertising and Organizing strategy are two very similar outreach efforts with almost the exact same steps and goals. When done in conjunction, they are complementary strategies that work well together.
In the next Solidarity Sunday we will share some research from Google showing how familiarity with a brand affects purchasing decisions and how you can take advantage of it to grow your Local.