Introduction to Empower
Empower is a tool that you can use to manage relationships at every level of your organizing program. As an organizer, your work revolves around following up with community members, volunteers, and other stakeholders. We follow up to make asks, check in about commitments made, inform our community, train and share skills, and to connect through 1-1s. Successful organizers are expected to take good notes, keep track of all these meetings and relationships, and get accurate and relevant information out to the community. The Empower Tool was specifically created to support relational organizing, which is an organizing methodology that focuses on utilizing relationships to affect change. We each have our own unique network, and each relationship in that network is part of our people power. When we harvest shared motives and collective attention towards an issue that impacts our community, we are flexing our relational muscle for change as a community. This looks like using your growing web of friends, family, neighbors, and acquaintances to make lasting positive change in your community through asks, commitments, and adapting to dynamic relationships.
Relationships are an essential part of an effective relational organizing program. The Empower tool is meant to support you with but is not limited in the following:
- Build and Manage Relationships: Empower gives you tools to build, manage, and maintain a network of relationships that you can use to create change and build long term power.
- All-in-One App for Volunteers: Empower can be your volunteer action hub to stay connected with volunteers. Ask volunteers to reach out to friends and family or to take action on their own. Send updates quickly with mass texting. Expand your program with open canvassing. Run a phone bank, text bank, or door-to-door canvassing.
- Maximize Your Impact: We build best practices from research into the tool itself, so you can have more impact with less effort. Empower’s dashboards give you even more data to track your progress, give personalized coaching, and maximize your impact.
Many community organizing programs have a small staff and limited resources, so it is critical for these organizing campaigns to work efficiently for the benefit of their communities. Empower will help you plan, manage, and communicate with your base of supporters more strategically when asking for your community’s time and effort around your shared cause.
Recently, we’ve heard organizers tell us that it’s more challenging to persuade everyday people to engage with an organizing campaign. Oftentimes, it seems that campaigns have shifted their focus to mobilizing volunteers around a specific or single action. Through Relational Organizing, the intention is to uplift the value of relationships in our work, with a focus on sustaining and strengthening these connections that is our people power. Whether it’s attending an event, knocking on doors, or canvassing a street corner, broadly engaging individuals within a community is a challenge, but very much worth the time and effort.
It is thus important for campaigns and organizations to build and maintain strong relationships with their base of supporters and the Empower Tool can help you do that.
It might be helpful to explore some of these other background articles to deepen your initial understanding of the tool:
Using the Empower Tool will help you with an essential element of relational organizing - building and managing relationships with your supporters.
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