The Elevator of Engagement
The elevator of engagement is a metaphor that describes a person in your campaign's level of interest and engagement, and how that affects a person's role in your campaign. The goal of the elevator is to move a person from contact to volunteer, and then potentially a volunteer leader or organizer, through multiple rounds of engagement from a trusted messenger. Engagement is an essential component of effective relational organizing, and in this article, we will tell you how to use Empower to move people up that elevator of engagement to increase the impact of each person in your organization.
The Elevator of Engagement
Definition
A metaphor that describes a person involved in your campaign's level of interest and engagement and how that affects a person’s role in your relational organizing campaign.
Explanation
Elevators help people move from level to level. Engagement is your elevator. Depending on how much someone engages, they will reach different levels. While the ground floor might be an initial action, on the second floor, volunteers are engaged in relational organizing. On the third floor, the volunteer is trained and regularly completes calls to action. The fourth floor has the volunteer training other volunteers and helping to lead their teams. We use the term elevator intentionally. An elevator is inclusive, it allows all people to access different floors in a building. With an elevator, people can get on and off whenever they need. You might see this with people engaging in your organizing program. Some people will get off at level two, while others will continue to levels three or four. People also go up and down with elevators and as an organizer, you can always strive to keep your volunteers engaged and moving up the elevator.
Why it Matters
Although it’s a metaphor, the Elevator of Engagement is a useful concept for tracking how engaged your people are in your organization and when they are ready for more or less. You can use Empower to track the number of people that you have at each level of engagement. Your goal might be to constantly move people up the elevator because with higher levels of engagement comes greater impact. While some people won’t be interested in moving up (and may even move down the later), you can strategically building opportunities for people to get more engaged in your campaign at each level of the elevator. Tracking the number of people at each level can help you strategize; you can see at what levels people need more opportunities to engage and you may even be able to identify barriers preventing people from moving up the elevator.
Using Empower to Track Engagement Levels
One way you can use the Elevator of Engagement in your work is through the use of tags. You can create and assign tags based one someone’s level of engagement (e.g. level one = low engagement and level four = high engagement). Check out this full article on Adding and Creating Tags to get a step-by-step rundown of how to assign tags to someone in Empower.
If you assign people tags based on their level of engagement, you will be able to easily see how many people you have at each level of elevator. To view people with a particular engagement tag:
Click on People
Select All and then click on the Filter Button.
Select Tags
Choose the Any of These tag and then select the tag for the level that you are interested in tracking
Click Apply
You will now see everyone in that particular level of engagement
Tagging individuals by their level of engagement will also allow you to quickly pull a group of your most involved people.
Engagement is an essential component of effective relational organizing and the Elevator of Engagement allows us to measure how we engage our people.
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