What Does the Future of Political Organizing Look Like?
We’ve written a lot about political organizing and tools like canvassing and phone banking in the past. But what does the future of political organizing hold? As a political and advocacy organizer who has been working in this space for 30 years, I like to stay up to date on all the latest grassroots organizing trends and make sure I am not just relying on the old school tactics I grew up on, but am focusing on what is performing well and what will do well in the future. Here are my tips for stepping up your campaign tactics for 2026 and what to test going forward.
Relational Organizing
Relational organizing is a strategy where individuals leverage their personal networks to achieve a common goal, such as community change or political action. It works by asking people you know—friends, family, or colleagues—to get involved and then encouraging them to do the same with their own networks. This approach is effective because it uses trusted relationships to persuade, inform, and mobilize people, rather than relying on cold outreach.
What is Old is New Again
The hard work of connecting old-school networks and harnessing them for political change is a hot thing in politics right now. This takes work and time. Test out free tools like the Empower Project to scale your relational organizing.
Paid Organizers
Having a strong crew of paid organizers is expensive, hard to find, and incredibly valuable. Taking the time to recruit canvassers who want to do the hard work and are also interested in good outcomes takes time. Using technology to keep track of results and data is key and an ongoing, tech-forward way to make canvassing more efficient.
Volunteer Organizers
Volunteers are even harder to recruit and organize, but they make a real difference. Having folks who can talk to their neighbors about a campaign or an issue.
Phones have a place, but it is not instant and is hard to do well.
As a prolific phone banker, this hurts to say. But while phone banking can still be effective as a volunteer recruitment tool (particularly if you have a preexisting relationship with that person), in terms of direct voter contact, traditional phone banking is dying – the primary reason being cell phones. More people are ditching their landlines, and federal law prohibits using any predictive dialer technology to call cell phones, meaning every single one of them must be hand-dialed by a volunteer. To make matters worse, more people are becoming hesitant about answering calls from numbers they don’t already have in their phones, preferring to listen to a voicemail and decide whether to call back. The other major reason for the decline in phone banking? Other organizing tools (like canvassing!) are just so much more effective. Though there are still several older voters out there who have landlines, it is just not as effective as it used to be.
Zoom
From virtual lobby days to Zoom organizing meetings with story capture built in, Zoom is a versatile platform that can work as a meeting place and a collection tool for organizing.
SMS and Email
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to many. In the modern age, most people have cell phones. And even with changes to Apple’s operating system, there’s a pretty enormous pool of people out there that an organizer can reach via text. Further, texts are generally viewed as a highly personal form of communication. And if you begin collecting SMS signups early enough in the campaign, this can really pay off as you get closer to Election Day. But while it has been overused, good programs from brands you know and trust still connect with voters. Further, while it’s hard to call email a “tool of the future” at this point, what’s very clear is that it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Email continues to stay effective as an organizing tactic as more people have access to their email on their phones or tablets, and good emails jump out from typical spam. In the modern era of organizing, email is as important as ever and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
Text Banking
Peer-to-peer texting had its heyday about a decade ago and now falls just above robocalls in the pantheon of overused tactics. But that’s not to say that it can’t be well done. A good texting program can and will stand out among all the bad texts you get; it just takes focus, connection, and a bit of creativity.
Social Media as an Organizing Tool
Simply put, social media has changed the game in terms of political organizing. Tapping into the fact that someone’s entire social network now lives online, organizers are increasingly using social media to have volunteers reach out to their friends or have friends of friends make warm introductions to make their asks more effective. Back in the good old days of organizing, you had to ask someone who else they knew who might want to help. Not anymore. Organizers today have their volunteers reach out to their friends and talk about the issues that matter to them. In the future, social media will only continue to help refine asks and use positive social pressure to produce real change.
Story Capture
Story capture and user-generated storytelling are a bigger part of the field than ever before—finding stories in the field and lifting them with paid methods is an important strategy, whether through phones or digital.
AI as a Partner for Organizing
Artificial intelligence is a great complement to organizing. It can do many things to make organizing easier. Do you need a volunteer added to a data file? AI can do that. Need to translate your canvassing script into multiple languages? AI can do that. Need follow-up texts to folks who signed up at the door? AI can help. Want to anticipate what your conversations at the door could be like to create scripts and responses? AI can also help. All of this needs to be edited and reviewed by a human, but it can move things along faster than on your own.
Implementing the Right Political Organizing Strategies
Okay, so now that you have read this, what does it mean for your plan? Pick tactics that fit your program and be thoughtful about what you can implement with the resources you have. The biggest issue will be time, so make sure you start earlier than you think is needed to build and implement a program.
Relationships Matter, Now More than Ever
With all the flashy new tools available to political organizers today, one thing is clear: relationships still matter a lot. All these tools that we’ve mentioned above are only effective when they are backed up by a strong personal connection. For instance, having a canvasser be vulnerable and tell their story at the door is the key to real persuasion. And while social media has really changed the game in terms of organizing, its strength lies in the fact that it is essentially tapping into the personal relationships between users. Political organizing is still very much based on personal relationships.
Tools: The Good and the Bad
No matter how much talk there is about tools for organizing, even the best tool will not take the place of the hard work that goes into organizing. But it can make it more focused and strategic.
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