To maintain a strong organization it is important to continually
involve those interested in your group or issue, and to constantly reach
out to potential supporters who might not be able to be directly
involved. Building a base of passive and active supporters is
essential to the success of any long-term campaign.
New Member Outreach and Recruitment
Outreach and recruitment should be central to all of your events and
activities. You should provide opportunities for people to become
informed about an issue and show support. Often new people are just
curious about your group and need some extra encouragement before they
decide to get more involved.
The best way to recruit new members is one-on-one contact. After
you talk to a potential member at an event, tabling, or door-to-door
work, follow up with a phone call. Find out what they are interested in
and givethem easy ways to get involved. With a commitment to recruiting
and nurturing new members, your group will retain people who stick
around to become leaders in the organization. You also continually
reinvigorate your group with new peopleand energy as old members leave
or graduate.
Building a Broad Support Base
Once you have a core group, you can do outreach on a much larger
scale. Large-scale outreach involves going out and finding those who
are interested in your issue rather than waiting for them to come to
you. Outreach on a large scale can involve campus-wide events, petition
drives, or actual door to door soliciting. The idea is not to get
everyone to become an active member of your group (which might be
unwieldy), but to develop a large base of support who can provide funds
and be helpful in a time of crisis.
For example, the Campaign for Affordable Rutgers Education (CARE)
"canvassed" Rutgers dormitories four nights per week during the fall
semester of 1991. Over 20 volunteer canvassers went door-to-door giving
a basic rap about tuition increases and university democracy, and then
presented each student with a petition demanding a tuition freeze. They
went on to describe CARE and present the student with a membership form
and ask for a $2 donation. Many more students were willing to sign the
petition than sign up as a member. CARE was able to build a membership
of 700, and an even larger phone list to be used during emergencies.
They also identified those members who were interested in coming to
meetings. The money was used to send members a bi-monthly newsletter.
By dividing up this list among dozens of volunteers, CARE was able to
phone-bank its members whenever an event or demonstration was scheduled.
The steps in building support are basically the same regardless of
your initial size:
- Do something that gets the attention of the
community in which you are working, such as a rally or door-to-door
canvassing.
- Keep track of those who show interest with databases and
phone trees.
- Follow up on your contacts and get them involved.
By reaching out to all on campus who may be interested, you can develop
the strength to win concessions from the administration or other people
in power.
Keeping Track of Supporters
It is helpful if you compile all the names of people who have signed
in at your activities into a "master list." You may want to divide the
list into three sections:
- Active members who come to meetings
- Volunteers for specific tasks who do not attend meetings
- Supporters who will come to rallies or events
If your group is large, you may want to assign the task of
maintaining your membership list to a member who has a computer and is
familiar with spreadsheet or database software like Excel or Filemaker.
For example, you could put the "master list" into a table containing:
- each person's first name, last name
- address (2 lines), city, state, zip code
- home phone
- work phone
- year of expected graduation
- living group
- level of interest
- comments (explain where the name came from, what kind of work they like to do)
- date they were interested
Once the information is in your computer, you can print out mailing
labels (perhaps sorted by living group) and phone lists sorted by last
name and first name.
You can periodically delete people who leave school, especially
during the summer. In September, the vitality of your group will depend
on your ability to track down key members. If you lose people, perhaps
you can find them through e-mail, the registrar's office, or by asking
around.
Other Tips on Keeping People Informed and Involved
- It is good to send out minutes or a newsletter to keep less-active
supporters involved and up-to-date.
- Have social events as well as rallies to keep less active members
who just want to support your issue involved and connected.
- Involve people in a long-term planning, so that they can feel some
"ownership" of the organization. Invite new members to retreats and
bull-sessions about the future of the organization.
- Hold regular meetings at regular locations, so that peripheral
members can rely on your organization and know where to go if they want
to get more involved.
- Write a constitution and operating rules that everybody can see and
understand. Sticking to the rules that your group writes for itself
will enable people to expect consistency and make decisions about the
group.

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