Seven Reasons Why Your Organization Can’t Duplicate the Obama Grassroots Campaign
Copyright 2009, Amy Showalter & Dr. Kelton Rhoads
I can hear you saying, “Hold on, Showalter, this is America, we can be anything we want to be!” When it comes to grassroots movements, maybe not. Allow us to explain.
I’m hearing government relations teams tell me, and Dr. Rhoads is hearing his product marketing clients tell him that they are being pressured by their executives to create a movement around their issue or product “like what Barack Obama did.”
Remember, if we know one thing, it’s never one thing that creates persuasion. Just because the media honed in on the technology tactics of the Obama campaign does not mean that’s all you need to succeed.
Here are our seven reasons (and if you can’t implement all of them, as Barack Obama’s team did, you’d need to activate most of them) why your organization probably can’t duplicate the fervor of Obama’s grassroots campaign:
- You have to lose control of the people who are carrying your message, and to some extent the message. When is that last time you knew of a corporation that wasn’t a bit nervous about message anarchy?
- You have to train the grassroots army and keep them accountable. In my eleven years of training PAC and grassroots influencers, I can count on one foot the number who engage in robust accountability with their volunteers. Many just put their head under the covers and hope for the best.
- It’s helpful to have a frustrated audience who feels they only have one of two choices (McCain or Obama). This doesn’t resemble the marketplace at all; there are tons of options if I choose not to drink Coke. There are tons of other associations I can join, and lots of other political causes I can give to, as well.
- Can you ‘go negative’ on all your opposition, and have the majority of people cheering you as you do so? Obama could. You on the other hand may have a constituency that would revolt if you blamed the state of affairs on your rivals.
- Can you leverage a sense of embarrassment among your opponents that keeps them from resisting your onslaught? Probably not. Are drinkers of Coke embarrassed when Pepsi launches a new campaign?
- Ideology (riding the highest moral high horse) fueling the movement. Are you able to offer your peeps a sense of moral purity if they follow you? Some grassroots campaigns can achieve this, but not every message can be swept along with ideological fervor. Can you build an ideological movement around your product? If so , do you know how to build it? (And we aren’t referring to online tactics)
- You’re not Barack Obama. You may not even want to be; he has a difficult journey ahead, made all the more difficult by the elevated expectations his campaign generated. For a politician, the big hurdle is getting into office; hard to kick them out before their term is up. You on the other hand, answering to the public on a day-to-day basis, can get booted at any time. Any IOUs you write in the morning are due that same evening…not in four years.