Digital Communications
Digital Organizing & Social Media Management
Summary
Digital spaces are critical sites of organizing. They are places where movements tell stories, build relationships, identify who holds power, celebrate victories, and bring more people into the work. Our research reinforces strategies organizers are already using and points to ways communicators can extend and deepen them online.
Explore each of the tactics below and hover over the highlighted text to see more detail.
Tactics
Use the language of extraction to show how wealth and resources are pulled out of communities.
Organizers already use extraction to describe what corporations and powerful interests do to communities. The research suggests communicators can deepen this strategy by connecting the extraction of natural resources to the ways wealth and labor are extracted from communities.
See it in action
“We know what extraction looks like when corporations drill, mine, or frack: they take valuable resources out of the ground and carry the profits away
Start with something people can picture.
Drilling, mining, and fracking give people a physical model of extraction: something valuable is taken from a place and moved somewhere else.
. The same thing happens when corporations take our labor, suppress wages, avoid taxes, and leave our schools and public services without the resources they need.”
Short + shareable:
They drill the land. They drain our communities
Show where it goes.
Don’t stop at what communities lose. Name who accumulates wealth and power as a result.
. We organize to stop the extraction.
Show how race was created to justify taking land and exploiting people’s labor and how this history still shapes who has wealth and power today.
Movements have long explained that race and racism are not natural or inevitable. Race was constructed and used to justify taking land, exploiting labor, concentrating wealth, and denying people power. The research suggests making the connection between past and present especially clear. Show how these systems continue to shape who has wealth and power today and how collective action can change them.
See it in action
“Racial inequity was built through decisions about who could own land, whose labor could be exploited, and who could build wealth
Name the decisions.
Instead of saying inequality has "deep historical roots," identify policies and practices that distributed land, wealth, opportunity, and political power along racial lines.
. Those decisions continue to shape who has wealth and power today—and organizing gives us the power to make different ones.”
Short + shareable:
It was built. Together, we can change it
Don’t end with harm.
If systems were constructed, they can be reconstructed. Connect historical explanation to organizing, resistance, and people’s capacity to make different choices.
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Show people not only what movements are fighting against, but the life they are fighting for and how joy itself can be a source of collective power.
Joy, creativity, care, and connection have deep roots in movements for liberation and abolition. They can sustain people through struggle, strengthen relationships and solidarity, and help movements build the collective power needed for change. Digital communications can make these dimensions of organizing more visible while helping people experience the future a movement is working toward.
See it in action
“This is what we’re fighting for: neighborhoods where we can live, gather, celebrate, create, and thrive together
Show joy rather than only naming it.
Photos, video, art, music, celebrations, community meals, victories, and relationships can communicate possibility more powerfully than abstract language.
.”
Short + shareable:
Joy is part of how we fight—and part of what we’re fighting for
Connect joy to the political project.
Joy isn’t a break from organizing. Show how community, care, creativity, and belonging are part of the power we are building and world movements are working to build.
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Make visible how people come together to fight for the power to change the systems and decisions shaping their lives.
Movement communications already speak powerfully about building a base, confronting opponents, fighting back, and winning. Keeping that language visible helps show that organizing isn’t simply about having a voice, but about building the collective power to challenge the systems that concentrate wealth and decision-making power—and change the rules, policies, and institutions that sustain them.
See it in action
“We organized. We built our numbers. We fought. And we won. Now we’re building power for the next fight
Keep the next fight visible.
Winning something can build people’s sense that further change is possible.
.”
Short + shareable:
They’re counting on us staying divided. We’re counting our people.
Show that the future is contested and that collective action can determine what comes next.
The future isn’t something that simply happens to us. Corporations and other powerful interests are already making decisions that shape what our neighborhoods will become, where wealth will flow, and who will have the power to decide. Movement communications can make this struggle visible by contrasting the future produced by continued extraction with the future people can build through organizing and collective power.
See it in action
There are two futures for our neighborhood. In one, corporate investors keep buying up homes, raising rents, and pulling wealth out while families are pushed farther away. In the other, families can afford to stay, public spaces are thriving, schools have the resources they need, and the people who live here have real power over what gets built and where resources go
Put two futures in view.
Show what happens if powerful interests continue extracting wealth and controlling decisions—and what becomes possible when communities build enough power to change course.
. Neither future is inevitable. Which one we get depends on the power we build together
Show what produces each future.
Neither future is inevitable. Make clear that policies, institutions, corporate power, and collective action determine which direction we move.
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Short + shareable:
The future is up for grabs. Let’s organize to win it
Connect the future to the fight happening now.
Show how today’s organizing—building a base, confronting powerful interests, changing policies, and winning campaigns—creates the conditions for a different tomorrow.
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