When it comes to motivating people to get out the vote, get on the streets or make change, it’s important to meet them where they’re at. Relational organizing aims to do just that, proponents say, and the practice is gaining adherents.

“People learn through doing, through conversations, through self-discovery, which is why organizers are constantly running campaigns,” labor organizer Jane McAlevey, a pioneer of the approach, said in 2019. “Because it’s in campaigns, it’s in struggle, that people begin to learn to pull away the onion layers of bullshit put in their head by the media and society, and come to think for themselves.”

What is relational organizing?

The relational technique relies on a simple question: Are you more likely to take political action if asked by someone you don’t know or by someone in your existing social network? Proponents of relational organizing hold that the latter is more effective—and they’ve increasingly put institutional and financial backing behind the theory. 

In her 2016 book “No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age,” McAlevey explained how a communal and more inclusive approach to effecting change can lead to greater solidarity in all respects of fighting for progressive change.

“American urban politics has been governed by boundaries and rules that stress ethnicity, race and territoriality, rather than class, and that emphasize the distribution of goods and services, while excluding questions of production or workplace relations,” wrote McAlevey. “The centerpiece of these rules has been the radical separation in people’s consciousness, speech and activity of the politics of work from the politics of community.”

UC Berkeley Professor Lisa Garcia Bedolla, whose research addresses voter participation and organizing methodology, described relational organizing in an event at Berkeley in April 2018 as essential to undo the myriad historical abuses that have led to low civic engagement. 

On the ground application

A firm that’s using the tactic as its main approach to organizing is the Tuesday Company, a progressive campaign startup that relied on the social pressure of relations organizing to turn out the youth vote in 2018 and 2020. The company also uses the relational approach in its fundraising outreach programs. CEO Michael Luciani told Campaigns and Elections in October that internal data from the company showed “about an eight-point lift over cold outreach for GOTV” when people use relational organizing apps like Outreach Circle and VoteWithMe. 

Tuesday, Outreach Circle and Outvote have all received grants from liberal tech funder Higher Ground Labs. Founded by former staffers from the Obama administration in the wake of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Higher Ground has invested $15 million in progressive startups, and claims that over 6,000 campaigns use tools developed in part with help from the group’s largesse. 

The approach also has strong levels of support in the nonprofit sector. The Relational Organizing Institute, a project to increase the use of relational organizing in campaigns and community activism, was founded in 2018 by the Movement Cooperative, Faith in Action, Acronym and a number of other groups.

“The theory is simple: A volunteer reaching out to someone they already know is more effective than a volunteer reaching out to strangers,” Acronym wrote of relational organizing in 2018. “If you got a call from a campaign organizer asking you to vote, it would be easier for you to ignore it (assuming you even pick up the phone from an unknown number) than if your best friend texted you and asked you to vote.”