Creating an Organisation for Change

Here is avery interesting piece written in response to a small island corrupt gvernment.

IMHO in order to succeed a new political system/organisation needs the following:
Membership Management
Know who your supporters are. Once you have that information then you can 1) ask them for money, 2) communicate with them directly, 3) Ask for volunteers, 4) Take lobbying action.
Volunteer Management
If your organisation has a worthwhile reason to exist and goal then it’s not difficult to find people who are willing to devote a few hours a week to help a cause they believe in. Then use their unique skills – better yet, produce a database of people, their skills, and their availability and call on them to help you. Suddenly you end up with a staff of several hundred part-time finance professionals, graphic designers, writers, administrators, proofreaders, and coffee makers.
Donation Management
In order to fund your organisation you need to use your volunteers and your membership and contact lists to continually ask for donations, then put them to good use. The value of an $5 donation is not the money, it’s having someone buy into your mission financially and personally. They become invested and they are more likely to join your volunteer army.
CommunicationsProduce good talking points for the different levels of argumentation, from the very simple headline for the entire organisation to the bullet point breakdowns of specific policy points and spreadsheets for sophisticated readers. Directly mail your supporters and ask them to help you lobby, raise funds, or recruit new supporters.

These are the things that Obama did better than his competitors.

To effect political change it’s a matter of:

1. Developing a platform and strong identity.This same process happens in the US, where the Republicans own the brand of “individual freedoms and fiscal responsibility”. Their performance in these areas is irrelevant, it’s the branding that matters.

2. Communicating effectively.Use talking points communicating the headlines of the platform. Get everyone involved on board and publicly saying the same things about the same topics. This will both lower the constant infighting that generally plagues opposition parties, and produce an us vs. them where simple truisms of talking points make it very hard to oppose the organisation saying them because people find themselves agreeing with them.A lie repeated loudly and often enough becomes truth. In many durisdictions the ruling party invariably uses this , that’s why they repeatedly smear their opposition using the same language over and over again. No matter how crazy it would seem if said once, it becomes very effective when the whole team is up on a pulpit spouting the same rhetoric. To combat this, an organisation must shout the truth loudly, stick to places where it can be impeccable with its word, and constantly put the current corrupt political party system on its back foot by both combating their attempts to spin their record and attacking them for the things they haven’t done – which presumably would be addressed in #1.

3. Using the above two to build an army. When all voices of reason are coming from one defined source and one brand then it becomes powerful. There is more than enough wrong with the current political system to get everyone on the same page (see #1 and #2).