The Marshall Ganz playbook for progressive change

Viktor Mak
6 days ago
6 min read

Marshall Ganz is a prominent American scholar, writer, and activist best known for his work in community organizing, leadership, and civic engagement. He has played a key role in shaping the field of grassroots organizing and has significantly influenced modern social movements and political campaigns. In this post, European Center for Digital Action’s Co-Director, Viktor Mák discusses his latest book, ‘People, Power, Change’. He outlines the main concepts set out by Ganz and highlights their relevance to digital organizing.

Published by Oxford University Press, 2024.

Marshall Ganz’s new book, People, Power, Change - Organizing for Democratic Renewal, summarizes a lifetime’s work. He captures decades' worth of insights into how people-powered campaigns can be put together and scaled up for victory. It provides a basic roadmap for progressives to organize a group of people to achieve change. It’s a hands-on book, with a practical and skills-oriented focus.

Social movements and progressive organizations can be understood to work from a known repertoire of contention, as the social historian Charles Tilly defined them. Collective groups turn to tactics and strategies that are culturally and socially available to them. More concretely, if progressives march and sign protests in your country, you are likely to employ those tactics, whereas if hunger strikes and boycotts are common, you’re more likely to opt for one of these methods.

Marshall Ganz's book is significant because it expands the repertoire of contention available to progressives worldwide. His teaching expands the tools for action. But what exactly does organizing mean for Ganz, and how does it connect to other forms of activism?

Digital organizing Vs Ganz’s organizing

Digital organizing is a tried and tested tactic at ECDA. Many progressive actors have large social media followings and communicate to their supporters via these platforms. However, there are limits to what kind of engagement and campaigns progressives can run on social media. Your access to your supporters depends on the algorithm, and the apps restrict the types of actions they can take to participate. You might have a viral post with thousands of comments, likes, and shares, but the activity remains mainly on social media.

Digital organizing addresses this weakness of social media campaigning. It organizes a constituency from social media into a contactable database. From there, you can reach out to people in targeted ways, move them up a ladder of engagement, and build much larger campaigns. A handful of trained professionals can manage this community and keep them engaged and mobilized. This is the bread and butter of what we do at ECDA.

Online to offline

Marshall Ganz, who started organizing campaigns well before the internet was invented, offers a four-step approach to organizing that many progressive campaigns can benefit from even today. He focuses on telling compelling stories, building relationships, and funneling supporters into a flexible structure that can empower them to participate in the campaign.

Step 1: Tell a compelling story

Public narrative

When attempting to grab people's attention, we must tell compelling stories. Often, progressives fall into the trap of focusing on problems and making appeals to rationality. For example, “Between 2020 and 2024, the five richest men on the planet grew their combined fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion—adding roughly $14 million every single hour—while nearly five billion people became poorer over the same period.” The hope behind these statistics is that the audience will work itself into a frenzy, draw the same conclusions as the speaker, and jump to action. Yet often this falls flat. Instead of relying on scary facts, according to Ganz, we need to rely on narratives and stories that move emotions. Ganz outlines the three basic pillars of the public narrative.

The story of self, the story of us and the story of now

Instead of focusing on facts and trying to motivate people from a rational perspective, Ganz outlines the public narrative framework. Introduce yourself to the audience and tell an emotion-based story of how you were called to leadership. Present a challenge you faced, a choice you made, and the results of the choice. My high school guidance counselor called this framework the CAR model (context, action, result). You want to demonstrate values, not explain them. Show how you faced hardship, chose to have agency and chose to act about it, and what the outcome was and what you learned. This demonstrates your credibility to your audience, making you relatable and motivating. If you could face adversity, perhaps we can too.

Once you have credibility with the audience, you must explain the story of now: why a situation calls for urgent action, and why now is the time to act. Outline the risk of inaction and why no delay is possible. Finally, once the audience understands why now is the time to act, and who is calling them to act, you must establish a story of us. Your story must weave together the audience into an imagined community. People want to transcend their lives and daily struggles, and to be a part of a larger community that stands for values they share—justice, fairness, equality, dignity, and love. Make it clear that by participating in the campaign and taking action, listeners can join such a community.

Here you can find an example of the public narrative.

Step 2: Leverage the enthusiasm and momentum to build relationships and identify leaders

Relationship

Organizing campaigns depend on relationships and must be embedded in the constituency demanding the change. Too often, groups or leaders gain power and influence without having real and authentic connections to the constituency they represent. They get this power through charisma in the media, or through grants, or connections to elites. There is nothing inherently wrong with campaigns that are disconnected from the constituency. They can still mobilize many people and win change, but they are not organizing campaigns, which derive their power from the aggregation of the resources of the constituency.

So once you have a public narrative that is powerful and resonates, your job is to find leaders who will carry the campaign with you. Ganz outlines a snowball method of mapping a constituency, conducting dozens of conversations and identifying the people who will be the backbone of your campaign—your leadership team.

One-on-one conversations are how to start mapping the community. These are short, structured conversations to build public relationships. Public relationships are goal-oriented, and the organizer and the constituency enter into them with a goal: the campaign's victory. Ganz outlines a tried-and-tested method of capturing their attention, stating your goals, exchanging information and stories, and making a commitment to future action.

The goal is to identify supporters who can take on tasks, who are well-connected, and who will help recruit the resources of your constituency to your campaign. Your goal as an organizer is always to find people with potential and help them develop it.

Step 3: Build a structure and a culture that can empower

Once you have a handful of people who are motivated by the campaign, connected to the community, and have the skills required, it's time to put them in a structure. Ganz defines leadership as accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve a shared purpose in the face of uncertainty. So the structure you’re aiming to build is not one where you are at the center, giving instructions, asking for updates, and devising big plans. It’s a snowflake model, where you’re enabling others to take responsibility and ownership of tasks, projects, and campaigns. Like snowflakes, it's a model that spreads outwards, with new leaders setting up their own one-on-ones and their own leadership teams.

The aim is to encourage people up a ladder of engagement, and to help them unlock skills and abilities they never had before. The structure should allow people to knock on doors, to train volunteers, to give interviews, to deliver petition signatures, to organize small protests—whatever the campaign requires.

Overall, the book's achievement is that it distills a lifetime of organizing experience into a practical guide that is relevant to campaigners in every context and any location. For anyone who wants to grasp the underlying principles that determine how momentum can be converted into an organized, structured campaign that delivers results—this book is a great place to start.