Blueprints for Change is an open library of advocacy how-to’s put together by campaign innovators in order to help progressive organizers and groups up their game more quickly.

Disinformation (the intentional spread of false and misleading information) and misinformation (the unintentional spread of false information) are not new phenomena. What is new is the ability to rapidly create, disseminate, and consume false and misleading content on a global scale via an interconnected digital media landscape. The hostile actors (e.g., the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency) who create disinformation campaigns rely on provocative, divisive, and/or disturbing content to get our attention in an immensely crowded digital media landscape. The goal is to evoke emotion. Emotions like anger, jealousy, and fear drive content resharing on social media platforms. 

WhatsApp is a mobile application used for one-to-one, group, or broadcast messaging. It is free, encrypted end-to-end, and is one of the most widely used mobile apps in the world, with over 4.93 billion active users in 2018. In advocacy and movement building, WhatsApp can be used for communication between campaigners, a platform for supporter community building, a way to activate distributed networks and a channel for crowdsourced knowledge. 

While Facebook has come under a lot of criticism lately for its leaking of user data and its complicity in right-wing voter persuasion, dissemination of fake news… and the list goes on… it remains a social network that large segments of the population use daily and therefore cannot be dismissed as an organizing tool. For groups needing to reach out and build their base and mobilize people to come out to events, Facebook remains an important part of an organizer’s toolkit. Given that the conventional ways that organizations have used Facebook to reach out (through a Facebook Page), are generating diminishing reach (since Facebook changed its algorithm), it’s important to explore how groups are making tactical use of the network through the platform’s Groups option.

As digital group-work tools make it easier to coordinate teams at a distance, campaigns that access them can now scale rapidly and build collective impact through distributed organizing (see our guide on this for more). One of the challenges of this kind of organizing is that the lack of face time and direct human contact can lead to engagement and morale drop off. Several groups that have sparked remote teams and chapters have now developed ways to support these groups at a distance and maintain a sense of purpose and togetherness with their supporters no matter where they are.