In our Feb. 24 Lab, we’re working with the CAA Foundation to figure out how to build a movement of parents for education reform. As we tackle the challenge, what can we learn from contemporary social movements and the tools they have used to effect change?

To educate us on the subject, we spoke with Jeremy Heimans, co-founder and CEO of Purpose, an incubator for technology-driven social movements. Heimans was the mind behind GetUp.org, a political movement in Australia, as well as Avaaz.org, a movement to enable “people-powered politics” worldwide. Labs Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson spoke with him about the use and abuse of technology in today’s struggles for change. Their conversation follows:

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: When you look at the past decade or so, what would you say are the main effects that technology has had on organizing social movements?

Jeremy Heimans: The most important change is that technology has made it dramatically easier for people to begin social movements. Before the Internet, to initiate a social movement you usually needed to have access to some large, existing social infrastructure. You either needed someone with a big megaphone – access to mass media – or something like the network of black churches that was accessed by the civil rights movement. But today, you can create a new aggregation of people much more quickly than was previously possible.

When I started the group called GetUp! in Australia, it was really about getting together large numbers of people who felt left out of the existing system. I didn’t have any kind of megaphone or outside infrastructure. But we created a group that quickly became one of the largest political groups in Australia and aggregated about one in 20 Australian adults. That’s an example of something I clearly couldn’t have done 40 years earlier. By lowering the barriers to movement creation, you can take advantage of a large amount of distributed, individual power that otherwise would have been hard to coalesce.

This isn’t to say that you couldn’t organize people before the Internet. There were many multi-million people movements. It’s just that the velocity and the scale of the work you can do now is much greater.

ABN: If you look at where this trend has come so far and where it’s heading, do you think all we’re seeing is a quantitative change of movements getting bigger and faster? Or do you think there are also qualitative changes?

JH: We’re already seeing qualitatively different outcomes. Because it’s so much easier to organize, membership and affiliation is looser. Whereas people used to be strongly connected to a few organizations, they are now more loosely connected to many different things. That has an impact on the intensity of the engagement you’re going to get out of people. At the same time, you can more easily move people up a curve of engagement than you could before. Someone who starts by signing an online petition can graduate into a community group leader.

There is also less of an emphasis on individual, charismatic leadership. That’s not to say that there are no charismatic leaders. But the movements that are emerging today are relatively leaderless compared to movements of the past. There is a sort of authenticity that comes with that.

Twenty years ago, there was more of an emphasis on the effectiveness of your political communication, its frame, its polish, etc. That stuff is still very important, but because of the way memes can just start up now, there is more of an emphasis placed on authenticity and openness. Those are now more of a measure of whether a movement is likely to take off or not. That’s a difference you could see compared to the 90s, for example.

ABN: What would you say are the biggest misconceptions currently out there about the role of technology in social movements?

JH: Clearly people get obsessed with the tools. They think that it’s Facebook or Twitter that is driving all this change, when really those are just platforms. Different platforms will go in and out of fashion, and different ones will scale. 

Technology has also not changed the need for a smart organizing strategy and for certain forms of strategic leadership. People may think these new movements have absolutely no strategy and are completely decentralized. But most effective social movements combine very hierarchical clear role definition with a degree of self-organization. Obama’s campaign in 2008 was a good example of an organization run with military discipline and clarity combined with a very high degree of technology-powered self-organization. Usually people jump to one extreme or the other.

Another misconception is that all this activity is just people clicking, that it’s all shallow and doesn’t amount to anything. Those people haven’t really seen how politicizing people works. They don’t understand that the entry point for engagement is not the endpoint. Making that entry point lower and easier is actually really important for the maths of this kind of work. It allows you to scale in a really different way.

ABN: I think you can see a lot of what you say in the Occupy movement. I read an article over the weekend about what some of them are up to now – they’re talking about things like occupying foreclosed homes. And I was thinking, that’s really different from all of those people who re-posted pictures of protesters getting pepper sprayed on Facebook and tagged them as “Occupy.” I’m not sure which one is really the “essence” of the movement… the number of people who would actually go do something like squat in a foreclosed home is surely much smaller than the Facebook group.

JH: Those guys understand that. There are people who are thinking about what the next moves are. There are people who are all along what we would call “the commitment curve.” There are people at the top figuring out the most iconic, theatrical moves that only the most committed people would do. There is also room for people whose engagement is more shallow. But they are still really important to the movement – it’s the way they play together that really gives strength and scale to something like this.

ABN: So in this Lab we’re interested in the question of organizing parents into a movement for education reform. Think for a moment about target population. Let’s say the only move you could make was some sort of technological change. What would your strategy be?

JH: I’m not sure you would silo out technology in quite that way. It’s never the technology itself. You’re just using old organizing principles with new tools. I’d say the first question is how you organize people. Do you want to do it on the national level? Do you want to get a whole bunch of parents loosely organized first? You could use technology to get a whole bunch of people to sign up. Or would you want a highly localized strategy from the beginning?

These are pretty foundational questions. And they’re pretty tricky when it comes to the education topic, because it’s such a state-based and local-based issue. It’s quite hard to get policy changed at the national level. On the other hand, you get powerful network effects when you organize nationally or globally. It becomes more likely that people will forward certain actions to friends and family across certain criteria.

There is an interesting set of tradeoffs. If you organize people too loosely, it makes it too generic to get a lot of people involved. If you organize people entirely around the issue of one policy in one state that needs to change now, you might get too wonky for people to engage with.

Another problem is that any time you only try to organize certain classes of people, like parents, you’re restricted the network effects of allowing something to spread easily and quickly and virally. You may want to think about a way of getting non-parents involved simply as a way to get more parents.

ABN: That makes sense. I mean, I’m the oldest child in my family. While I was in college, my younger siblings were still in middle school and high school. If this were the 60s and I became a student radical, my parents would probably only know about it if I got in trouble. But now if I became an activist in some sort of education reform movement, I would probably talk about it on Facebook and it would bleed over into their world.

JH: That’s right. Sometimes people make the mistake of narrowing their strategy because of the audience and miss a lot of opportunity in the process.

ABN: So if you think of parents as a group we’re trying to build a social movement out of, what do you see as the assets and liabilities?

JH: Parents would have a big demographic bulge based on time. You would tend to get a lot of mums who would either not be working or only working part-time; the movement would likely skew female. You might think about there they are tech-wise during the day – are they spending more time on Facebook and less on Twitter, for example? Are they likely to be as politicized? No. So you might think about how to get people in through existing social relationships, like mums’ groups. All over the country there are groups of mums that meet, often with their young children. That might be a great place to go where there are established relationships and social capital ready to be deployed.

ABN: One of the things that interests me about this challenge is how to get parents to move from thinking about their own kids’ education to the education of all kids. That strikes me as a “consciousness-raising” problem. Would you agree? What do you think is a way of increasing that kind of awareness?

JH: This is a great question. Content-based strategies are usually of limited effectiveness. They’re overrated. It’s much more important that content or information be embedded in an existing relationship structure or some sort of action that people can take so you can begin to mediate a new relationship. When there’s already a group that works, whether it’s the school board or the mum’s group, that’s where you go to do the awareness-raising. Then one mum will say to another mum’s friend, “Hey, you should come with me to go do this.”

But too many people think that you just need to run an awareness campaign. It’s usually not information you should provide to people – it’s usually actions that build upon actions. Information is important, but it has to be contextualized in that framework.

ABN: We’re putting together a group of thinkers from many different fields to try to come up with a novel idea in this area. But you’ve been working on these kids of problems for many years. What’s might be an idea that we might come up with and think is really original, but that you would find to be a disappointment or something you hear all the time?

JH: My greatest concern would be that you’ll get the level of abstraction wrong. People may say that they need a movement of parents around education reform. It may work well at the general level, but  you may not have the expertise in the room to say what will be hard, why it is hard, how you actually operationalize one of these movements. You don’t want to just have an amateurs’ conversation.

ABN: Well, what’s the big mistake the amateurs usually make?

JH: Stuff like awareness campaigns.

It’s really the lack of a clear theory of change. How does social change happen? What are the steps and the process? If you don’t have a clear understanding of that, you’re not going to get the right level of analysis.