What You’ll Learn
- How relationships and social pressure impact individual behavior
- How to prepare supporters to assess, engage, and mobilize their personal networks
- How relational organizing tactics can be used to supplement a traditional Field program
- How to design and manage an ongoing relational organizing program
Why This is Important
Whether you’re ushering a local party through multiple building and election phases, or just someone who wants to see their community more politically engaged and equitably represented, relational organizing is a strategy that can produce real, lasting results for progressive candidates and causes. Relational organizing is a relatively easy strategy to understand, but maximizing its impact takes systemic thinking and long-term effort.
Key Resources
- NDTC Relational Organizing Toolkit
- Volunteer Training and Relational Organizing Manager
- Personal Network Mapping Template
- Friends and Family Contact Tracker
- Relational Organizing Supporter Conversation Guide
Related Trainings
- Intro to Volunteer Recruitment and Management — Learn how to recruit and develop your campaign’s volunteer infrastructure
- Field Tactics — Learn how to train and manage your canvassing and phone banking efforts, which will be key during GOTV
- GOTV — Learn the basics of a targeted and effective Get Out the Vote (GOTV) strategy
Allyson Raines
Trainer
Allyson joined NDTC in 2019 after eight years with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. In her most recent role as a Regional Campaign Director, she transformed the PPAF electoral model to drastically expand the role of grassroots members by deeply training and coaching operatives to cultivate leaders in every aspect of campaigns. She believes that organizing and electoral campaigns are transformational experiences and focuses her work on developing staff who center that approach. Allyson has managed electoral campaigns on a county and statewide level in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio. She started her career as a professional organizer in Detroit, MI with the Harriet Tubman Center for Community Organizing. Allyson holds a BA in Sociology focused on Gender and Sexuality and Civic Engagement from the University of Michigan. She lives in Chicago with her family Michael, Emmett, and Elliot and their loving pup Reggie.