Organizing and mobilizing refers to efforts to engage individuals and groups in collaborative efforts, coalitions, constituency development or community building around a specific viewpoint, or to inform the public about a particular set of issues. These activities may include protests, town meetings, petitions, and public recognition campaigns. Organizing activities may lead to referenda and resolutions that the public or stakeholders should consider.

The basic premise of organizing is that more voices saying the same thing is more powerful than one voice, no matter how expert. Your organization may have great arguments and information on an issue, and you may have met with many government officials about it, but you are still one organization. If you organize and mobilize the public (or even just those affected by a policy), however, you are a powerful voice.

Organizing can be seen as a supplemental activity to the others in this section, as it multiplies your advocacy voice no matter which route you take (lobbying, commenting on regulations, etc). At the most basic level, organizing and mobilizing are used to make enough noise to be heard by government officials, whether legislators or agency officials. The last thing any official wants to do is alienate a large group of voters.

This can be done in a focused approach, or a more broad based approach. An organization might need the vote of one key legislator on an issue, in which case the most effective course of action would be to organize as many constituents as possible to contact the legislator and make their views known. A more broad-based approach might be required if more votes are needed, or to bring an issue to the attention of the legislature. This might call for one or two constituents from many districts to contact their legislator.

One thing to consider is that it doesn’t take much. Many congressional offices consider an issue “hot” if they get more than a dozen constituent letters or calls on it. State and local governments are likely to act on fewer communications.

There are other ways to mobilize the public that are not as formal as asking them to lobby policymakers (an activity many people are not comfortable with). Protests, rallies and petitions are all ways to make a group’s opinion known without any direct lobbying (although these are often used in conjunction with lobbying). In many cases, petitions may set off formal legal procedures once enough signatures are collected (usually by putting referenda on a ballot), so that a group can bring about change simply by getting enough people to commit to signing a document.

Organizing is becoming increasingly important in the face of the growing dominance of large campaign contributors, who are often seen as having disproportionate influence over the votes of legislators. While they are able to provide campaign funds, they cannot provide votes. Legislators will work with organized groups of constituents for fear of losing votes, even if their interests are in opposition to those of campaign funders.

While there are many other examples of ways to mobilize people around policy issues, they all follow a single idea; that more voices speaking in unison are better.