It's time to celebrate! Then we're getting back to organizing

Kristyn Arrighi on November 3, 2026

It’s election season – with exciting wins in Brazil and Serbia, a Democratic wave in the US midterms, and elections in New Zealand later this week, many of our organizations have been highly focused on mobilizing voters. While we await the final counts, here at ControlShift, we’re also thinking: what’s next?

Regardless of where they’re happening, elections are always huge mobilization moments with new and less-engaged supporters entering the fray. Your existing supporters get an additional jolt of organizing energy as they countdown to election day. The challenge for organizers is what comes next. How do you keep your supporters engaged when the immediacy of an election is over? How do you turn that surge of participation into a lasting movement?

#BlackLivesMatter protest in Stockholm, Sweden by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash

Even for those who are not currently in election mode, planning how to organize beyond the conclusion of a major organizing moment or campaign milestone is important.

So how do we build a sustainable movement long term? Through supporter-led grassroots organizing. Here are some best practices to keep in mind as you look to the future. (With some notes about how ControlShift can help.)

1. Movements are about relationships, not just lists of supporters

Most organizations care about tracking metrics over time, and some of the easiest numbers are things like total members to list, total number of texts sent, signatures collected, etc. Those metrics are important and can be useful, but the real power of a movement is in the relationships that are built – both between the organization and its supporters and amongst the supporters themselves. Those relationships create the trust and resilience that a movement needs to be sustainable in the long term.

The best ways to build those relationships will depend on the specific context and issues that your organization is working on, but we have some evergreen suggestions:

Use regular storytelling to show how supporters have helped to guide your organization’s work, contributed to your priorities and decision making, etc. Being a cheerleader for your supporters builds trust and keeps everyone engaged in your work.
Be clear and direct in communications, including sharing your organization’s broader strategic plan, communicating current challenges, and being clear about losses or things that have gone wrong.
Provide opportunities for supporters to ask questions directly of your team or share feedback on the work that you’re doing. Smaller cohort calls or in-person events with your team can be a nice way to build these relationships and engage with your supporters directly.
If your staff capacity allows, set up 1-1 meetings and/or personally reach out to leaders to offer strategic guidance or answer their questions.
Whenever possible, provide tools and opportunities for supporters to connect and build relationships without your organization at the center. The best grassroots organizing happens when your supporters can directly connect with each other to share learnings, challenges, and opportunities.

How ControlShift can help: ControlShift’s petitions, events, and local groups tools are built for grassroots organizing. Each tool provides different ways for your supporters to get involved with the work your organization is doing and to find other supporters in their community.

2. Create a consistent rhythm of actions

Movements aren’t sustainable if they have only occasional bursts of energy. (This is why we’re writing this blog post!) If you’re only calling on your supporters to take meaningful action occasionally, or only asking for their involvement when you need them to do something for you, they’re not going to stay connected with you between major campaign moments. They’ll likely also be more difficult to engage when the next big opportunity arises.

This doesn’t mean asking individual supporters to do more all the time. An ongoing organizing program should be prepared for supporters’ availability to change. Instead the goal is to build a regular schedule of (meaningful!) opportunities (events, campaigns, office visits, etc.) to take action, so that supporters are easily able to get involved as their schedule allows and their participation can become a habit. Regularly reporting back about those actions also allows supporters who aren’t able to join to feel connected and aware of the ongoing organizing.

3. Many leaders lightens the work

A movement’s strength depends on more than just the number of people on its supporter list. Strong movements need those supporters to be empowered to act as leaders: with the opportunities, skills, and confidence to bring others into the movement.

Leadership development is admittedly a not insignificant task, but whenever possible it should be an ongoing part of your organizing that’s available for all supporters, not just the small group of your most experienced volunteers. Ideally, your organization will be constantly looking for new leaders, both by providing easy ways for supporters to step up and also by actively recruiting supporters to become leaders (even if they’re not yet confident enough to volunteer on their own).

A few tips to build your leaders:

Make it easy to find and join opportunities: The easier to get started the better, even if it means that some people who sign up won’t follow through. Keep in mind the various responsibilities your supporters have and try to reduce barriers where possible. This could include things like hybrid events so people with less mobility are able to call in from home, offering childcare for in-person actions, providing transportation, ensuring that all key materials are available in multiple languages, etc.
Plan for different levels of leadership: This doesn’t need to be a traditional ‘ladder of engagement’ where people can only take the next leadership step after already completing a smaller task. While some supporters may move through leadership opportunities in a linear manner, it’s more helpful to allow supporters to choose the opportunities that they’re interested in at the moment. Supporting different levels of leadership also means providing smaller, shorter tasks for those with more limited time and capacity.
Provide training and support: Kick off calls, organizing toolkits, and strategy sessions can help new leaders to feel well supported by the organization. Written materials allow leaders to engage with information whenever is best for them, but consider having online meetings too. Putting faces to names is invaluable for both staff and supporters. Outside of campaign-specific information, you can also offer more targeted trainings around effective facilitation, communications/media training, and broader campaign planning.
Facilitate peer learning: Providing space for leaders to share their experiences with one another can help generate new ideas and also makes it easier to scale your leadership program.
Give people real authority: The best supporter-led movements aren’t just delegating simple, defined tasks. Instead they trust their leaders to make real decisions, own their organizing, and truly shape the work.

How ControlShift can help: ControlShift’s Efforts feature makes it easy to take a national campaign and break it down into local petitions, targeting local decision makers, and run by local organizers. Our Calendars feature supports days of action and makes it easy for supporters to become hosts.

4. Go Local

Many organizations are working on national issues or have a national sphere of influence. But even for national issues, movement building needs to happen on the ground locally.

This organizing can look different in different contexts, depending on the organization and the issue, but every organization can provide space for their supporters to organize around the ways that the issues are affecting them in their communities.

For the organization, these local supporters can also serve as eyes and ears on the ground – helping organizations understand what’s happening in their communities and raising specific opportunities to get involved. Supporters can also provide the organization with new, community-informed ways to speak about the issue. This community-specific context can be integral to pushing a movement forward.

Hyperlocal organizing can be difficult to manage at scale, but it’s easier when you’re able to rely on the local supporters you’ve been empowering to lead in their own communities.

To support local organizing effectively:

Start with local priorities: Allow local supporters to identify the specific issues that matter in their communities, even when those priorities differ from the organization’s immediate campaign focus.
Build on existing networks: We know that people are more likely to participate when they’re asked by a friend, so empower existing supporters to invite others into the movement. Depending on your issue or the communities you’re organizing, it may be useful to provide sample scripts for people talking to different audiences, like family vs. coworkers vs. fellow parents, etc.
Make it easy to get connected: Provide simple guidance and clear ways to find other people who want to organize. Remember to also make it easy for local leaders to report back, share concerns, etc. Many organizations will make it easy for a supporter to get started organizing in their community, but communicating back to the organization is harder.
Don’t be prescriptive: Shared goals and basic expectations are important, but the joy (and good chaos!) of local organizing happens when local groups and leaders can decide for themselves how best to organize and what sorts of actions they want to take in their own communities.

How ControlShift can help: As already mentioned, ControlShift’s Efforts feature makes it easy to take a national campaign and break it down into local petitions, which are run semi-autonomously by local organizers. This can be an easy way to find local leaders and connect them to supporters in their communities. Our local groups feature makes it simple to provide for deeper organizing. Supporters can easily find or start a new local supporters’ group in their area, with tools to connect and discuss issues, run local petitions, and host local events.

People are more likely to remain engaged when they can see that their time and opinions are valued. In movement building, that means going beyond asking supporters to complete simple predefined tasks and instead giving them opportunities to help identify issues, shape responses and strategies, and have ownership over the work

Of course not every decision needs to, or should be, made by committee, and not every supporter is going to want to be highly involved. But supporters who feel that they’re only being asked to contribute time or money without being able to influence decisions may become disillusioned.

Some easy ways to engage supporters:

Ongoing surveys: Surveys are perhaps the easiest way to see what your supporters care about and how many are interested in leading that work. (And importantly, a majority ‘not interested’ response doesn’t necessarily mean that your organization needs to stop work on something that you think is important, but it can mean that it’s time to rethink your messaging and work to bring your supporters on side.)
Allow immediate supporter-led actions: Providing tools for supporters to start and run petitions, host events, etc. is an easy way to scale your movement and get supporters immediately involved in a campaign’s direction and messaging.
Report back: After consulting with supporters, share how the feedback you received actually influenced your organization’s next steps.

How ControlShift can help: ControlShift’s supporter-led petitions can be a great way to get people engaged. Organizations can use supporter-led campaigns as a way to see what their supporters care most about, test different messages and approaches to the same issue, or be the next call to action someone sees after providing an ‘I care about this issue’ survey response.

6. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

The best and most powerful movements are constantly adapting to new information. Organizations need to understand not just how many people participated in a specific action, but whether that work is considered meaningful by supporters and whether it’s actually moving you toward your broader goals.

There are metrics that can be used to see how meaningful supporters see their activities. If you’re not already, consider tracking things like: how many people are taking repeat actions, how many people are moving from easier ways of getting involved to opportunities that require more capacity and leadership, how many new supporters are being directly recruited by your supporters, etc.

Beyond the numbers though, constantly soliciting feedback from your supporters is vital to building a sustained movement. Integrating ongoing feedback about training and other support materials keeps your information fresh and makes it easier to train future leaders. Asking attendees to provide feedback about supporter-led events can allow you to identify your most effective hosts and spot training gaps or personality issues sooner. Regular 1-1 or small group check-ins with local leaders ensures that you’re able to address concerns more quickly, even if the leader wouldn’t have proactively reached out on their own.

7. Build coalitions

Organizations can sometimes feel very protective of their place in a movement and want to guard their role. It’s understandable, but there are also only so many hours in a day and no organization can fight every battle or address every issue on its own. Building a sustainable and successful movement requires collaborating with other organizations.

Coalition-building means being able to combine resources, reach and activate new supporters, coordinate larger actions, and demonstrate broader public support. Depending on the movement, it can also create new connections between issues that might otherwise be seen as separate.

When building out a coalition, keep in mind:

Start with the shared big picture: Coalition partners don’t need to agree on every detail or use all of the same tactics, you just need to be aligned on the main issue.
Understand and celebrate each partner’s contribution: Different organizations have different skills, capabilities, and challenges. Figure out what each partner in the coalition can bring to the table, whether things like community relationships, subject and/or technical expertise, staff capacity, organizing experience, or access to decision-makers.
Assign roles: Decide what the decision-making process will be (and when full coalition agreement is needed) and who’s responsible for what.
Invest in relationships now: Don’t wait until the next urgent mobilization to connect with your coalition partners. Keep building the relationships between organizations during campaign downtimes.
Make space for smaller groups: The best coalitions should make space for organizations with fewer resources too, not simply amplify the voices of the largest orgs.

How ControlShift can help: ControlShift’s partner tools can help you manage your coalition, while granting access to petitions, events, and email tools.

Powering a movement

With so much energy in recent elections, we’re hoping to see that electoral energy turned into long-term, sustainable grassroots organizing. Building and supporting a grassroots movement takes time – building relationships, training leaders, and getting local isn’t easy. The work is usually less flashy and immediate than an electoral campaign, but the work is also worthwhile. It’s how we build lasting power.

ControlShift believes that the movements we power and the fights we need to win are only possible if we focus on the grassroots and empower regular people in their communities. If you’re interested in bringing that ethos and ControlShift’s tools to your organization, get in touch – we’d love to chat.

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