Happy April Fools Day y’all! My joke on you today is there are no links in this email that lead you to the video you are expecting 🙂
This month I’d like to focus on yet another word that is central to successful organizing:
Respect.
If you’ve ever attended a training of mine you’ve heard my mantra:
Respect The Inbox. Respect The Newsfeed.
Respect Your Community.
Respect Yourself.
The TL/DR of the Mantra
The inbox and newsfeed are two of the most valuable online real estate spaces that exist. They are the proxy for what are actually the most valuable things any of us have to offer: time and attention.
It is imperative that when we communicate with our communities — whether they are members/supporters or potential members/supporters — we share with them content they want to see and engage with. In other words, we show respect for our community by not wasting their time and attention.
When we do this we are also respecting ourselves by not wasting our own time and energy putting out content no one wants to see and engage with.
But that mantra only scratches the surface of what respect really means in the context of organizing. Respect in organizing is not just about being nice. It’s not just about tone. And it most definitely is not about whether or not people “like” us.
Respect is a power-building practice that must be exercised in everything we do.
So let’s talk about a few different ways that respect shows up in our work, and what it looks like when we fail to center respect in what we do.
Respect Means Listening Before Asking
Too often in organizing, we treat communication as a one-way street. We decide:
- what the strategy is
- what the goals are
- what the message is
- what the ask is
- what the urgency is
and then we push it out as far and wide as we can, as fast as we can.
But respect needs to predate all of this.
We have to ask our community what they care about, what they think the goals should be, what the urgency is. This allows us to align our strategy with what our community actually wants and needs. In this context, respect means taking the time to understand what our communities are worried about, what they care about, what they need from us, and what they are actually ready and able to do.
Good organizing isn’t just about getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time. It’s about building strategy rooted in real relationships instead of assumptions. If we are not listening thru conversations, replies, comments, testing, surveys and yes, one on one conversations, we aren’t strategizing. We are guessing. And guessing is not respect.
Respect Means Remembering People are Not Metrics
You know I love a good dashboard as much as the next digital strategist. Metrics matter. Testing matters. Analytics matter. But respect means that we have to remember that behind every click, reply, signature, donation etc is an actual human being.
Our supporters are not just numbers to optimize. They are people who choose to spend their time, attention, money and trust in support of the work we are asking them to be a part of. That distinction matters. When we start treating people as transactions instead of relationships, we may get more short term results (think churn and burn), but we lose the long term trust it takes to actually build long term staying power.
I started doing this work when I got frustrated watching candidates use social media as an ATM instead of as social media. As I said at my very first training, “It’s called social media for a reason. If you just want to talk at people, stop using social media and just build a better website.”
In organizing, trust is everything.
Respect Means Respecting People’s Intelligence
Jargon is a respect issue — I’ll get to that in a minute. But so is the opposite problem: dumbing things down. A lot of orgs over-simplify their messaging because they don’t trust their audience to handle complexity, nuance or bad news. That’s also a respect failure. Your community is capable of understanding that things are complicated, that wins are partial, that strategy involves tradeoffs. Treating people like they can handle the real story — not just the cleaned-up version — is one of the most powerful things you can do to build trust.
Your supporters chose this work. They chose you to do this work with. Give them credit for that.
Respect Means Clarity, Not Manipulation
There is a difference between urgency and manufactured urgency. For example, I often refer to end of month fundraising as the hallmark holiday of email strategy. While it’s true that many campaigns have end of month deadlines for reporting fundraising results, it’s not true for every campaign and it’s certainly not true for most organizations. And end of month doesn’t necessarily line up with when our supporters have money to donate.
The most successful fundraising email I’ve ever sent wasn’t sent at the end of the month — it was sent on the 1st of the month, payday. It acknowledged that for this particular organization, end of month deadlines weren’t a thing but that fact didn’t mean we didn’t have urgent work we needed to accomplish that month. We then outlined that work and at the beginning of the next month we started by updating our audience on what we accomplished the previous month.
Manufactured urgency is not a strategy, it’s disrespect.
There’s also a difference between a compelling ask and a manipulative one.
Respect means being honest about what we are asking people to do, why it matters and what is actually at stake. It means not relying on misleading subject lines, bait and switch messaging, guilt or gloom and doom as a substitute for strategy. Over time these tactics teach people not to trust us — and then when we have a legitimate need for their support, their support is nowhere to be found.
Respect Means Honoring the “No”
When someone unsubscribes, stops opening your emails, or just doesn’t take action — that’s information. It’s not a problem to engineer around with increasingly aggressive re-engagement sequences. Chasing lapsed supporters with guilt-laden subject lines and manufactured scarcity isn’t strategy. It’s the organizing equivalent of texting your ex at 2am. It might get a response, but it’s not building a relationship.
Respect means honoring opt-outs cleanly and promptly. It means looking at disengagement as feedback rather than a failure to be fixed at any cost. Sometimes people have moved on, their circumstances have changed, or they just weren’t the right fit for your community — and that’s ok. Forcing the relationship doesn’t build power. It builds resentment and spam complaints.
Respect Means Closing the Loop
One of the things I talk about in my trainings often is the importance of reporting back — what happens after the supporter has taken action.
We forget to say two of the most important words in the English language: Thank you.
Respect means reporting back on outcomes, good or bad. It means showing people what their action accomplished or, if a goal wasn’t attained, why their action didn’t accomplish said goal and what you’re going to try next. If someone gives us their time, money or trust, the least we can do is make sure they know it mattered.
Many organizations are great at the ask. Not many are good at the follow up.
If people only hear from us when we need something, we are not building community. We are extracting from our community — and extraction is the ultimate form of disrespect.
Respect Has to Exist Inside Our Work Too
Respect is not just something we owe our audience. It’s something we owe our co-workers, our organizers, our coalition partners, and ourselves.
Too many organizations build strategies rooted in dignity for their audiences while running internal cultures rooted in chaos, burnout and extraction. Respect looks like not treating staff as infinitely available at the drop of a dime. It looks like not expecting coalition partners to amplify our work but not being willing to reciprocate and amplify theirs. It looks like sharing credit and giving credit where it’s due. It’s honoring boundaries. It’s planning ahead while being flexible to the times we live in. It’s making space for disagreement without treating it like disloyalty. Respect is setting expectations and holding people accountable, including ourselves.
If we want to build a better world, the way we work together has to be rooted in respect. Otherwise, we are just reproducing the same harmful dynamics in different branding.
Respect Across Difference
This one doesn’t get talked about enough. A lot of progressive coalition dysfunction comes from a respect failure — larger or better-resourced organizations steamrolling smaller ones, majority organizations not centering the communities most affected by the issues they claim to champion, orgs dismissing tactics or communication styles that don’t match their own culture.
Respecting coalition partners means showing up to amplify their work without being asked. It means not assuming your timeline, your strategy or your theory of change is the right one just because you have more staff or a bigger list. It means centering the orgs and communities closest to the issue when it comes to strategy, messaging and credit.
Coalition work done right is one of the most powerful tools we have. Coalition work done without mutual respect is just a coordination headache with a shared logo.
Respect is Also About Access
Respect is not just a philosophy. It’s a way of doing things. Accessibility is respect in action.
If your email is unreadable on mobile, that is a respect issue.
If your video has no captions, that is a respect issue.
If your graphics are inaccessible because of a lack of alt text, that is a respect issue.
If your content is full of inside baseball jargon, that is a respect issue.
If you are always asking your community to do the same two or three tactics, that is a respect issue.
We cannot say we value people while building communication and organizing systems they cannot fully access. Accessibility is not about polishing our appearance — it’s how we demonstrate to people that we respect them.
Respect Is How We Build Trust
At the end of the day, respect in organizing is not about being nice for the sake of being nice. It’s about being accountable to the people whose trust makes our work possible. It’s about treating time and attention like the precious commodities that they are. It is about building strategy from listening instead of assumptions. It’s about refusing to confuse manipulation with genuine community building. It’s about honoring people who said yes by telling them what that yes made possible. It’s about showing up for our partners the way we ask them to show up for us. And it’s about building internal cultures worthy of the external values we claim.
Respect is a power building practice.
And in a world that is always asking people for more — more time, more money, more attention, more energy, more outrage — respect may just be the best way we can demonstrate that our organizing is actually worthy of it.