Our Long-Term Vision
Building a More Empowered Social Change Sector
The social change organizing sector is largely comprised of passionate people working hard to better our communities, our institutions, and our society at large. In a world rife with systemic problems, organizers work diligently to respond to these challenges in effective ways.
Organizers rely on many different tools to support their work, and the Web has emerged as one of the most promising vehicles for supporting their efforts to create lasting, substantial change.
Many inspiring examples of organizing efforts that utilize online tools have emerged over the past five years, and the potential for this medium remains largely untapped. As a movement, our current challenge rests in responding to this potential and organizers’ growing enthusiasm with intelligent ways to leverage our limited resources for maximum collective impact.
Maximum impact requires a proactive shift towards technology that empowers the sector by improving the experience and efficiency of social change organizers who struggle with poorly integrated and supported tools. Empowerment demands that we put targeted information within reach of organizers, encourage community-driven software development, and strengthen essential training networks.
Historically, the enthusiasm and agility of the social change sector has enabled it to make tremendous progress with minimal infrastructure. We now have an opportunity to harness an optimized organizing infrastructure - current online tools enable organizations to build a stronger base, expand networks, raise funds, respond faster to crisis, manage events, make project coordination more collaborative, and encourage grassroots participation.
As constant advances in technology motivate and surprise us, the question becomes less about the limits of technology itself, but rather how we choose to use it, and how we make it a more accessible tool for organizers.
In order to harness the potential of new and emerging technologies, organizers need access to a comprehensive base of knowledge and resources. In contributing to this capacity-building effort, dotOrganize aims to accomplish actionable short-term goals while fostering a long-term vision of a strong social change sector.
This report compiles insights from more than 400 social change groups, technology providers, and nonprofit technology capacity builders, examining the needs of organizers working to utilize new technologies, and offering recommendations for how to meet those needs more effectively.
