Abstract
Using first-hand experience supplemented by an open-access archive, this article examines case examples of civically engaged, public-facing technical communication (e.g., training for community organizers) as well as the value of stories and storytelling for content strategy. By developing 10 best practices for content strategy in advocacy organizations, this article offers suggestions for how to design and sustain content strategy for community organizers and contributes to the field's knowledge of the content strategy of politically engaged nonprofits, particularly those with a strong digital presence.
Keywords
Content strategy, both as an academic discipline and an industry practice, has its roots in the desire to organize people, practices, pedagogies, processes, and policies (Stone & Moore, 2021) into a cohesive, agile structure. The content of content strategy varies based on the company, organization, or community's communication needs with an emphasis on planning and strategizing (Getto et al., 2020) for the “creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content” (Halvorson, 2008). For nonprofits, specifically advocacy organizations, the business of content development, strategy, and governance is a little more complicated. Because advocacy organizations engage in political activism and a multitude of social justice issues, their content and content strategies are often focused on holistic policy training, strategic process design, leadership development, or building coalitions and organizing capacity (i.e., raising money). While nonprofit content strategy has been studied by some technical communicators (Dush et al., 2016; Flanagan & Getto, 2017; Grabill, 2007; Halvorson & Rach, 2012; Jones, 2014), there is scant research on how advocacy nonprofits strategize, plan, create, maintain, and audit (Casey, 2015) 1 their content to meet their ever-shifting goals. To begin to understand this alternative space for the study and implementation of content strategy, this case example considers Organizing for Action's (OFA) static content repository and its associated content strategy for sharing training materials and organizers’ stories. As a case example of first-hand experience supplemented by an open-access archive licensed under Creative Commons, this article provides an overview of OFA's content life cycle and contributes to the field's knowledge of the content strategy of politically engaged nonprofits, particularly those with a strong digital presence. While the results of this case example are not generalizable, it offers a detailed examination of civically engaged, public-facing technical communication (e.g., trainings for community organizers) as well as the value of stories and storytelling for content strategy. By developing some best practices for content strategy in advocacy organizations, this article answers Getto et al.'s (2020) call for “working within existing organizational paradigms to create literature on content strategy that spans the industry-academia gap” (p. 27).
In this article, I consider how and when advocacy organizations should examine the organizational content strategy of OFA, a large, now-defunct advocacy organization that was responsible for protecting the Affordable Care Act and winning important victories for the Democratic party in the 2018 midterm elections (Hogan, 2019). Since advocacy nonprofits (504c4) often ebb and flow with political exigence (and sometimes a particular candidate), they are historically not very sustainable. Because the longevity of advocacy organizations is often uncertain, planning for a possible dissolution seems like a first step in a sustainable content strategy. Advocacy organizations, like OFA, are extremely mutable, changing names, moving under different umbrellas, acquiring new funding sources, and so forth. This article offers suggestions for how to design and sustain content strategy for community organizers through a retrospective look at OFA's static content repository in four sections:
Advocacy Organization Overview: A brief overview of advocacy organization alongside a review of OFA's history and impact. Content Strategy or Strategic Content?: A discussion of the fluctuations in OFA's content life cycle based on the status of the organization itself. Training Archive as Static Content Repository: A few best practices for developing sustainable content strategy in advocacy organizations. Personal Reflection and Future Research: A thoughtful reflection on my own interactions with OFA's content and suggestions for future research on the content strategy of operational advocacy organizations.
While this article is a retrospective analysis of a personal experience, it also offers an organic model of how unpredictably dynamic advocacy organizations really are. If academic researchers, industry practitioners, and community organizers consider OFA's content ecosystem as a case example, it could enable better succession planning and asset mapping from a content perspective.
Advocacy Organization Overview
Between the 1960s and 2000s, large advocacy organizations (e.g., Organizing for Action) and professionally managed social movements (e.g., Women's March) have begun to overtake American civic involvement through coordinated and sponsored events or educational programs that seek to transform the participatory duties of citizens into paid occupations. According to Theda Skocpol's (2013) book, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, these large advocacy organizations have grown by the hundreds in the United States, serving progressive and conservative causes alike, and have led to a largely “less participatory and more oligarchically managed civic world” (p. 13). As a professionalized approach to community organizing, advocacy organizations operate under the 501(c)4 United States tax code designation as social welfare organizations that spend less than 50% of their budgets on politics and are not required to disclose their donors (Sullivan, 2013). Activities that were formerly considered to be volunteer work or civic engagement are now “dominated by professionally managed advocacy groups” in which paid employees deliver services and provide resources to their affiliated volunteers (Skocpol, 2013, p. 7). Because of the complicated and convoluted tax rules for 501(c)4 organizations, their services and resources usually take the form of public-facing events or freely available trainings about various aspects of civic life (e.g., registering to vote or contacting an elected representative) or indirectly political activities (e.g., training volunteers to canvas for particular issues like health care access). With large, undisclosed donor bases and fully staffed offices, large advocacy organizations serve an important (albeit sometimes invisible) role in issue advocacy and policy change work, both locally and nationally, and in some cases, transnationally (Nish, 2022).
Organizing for Action (OFA), a longstanding and influential advocacy organization that was operational from January 2013 to March 2019, worked to “help create a more accessible and participatory democracy” with three core values: respect, empower, include (Hogan, 2019). Their paid staff held over 30,000 organizing events across all 50 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.) and trained over 62,000 unpaid organizers to engage in issue-based community organizing through the use of strategic storytelling (Hogan, 2019). Using Ganz's (2010, pp. 541–544) three-part public narrative framework (story of self, story of us, story of now), the organization asked its organizers to share their personal stories as a coordinated means of gaining influence and visibility as a 504(c)4 on publicly accessible platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This case example compares OFA's content strategy for organizer stories and policy trainings to Casey's (2015) content strategy life cycle and works to understand how personal stories function as user content in community organizations as an organization-wide strategy and a content life cycle (Rockley et al., 2015) that supports story-based content strategy for publicly accessible digital spaces.
OFA announced its dissolution in December 2018 and officially merged with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee in March 2019. From March 2019 to December 2019, their trainings and resources were unavailable on the web because they were working to create an open-access archive—what I am calling a static content repository in this article. In December 2019, the organization launched its static content repository for all previous staff and volunteers to use for their organizing events and trainings, but with no plan for how it might be maintained or audited over time. Instead, the static content repository seems more like a mausoleum where each training was memorialized and archived with a carefully written epitaph to help community organizers remember what they once used it for. To differentiate between OFA's content strategy when it was operational versus after its dissolution in March 2019, this section is organized into two parts: a before and an after. While the formal content strategy of the organization—as it is recorded in their training manual—has not changed, its implementation by community organizing groups around the United States has shifted in response to the absence of the OFA headquarters and its paid staff who planned live training sessions and communicated with distributed chapters in all 50 states.
How the Organization Functioned from 2013 to 2019
When it was functioning as an advocacy organization, OFA organized its people, practices, and technologies around the Snowflake Model for community organizing. Made famous by Marshall Ganz (Mills, 2016) and the 2008 Obama Campaign, the originator of the OFA acronym that shifted over time (Obama for America → Organizing for America → Organizing for Action), the Snowflake Model emphasizes leadership development and clearly delineated roles for paid staff and volunteer organizers. While the language of the organization favored more democratic terms like “grassroots” or “community-based,” the organization's hierarchy and organizational structure centered around sharing organizing knowledge through centralized digital content, as evidenced in Figure 1.
OFA's whole snowflake structure from January 2013 to March 2019.
Figure 1 offers a visualization of OFA's organizational structure from January 2013 to March 2019. Local community organizer chapters in specific communities across the United States worked together with the OFA Headquarters to deliver in-person trainings and organizing resources that met a specific community or political need. Live events included collaborations with other like-minded nonprofit organizations such as Planned Parenthood for trainings like “Power of Pink: Motivational Interviewing,” which focused on the “motivational interviewing framework and applying it to conversations with family, friends, and neighbors” (Organizing for Action, 2019a, 2019b, para. 4). Organizing resources contextualized trainings centered on knowledge and place-based content strategy, such as “Effective Conversations,” which focused on giving OFA “participants a foundational introduction to effective conversations” including “effective listening, communicating your values, knowing your ‘why’, developing a theory of change” (Organizing for Action, 2019b).
How the Organization Functioned After 2019
Just after a very successful 2018 midterm election cycle, OFA announced its plans for dissolution and an eventual merger with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee in March 2019. From March 2019 to December 2019, affiliated staff and organizers did not have access to OFA's trainings and resources. Instead, local community organizer chapters in specific communities across the United States worked together to share resources while they waited for access to OFA's trainings to be restored, as evidenced in Figure 2.
OFA's fractured snowflake structure from March 2019 to December 2019.
Figure 2 offers a visualization of how the OFA Headquarters staff and leadership likely imagined their volunteers’ organizing structure to be during this time. In reality, though, OFA's volunteer organizers were self-organizing and creating new content repositories and content strategies on their own while they waited for OFA to create their open-access archive, as evidenced in Figure 3.
OFA's redistributed snowflake structure without archive from December 2019 to present.
Figure 3 demonstrates the authentic organizing structure of OFA chapters while they waited for the static content repository and reassembled themselves as a network of organizers with distributed agency and shared resources. Local community organizer chapters in specific communities across the United States worked together to share existing content within their own community-based, static content repositories represented by the dotted line circles.
Once OFA was able to strategize, plan, and create its static content repository, it was released in December 2019. OFA affiliates were encouraged to use its content to continue advancing progressive issues and creating a more participatory and accessible democracy. OFA hoped this static content repository would reassemble their Snowflake organizing framework, as evidenced in Figure 4.
OFA's reassembled snowflake structure from December 2019 to present.
Figure 4 illustrates local community organizer chapters in specific communities across the United States working together with the OFA Archive, which provided a static content repository of live trainings and organizing resources. Some local chapters had become more connected in the absence of the OFA Headquarters (see right side of Figure 4); meanwhile, others waited patiently to be reconnected to a more centralized order of power and resources. In reality, the now-defunct organization could not be replaced with a static content repository that memorialized its once active presence in every state and across every social media platform. While the availability of the archive was much appreciated and convenient for OFA-affiliated organizers, it was also a painful memory for them of an advocacy organization that had become a part of their identities as community organizers. As time goes on, the local OFA chapters’ use of the static content repository will likely look more like Figure 5, where the OFA Archive is present, but the local chapters are still reliant on their distributed networks of training documents and community-based resources that reflect the localized needs of their constituents, cities, and counties.
OFA's redistributed snowflake structure with archive from December 2019 to present.
In the next section, I discuss how the shifts in OFA's organizational structure impacted the organization's content strategy, the subsequent design decisions for the static content repository, and my own use of the archived content as an OFA-affiliated community organizer.
Content Strategy or Strategic Content?: Fluctuations in OFA's Content Life Cycle
Since OFA was primarily training organizers to share their own critical incident stories to persuade a specific audience toward an action (e.g., protect the Affordable Care Act under the Trump Administration), the content of their content strategy for storytelling was partially user-generated. Community organizers would attend an in-person or recorded training on an aspect of Ganz's (2010) action-oriented public narrative framework, and then they would deploy their organizing training on Twitter or in a letter to their Congress representative. Even before developing their static content archive, OFA provided templates and resources on their website for how to engage in effective conversations and storytelling for specific outcomes, but all of that content disappeared between March 2019 and December 2019.
When OFA's organizing content finally reappeared on the static content repository maintained by the Obama Alumni Association, the tone and purpose was entirely different. Rather than facilitating relational organizing through a central headquarters, OFA had memorialized its once vibrant community as well as its trainings and resources. As of January 2022, OFA's static content repository opens with a three-paragraph reflection on the work OFA did across the country from 2013 to 2019. Next, there is a paragraph that describes the site's Creative Commons license for reuse and adaptation of the included materials. Lastly, it describes the organization of the site, which is organized into eight sections (Organizing for Action, 2019a, 2019b):
Fellowships: A repository of the trainings and resources for the 8-week Community Organizing Fellowship that OFA ran from 2017 to 2019. Effective Conversations: A five-part self-guided series on effective listening and strategic storytelling. Leadership Development: A repository of resources on resource management, conflict resolution, and emotional intelligence. Voter Contact Best Practices: A repository of resources on how to engage voters with your personal story as well as relational organizing and voter turnout tactics. Issue Advocacy: A deeper, more advanced series of recorded trainings on issue advocacy, public policy, and lobbying. Digital Organizing: A set of learning modules that cover the essentials for digital content production and engaging in digital community organizing on social media. Tactics and Toolkits: A collection of printable resources from the entire lifespan of the organization, including the 2013 Organizing Manual. In-person Trainings: A collection of recorded, in-person trainings conducted alongside community partners during the lifespan of the organization.
Operational Content Strategy (2013–2019)
When OFA was operational, their content strategy was very similar to what Flanagan and Getto (2017) describe in their three-part heuristic for nonprofit content strategy as they placed significant emphasis on “developing audience awareness and interaction, making use of emerging technologies, and building sustainable partnerships” (p. 57). But, because OFA was large and distributed across the country, audience awareness and interaction shifted often. For example, an OFA Headquarters employee could be delivering a live training on how to have an effective conversation with a government representative about the Affordable Care Act to a perceived audience of community organizers when, in fact, there is a city councilwoman in the audience.
Prior to its dissolution in March 2019, OFA's content life cycle followed Casey's (2015) content strategy life cycle almost exactly (see Figure 6). In fact, the five steps in the cycle were very close to the same functionality. While Casey's content life cycle (left side of Figure 6) moves from strategize to plan to create to maintain to audit, OFA's content life cycle (right side of Figure 6) moved from strategize to organize to collect to report to analyze. According to the OFA Organizing Manual, organizers were to strategize to determine which resources were right for them to use. For example, if an organizer was engaging in door-to-door canvassing for the Affordable Care Act, they might need to download and print a signature sheet for their petition from the OFA website. The organizing phase of OFA's content strategy life cycle is very similar to Casey's planning stage. Volunteers used an online organizing platform to contact and coordinate a list of OFA community organizers who are willing to participate in the door-to-door canvassing. The collect phase in the OFA content strategy life cycle is very similar to the create phase in Casey's content strategy life cycle (Casey, 2015; OFA Organizing Manual, 2019, p. 103). In the case of door-to-door canvassing for a specific issue, community organizers are literally creating the signed petition list during their collection phase. When they move into the reporting phase, they are providing data to the organization on how many volunteers participated and how many signatures were obtained. These data points allowed OFA to audit their organizing trainings and resources to determine if they were easy to use and accessible for their affiliated community organizers. In some cases, organizers were asked to reflect on their experience with a narrative that was often posted to social media and/or saved in an internal archive for future training examples.
Casey’s (2015) content life cycle (left) and OFA’s operational content life cycle (right)
Archived Strategic Content (2019–Present)
When OFA dissolved in March 2019, its content strategy became a static collection of strategic content housed within an open-access archive. Instead of an established, cyclical way of engaging with content in a five-part framework (see Figure 6), OFA had fallen into the “content silo trap” (Rockley et al., 2015, p. 89) where the content organizers and maintainers had become disconnected from their users’ organizing needs. While the organization of the materials is linear and makes sense, there is no content life cycle in place to ensure the content is maintained and audited to meet the needs of the communities who are using it. Fortunately, the Creative Commons licensing does allow users to strategically reuse and adapt the content, but the strategy has shifted from the organization itself to the community organizers. If we consider that “writing is infrastructure” (Hart-Davidson et al., 2008, p. 32), OFA has provided a static repository of public-facing technical communication for users to download, edit, and deploy in their local communities as they see fit. In this case, the static content repository meets Gonzales et al.'s (2016) definition of content strategy as “a repeatable system defining the entire editorial content development process” (p. 57). While no one is actively maintaining or auditing the site, save for a server error or something else catastrophic, there are replicable instructions for what to do with the content and a kind invitation to use as you need to support ongoing community organizing projects and progressive issue advocacy.
That said, I have some concerns with the current static content repository. As a community organizer with OFA from August 2017 until its dissolution in March 2019, I often wondered about the problems that might be associated with professionalizing particular aspects of civic engagement, like voter turnout or advocating for a specific cause. While this article does not directly engage with those problems, they became evident when I considered how the organization's dissolution affected its affiliated community organizers. Personally, I had established much of my credibility as an organizer in Kansas City, Missouri, through the OFA network and the use of their resources as a starting place for my work with other nonprofits, issue advocacy work, and grant writing projects. OFA helped me get to know a new city and aided in the development of many friendships I still have today. But when the organization dissolved without much warning, it left me feeling rudderless in a sea of challenging political problems, and I imagine many of my fellow OFA-affiliated community organizers felt similarly. 2 In the next section, I provide some suggestions for how to develop sustainable best practices for content strategy in advocacy organizations, even when they are not operational.
Training Archive as Static Content Repository: Suggestions for Developing Sustainable Content Strategy in Advocacy Organizations
At the beginning of this article, I proposed that the roots of content strategy are situated in the desire to organize people, practices, pedagogies, processes, and policies into a cohesive, agile structure. This is particularly true of content strategy for politically engaged advocacy organizations that are focused on moving people to action, raising money, or gaining support for a specific bill in Congress. As noted by Flanagan and Getto (2017), nonprofits (of any kind) can benefit from a rhetorical approach to content strategy, specifically one that understands the user's specific purpose and is mindful of their potential lack of familiarity with effective technical communication skills (p. 59). In an effort to establish some best practices for content strategy in advocacy organizations, I lean heavily on my disciplinary training in rhetoric and my community training in the work of an organizer. This move answers Getto et al.'s (2020) call for “working within existing organizational paradigms to create literature on content strategy that spans the industry–academia gap” (p. 27).
Advocacy organizations are notoriously unsustainable because of their reliance on donations for operational funding and the ever-changing issues of political candidates and parties. As such, the best practices for content strategy discussed in this article are based on my research as a participant observer working with OFA from 2017 to 2019. I also rely on some recent notes I have been taking as I begin to engage with new nonprofits and advocacy organizations in the greater Nashville area where I have been engaging in pandemic-safe organizing for the last two years (2020–2022). In the sections below, I outline ten best practices for how to strategize, plan, create, maintain, and audit content for an active or dissolved advocacy organization.
Strategize: Make it Useful and Usable for a Specific Purpose
Within the content strategy world, strategizing is related to defining what content you need for your audience and how to make it useful and usable for their specific purpose (Casey, 2015, pp. 200–202). In community organizing, this practice can get tricky because issue advocacy should be place-based and responsive to the ever-changing needs of the community. If you’re working to strategize content for issue advocacy work, consider
Conducting motivational interviews to see what your users’ specific purpose is and what they might be looking for in your content. Participating in a few local events to gain a better understanding of your community and the kinds of resources your audience might need.
Plan: Anticipate and Localize the Users’ Needs and Goals
Content strategists plan by documenting the roles, responsibilities, and processes for all those who might be involved in the content strategy life cycle (Casey, 2015, p. 202). Similarly, community organizers plan by determining the roles, responsibilities, and processes for all those who might be involved in the organizing activity. In the canvassing example I shared earlier in this article, organizers were focusing on the who/what/where/when/how of the content strategy. When planning content for, or in collaboration with, an advocacy organization, consider
Identifying who will be using this content and for what purpose. Asking users how you can plan and/or localize content to meet their needs and goals.
Create: Design Accessible, Usable, Open-Access Content
While content strategists focus on creating accessible, usable, open-access content during this third phase, community organizers do not always focus on those tenets. Sometimes, they choose to keep the information private to protect volunteers; but sometimes, they keep their collected information private and inaccessible because it holds more proprietary value for the organization when it is not shared. When creating content for or in collaboration with an advocacy organization, consider
Opening your content up to a wider audience as long it is not putting any of your community organizers into a dangerous situation. Redesigning content for (re)distribution on a variety of free and/or open-access platforms like Google Drive, Twitter, or Canva.
Maintain: Update Examples and Stories to Ensure Content is Timely and Relevant
Content maintenance, or reporting as community organizers call it, is not always the most fun task, but it is necessary to ensure your content remains timely and relevant for your intended users. When maintaining content for, or in collaboration with, an advocacy organization, consider
Updating examples and stories to match the current political moment or issues your advocacy organization is supporting. Checking content for expired or irrelevant information about laws or policies that could impact community organizers’ ability to be effective.
Audit: Request Feedback from Users to Assess How the Static Content is Working in Their Communities
Auditing, analyzing, and assessing content is the most difficult part of the content strategy life cycle. Measuring your content's performance is directly related to whether you are meeting the needs and goals described in the planning phase. When auditing content for, or in collaboration with, an advocacy organization, consider
Launching a quick assessment tool (e.g., Google Form or Survey Monkey) to determine if your content is meeting users’ needs. Publishing the results of publicly available content audits (e.g., SEO data or click-throughs) to show the evolution of your organization based on user feedback and regular data collection, analysis, and action.
Personal Reflection and Future Research
The dissolution of OFA and the absence of its resources and materials from March 2019 to December 2019 was difficult for me because it robbed me of my invented ethos as someone who belonged to a highly regarded organization. While I was still able to continue engaging in meaningful community organizing projects in Kansas City, I found myself wishing for access to the trainings, particularly the tactical training on telling your personal story and connecting stories to issues. Similar to the way Rand (2014) describes her experience of choric collectivity at Camp Courage, OFA's strategic storytelling model was constitutive and performative for me. Of course, I know how to tell a story, but the structure offered in the training provided me with a sense of direction and that moved beyond a rhetorical understanding of audience, purpose, and message.
As a researcher and practitioner who works at the intersection of content strategy and community organizing, I share Getto et al.'s (2020) desire for more collaborative and accessible research between industry and academia. Imagine how much we could do if we were publishing in the same open-access spaces using accessible plain language to talk about what we did and how we did it. As I researched and drafted this article, I found myself asking two interconnected questions:
I wonder if this research would be at all useful to the Obama Alumni Association as they continue to strategize, plan, create, maintain, and audit their static content repository? If this research would be useful to them, how could I make this special issue of the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication accessible to them? How can advocacy organizations develop a content strategy framework that is responsive to the organization's ever-shifting funding, leadership, purpose, and identity? How much, if any, does an organization's content define its mission and legacy? Do the content histories and literacies of other activist organizations affect how new organizations communicate about and amongst themselves as they form? When and how do activist organizations begin to categorize their practices, procedures, processes, and policies, and at what point does that collection become an archive? If an activist organization is dissolved, as OFA did in 2019, how does the preservation of their content (e.g., training manuals, educational materials, localized guides) get mobilized in other spaces?
Personally, I would like to see a more community-based and localized approach to content strategy for researchers and practitioners. Of course, the issue with localization and hyperresponsiveness is scalability and ensuring that the maintenance and audit phases of the content strategy life cycle can be sustained. As my research and practice in content strategy progresses, I am interested in the following research questions:
As I look toward new research projects along these lines, I am interested in studying how other OFA organizers were impacted by the organization's shift from an active content strategy life cycle to one that is static and memorializes what once was. Additionally, I would like to collaborate with practitioners, perhaps even the volunteers who maintain the OFA Archive, to develop how-to guides that discuss how to localize static advocacy organizing content to make it more responsive to localized, community-based needs.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
