Hi John,
Earlier this week on Monday, I watched while the first COVID vaccines went into the arms of healthcare workers in this country and the Electoral College cast its votes to make Joe Biden our next President. It felt like 2020 and four years of Trump being our President was finally coming to an end.
I started to think about the last four years; I remember riding into DC on the Metro the day after the 2016 election, and the entire car was silent except for two people, sobbing. I walked into our Action Network offices, and we talked about how devastating this was for the country and the world.
Soon, though, the organizers of the Women’s March started using Action Network to build toward the historic day of January 21st, 2017. We were still a new organization, just four years old, and we had been building tools for moments like these. We had created tools with the progressive movement with an eye for a new kind of mobilization, building tools so that organizations large and small, and individuals all over the world, could work together to mobilize at a scale not possible before. We thought it was possible to build tools powerful enough for the most sophisticated programs but designed and priced so everyone could use them.
Along the way, we created a new model for creating technology. Just as our tools recognized that cooperation around mobilization was necessary to build the strongest movement, we saw that cooperation around creating our tools would create the strongest technology. We built a partnership with the AFL-CIO, Daily Kos, and others to build all of our tools in a unique cooperative model, all done within a non-profit model to make sure to keep focus on the needs of the movement, not investors.
We started the Trump years with the Women’s March, and we end them as the core toolset for the DNC’s mobilization program, the Movement for Black Lives, United We Dream, and many others around the world. Action Network tools powered so many of the major moments of the last four years, and we’re incredibly proud to have helped our movement.
Now, I think we all know that we need to take the next step as a movement. The election this year was a necessary step in the right direction, but we need to go further. Just as we spent the years before 2016 innovating in building stronger mobilization tools, we have spent the last couple of years innovating to be ready for this moment.
Last year, we launched Action Builder, the most powerful tool anywhere for deep, year-round organizing. It’s already been used in campaigns across the country, for everything from community actions to worker organizing to boosting census participation to mutual aid during this pandemic. And this year, we launched Mobile Messaging in Action Network, creating a true dual channel mobilization platform. With our tools, you can reach farther and faster and organize deeper than ever before possible.
To help the movement take the next step, we will be pulling all of this together over the months ahead into a full spectrum approach to mobilizing and organizing. We don’t take an all-in-one approach to tools (that never works); our philosophy is about combining best-in-breed platforms into an ecosystem of tools to power true progressive change.
Our organization is growing stronger as well, along the same principles of shared control and cooperation we try to build into everything we do. We are extending our partnership model to even more organizations, and we are proud to now be a union shop, creating internal systems of partnership that mirror our external systems.
I always make this point in our staff meetings and, honestly, to anyone who will listen: We do all of these things in this cooperative model not just because we believe they are the right things to do, but because we believe they make our organization stronger and our tools better.
Our development focuses on the things that matter to people who use these tools, because the people who use the tools are the ones focusing the development. The nitty-gritty of optimizing send speeds so emails go out faster than anyone else, or making Ladders to create automated campaigns more efficiently, or anything else we do, is not driven by a marketing program but by progressives using the tools.
That’s how we are able to see the needs of our movement and build for them. Four years ago, that meant we had the best mobilization platform anywhere, why Fast Company called us, “the backbone of the anti-Trump opposition.” And now it means we are ready to work with the movement to take the next step in powerbuilding and build a movement that can achieve sweeping reforms.
So watch out over the next few months as we have more announcements about what’s to come. And, as always, thank you to all the progressive organizers and activists who drive for the change we seek. We only build the tools; it’s the programs everyone is running that do the real work for a more just future.
In Solidarity,
Brian Young
President & Executive Director
Action Network & Action Builder
