Political
Marketing
Our services might look like marketing...
from a distance.
They're anything but.
Treating politics as marketing is the problem, not the solution.
People are agents of democracy, not consumers of it.
— as Wendy Brown explains.How exactly do our innovations empower organizations
to create change?
We’re a
Movement-Building
Agency
We draw from parts of more traditional industries, such as Public Relations, Marketing, Advertising, Tech, etc.
We are supporter engagement specialists. People power is how to delivery impact.
The Five Part Framework for Digital Organizing
Understanding that not all online interactions are the same is essential to ensuring an approach that will blend techniques across communications, mobilizing, and organizing.
Our Five Part Framework helps understand and assess digital actions according to their level of personalization and decentralization of decision-making.
Wherever your efforts might be struggling to meet the need, Tectonica can help support your team’s growth.
Progressives are struggling to make change
Our research surveying a multitude of progressive organizations in Europe has shown that we know our campaigns should be featuring a range of techniques across the spectrum.
However, it also showed they are not doing so.
The more decentralized and personalized an intervention, the less likely it was to feature in a campaign.
The Horizon of Possibility
For our organizations to win, they need to transform
the way they work with people.
Tectonica has a unique process to facilitate the development of a strategic plan which leverages the group’s wisdom, builds team consensus, and lays the groundwork for the actions needed today to achieve victory tomorrow.
Previous and Current Strategy, Research & Training Clients
What
Progressives
Need to Win
The painful reality: civics are in crisis worldwide.
The old formulas for uniting, fighting and rebalancing power are no longer working in our modern world. In part, this is because our institutions of connection that form the mortar of organizing and the means of deep mobilizing have decayed - replaced by an age of clicktivism, facebook sh*tposting, and insta-movements.
We need a seismic shift in the way politics are done.
A new way.
The Stairway to Social and Political Change
Everything we do at Tectonica is in service to winning progressive power - the ability to make social and political change.
The stairway is our model for the complex elements we believe are needed. Below we outline how they relate to our individual services.
While the development of resources - from supporter data and lists to funds raised - is essential for operational scaling and sustainability, you cannot buy your way to real change. And while selecting and effectively implementing tools can be powerful - research shows no relationship between any one tool or tactic to change. These factors - while necessary - alone will not create impact.
Too often our campaigns and orgs are treated as businesses and fail to become movements - the power to move our societies. The key factor to - and most missed opportunity - the final step towards change is how the supporter relationships are developed and embedded into strategy
Lists become truly powerful when each signature is seen as an opportunity to develop a new connection and inspire a future activist. A donation ask is necessary, but have we tried asking a constituent donor from the community what issues they care about in their lives?
Leadership and Human Capacity
True leadership is essential for real impact where people are the power. This can appear in individuals or distributed across the community itself.
Human capacity is where we need to invest first - creativity, insight, connection to community are the greatest power we have to leverage for change. Leadership is successful when it inspires and invests in the involvement and empowerment of others.
It is not new tech innovations that will save us. It is the human capacity for creativity, insight, vision, community strength, and leadership. It is the power underlying movements united in action.
Resource Development
We get it. We have to pay for it all somehow: staff, vendors, tools, offices…etc.
And your reach is dependent on the data of the lists of people - their emails, phone numbers, interests, etc
Organizations need to acquire the resources to scale operational magnitude and sustain activities. And while we can’t deny the pragmatic reality of the business of operating an organization or campaign, its singular focus often becomes an illusion of actual power to make change.
In each opportunity to develop a resource through people, is also the opportunity to reach beyond and develop a relationship of greater depth. Not only are we able to build greater power through relationships, but the impact upon the development of resources is accelerated too.
Tools and Tactics
“There [is] no clear formula for power, no tactic, tool, resource, or action that would guarantee success. Leaders used online and off-line tactics, electoral and nonelectoral approaches, and coalitional and independent strategies. What was common was a strategic logic about how to cultivate people as effective sources of power and stay accountable to them when wielding power in the public domain.” - Prisms of the People
Because no one tactic or tool is the key, organizations need to be able to have the full toolkit of available tactical approaches and supporting tools to draw on to best fit their specific needs in the moment and to be able to effectively utilize them.
Tectonica can help with the selection of that technology best fit for the specific context, as well as, knowing how to implement it to its maximum impact.
Supporter Relationship
The most essential and final step to making change is found in the way we develop relationships with supporters. Relationships to and between supporters of an organization of belonging and mutual accountability will solidify commitment, belief, and identity alignment in a way that will unveil the power within a community to make change.
People are the most independent source of power that an organization can catalyze for its mission. But to tap into that power in a way that grows power exponentially - requires a level of commitment from constituent supporters that only comes with deeper relationships. It requires a relationship of mutual accountability between constituents and the organization, or what the authors of Prisms call “civic feedback”.
Constituent Management Systems (CRMs) work is an example of how Tectonica can support how organization’s nurture and scale the relationships with intent to build power and create impact.
Strategy (in Action)
“Strategy is a verb: a creative, continuous stream of tactical adaptation. It is something we do, not a noun, something we have.” - Marshall Garz, Why David Sometimes Wins
To win power, we need organizations and campaigns that are nimble and responsive strategically to a volatile world. While planning is essential, this continual strategic response to the rapidly changing context of the moment, is essential to guide the entire process of winning change.
