How to organize a massive number of distributed events

From American presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders to the global Youth Climate Strikes, the most exciting movements are scaling the capacity of their organizing by mobilizing supporters to meet up (and do important work) at offline events.

If you are just getting started, the prospect of organizing distributed events at scale can seem daunting, so we’ve collected the best practices we’ve heard from our customers, allies and partners across the progressive movement.

Running a distributed offline mobilization has three phases: finding local event hosts, recruiting your supporters and the public to attend, and then following up after the events happens.

Recruiting event hosts is the most critical stage in a successful event mobilization. The more hosts you recruit, the more likely it is that each potential attendee will find an event near them. Many hosts will also recruit attendees from their own network, which grows the size of your mobilization.

To get to a massive scale, you’ll need to do some work as an organization to recruit attendees for each event in order to make your overall campaign successful.

After the events happen ask both the attendees and the event hosts to report back about the experience. Many organizations ask participants to rate their experience while also providing qualitative feedback. You can use those ratings to identify problematic hosts and understand ways to improve things for the next campaign.

Event mobilizations can be an effective way to build power and community and to get important work on behalf of your organization done at scale.

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