Implementing Metrics for Base Building and Leadership Development
A Pathways to Power Toolkit for Measuring Your Power-Building Work
Overview
What Is Pathways to Power?
Pathways to Power is a collaborative, multi-year research project by The Movement Cooperative (TMC) and Analyst Institute (AI), with input from 19 movement organizations, and sponsored by Way to Win. Pathways to Power guides movement organizations through developing and implementing metrics to measure their power-building work.
In the first stage of the project, TMC and AI collaborated with 14 organizations to identify six pathways that organizations use to build power: base building, leadership development, advancing issue campaigns, building electoral influence, long-term narrative change, and organizational resilience. Via in-depth interviews with practitioners from participating organizations, we developed an initial list of power-building metrics to capture work in each of these pathways. That project resulted in the Pathways to Power framework.
This toolkit is the product of the second stage of the project. In this toolkit, we get really practical and focus on implementing base-building and leadership development metrics.1 How can organizations build buy-in for this work? How can they decide on the metrics that best capture their base-building and leadership development work? How do they collect the data they need to support their metrics and ensure that those metrics inform decision-making? We worked hand-in-hand with a cohort of four organizations over seven months as they created and implemented base-building and leadership development metrics. This work uncovered best practices — around building buy-in, identifying metrics, and building supportive data infrastructure. Drawing on lessons learned, this toolkit walks you through the process of identifying and implementing your own metrics, step by step.
Why Are Base-building and Leadership Development Metrics Important?
Power is the ability to act and achieve purpose, especially to influence or change social, political, and economic systems that affect our lives. Power can come in many forms (e.g. solidarity, military, economic, etc.).2 Groundbreaking research by the Democracy & Power Innovation Fund, the P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University, and others finds that a main way base-building organizations build power is by growing a large, committed base and developing that base’s leadership.3 A base emerges when large numbers of people with shared interests and values come together to act in unison. That base can exert their influence and act on a target’s interests to achieve political wins. The larger and more committed the base, the greater the capacity for action and impact on the target’s interests. But many organizations lack metrics to track even basic information about their base. Who’s in their base? How big is their base? Is the base growing over time? Who’s a leader versus a member versus a prospect? Are people becoming more committed and engaged over time?
Measuring base-building and leadership development work is challenging. Organizations often try to measure power through contact metrics, such as number of doors knocked, texts sent, calls made, or conversations had. These are useful for tracking surface-level interactions with community members. But they don’t measure whether you’re bringing people into your base. Nor can they meaningfully describe your base’s size, enthusiasm, and commitment; the investment and skill of your volunteer leadership and staff organizers; or how your base and leaders transform over time. To develop a deeper assessment of the full scope of your current organizing work and to understand how your work is building your potential power over time, new metrics are needed.
Organizers can be hesitant to focus on metrics for fear that they get in the way of their immediate campaign work. But good metrics can help organizers capture information about the individuals and groups in your base to know who to reach out to with which asks, what is working best to engage them, and how we stay accountable to ourselves and the movement.
Metrics empower organizers to tell compelling stories to leaders, volunteers, funders, and others, both now and over time. They can empower your leadership and organizing teams to experiment, and push organizations to think about how to link short-term campaign efforts (e.g. voter registration and get-out-the-vote) to long-term base-building work (e.g. absorption). Over time, they can help you grow a deeper, more committed, more active base.
In this toolkit, we don’t attempt to measure the impact of your base-building and leadership development work on political wins (that’s a future stage of this project).4 Instead, we help track the size, makeup, commitment, and expanding leadership skills of your base to assess your organization’s growing ability to take collective action and influence decision-makers.
Who Is This Toolkit For?
This toolkit is designed for organizations who do organizing work and want to identify metrics that capture their base-building and/or leadership development efforts. It’s primarily written for data managers, but includes information that’s valuable for leadership, organizers, and other stakeholders, as well. We recommend using this toolkit after your organization has developed a clear, shared organizational strategy that prioritizes base building and/or leadership development.
How to Use This Toolkit
We find that useful metrics are those specific to your organization’s work and organizing context. Your metrics should accommodate the nuance of your organization’s unique theory of change, so that they can inform decision-making about your programs. This toolkit is meant to help you build out the metrics that will help your organization do its best work and tell your organization’s unique story. It provides a list of metrics that have worked well for other organizations, and also walks you through the process of developing your own. The toolkit includes worksheets, definition and metrics lists, and links to additional resources to help get you started.
Developing effective metrics is not simply about identifying the metrics themselves in a vacuum. It also requires building organization-wide buy-in and supportive data infrastructure so that data is captured consistently. This toolkit also provides resources to help you build buy-in and map out data infrastructure within your organization.
The toolkit includes three sections:
- Building Buy-In
- Developing Definitions and Metrics
- Sketching the Blueprint of Your Data Infrastructure
At the end, we include an Appendix with all the worksheets and resources referenced throughout the toolkit.
We lay out metric development as a step-by-step process. However, the process isn’t necessarily linear and requires iteration. It’s worth noting that while this toolkit is primarily about developing metrics and data infrastructure, we’ve put building buy-in first because it’s important to do so first. Do not, under any circumstances, skip this step; you don’t want to put time into developing metrics that are then not accepted or used by the rest of the organization.
If you have any feedback on how to make this toolkit more useful, or would like to share the list of definitions and metrics you’ve developed, please reach out to Darren and Liz at research@movementcooperative.org.
Good luck metric-ing!
In the Pathways to Power framework, we identify six ways that movement organizations build power. Because metrics for measuring each pathway to power differ, in this toolkit we focus only on two pathways: base building and leadership development.↩︎
Bhargava and Luce. 2024. Practical Radicals.↩︎
Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa. 2021. Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America.↩︎
See also pages 44-64 in the Democracy & Innovation Fund’s Power Metrics: Measuring What Matters to Build A Multi-Racial Democracy for ideas on how to measure impact.↩︎