Building Buy-in

Section Overview

Before you begin the process of building metrics, you need to make sure key members of your organization are on board. Buy-in isn’t just a “go-ahead thumbs-up” from leadership. Getting buy-in means demonstrating to stakeholders how this process connects to the organization’s ultimate goals and elevates the organization’s development. When people are bought in, they show their enthusiasm by offering ideas, providing capacity, and helping to move the work forward.

Buy-in is especially important for long-term planning, cross-team collaboration, implementing new organizational habits, and creating functional, widely-adopted data infrastructure. You’ll need to pull in the right stakeholders early and make space for their input.

We identified three bodies of stakeholders that organizations likely need to engage.

1. Organizing team: They run the campaigns and they know what’s happening on the ground. They’re engaged with community members, so they have a great idea of what works and what doesn’t. They are also often the ones responsible for collecting data.
   
2. Data team: They build and maintain the systems that gather data and transform them into metrics. They work with front-facing canvassing and mobilization tools and back-end client relationship management tools (CRMs) to sync, manage, and visualize the data that an organization collects.
   
3. Leadership team: They identify priorities and move resources to work on them. Ideally, they use data and metrics to help inform organizational strategy. Their buy-in can lend a project more legitimacy and help clear roadblocks.

Additionally, for network organizations,¹ staff members at their affiliate organizations may also be stakeholders. Each of those affiliate organizations may have their own organizing, data, and leadership teams to consider.

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Be generous with your patience! Building buy-in takes time, especially when your organization has to balance short-term and long-term goals. Kim at OPIN shared,

“I don’t think that this was a thing that happened overnight and I don’t think if I walked into any organization we would have a high-level staff member get the green light to do a big project that’s not immediately affecting results this week. And so really pushing for culture shifts of long-term technical strategy and investments I think is big.”

In this section, we lay out four key practices to build buy-in:

• Align the work with organizational strategy
• Lead by gathering materials and creating space to discuss
• Lay out the benefits of this work
• Acknowledge and manage capacity challenges

Align the Work With Organizational Strategy

In Pathways to Power, we noted that the best metrics stem from your organizational strategy. During implementation, we observed that when organizations had a clear, agreed-upon organizational strategy, they had an easier time building buy-in across stakeholders. Organizations re-assessing their strategy used the cohort as an opportunity to refine their strategic analysis and plan.

If your organization has a clear strategy…

Then you can use that as a guide for developing metrics. In particular, use your organizational strategy to:

1. Narrow which pathways to prioritize. For the organizations that we worked with in 2024, they all prioritized base-building and leadership development concurrently. Even if certain pathways take precedence today, you can always come back to the others later. Note that this toolkit is specifically designed for people prioritizing base building, leadership development, or both.
2. Identify strategic documents that can inform this work. Documents that name the organization’s goals, their opposition, strategic plans, or organizing frameworks are excellent places to start.

📝📝 STORIES FROM THE FIELD 📝📝

Viswa Challa and Amanda Weaver at People’s Action originally set out to create metrics for six different pathways. Their first instinct was to build everything from scratch. But after internal conversation, they pivoted. They decided to focus on base-building and leadership development, which were the heart of their organizing revival strategy.

They gathered strategic documents, including their Organizing Revival white paper, their ten-year power plan, and affiliate organizations’ respective ladders of engagement. Upon reviewing their documents, they realized that they already had a strong foundation to build from. Viswa and Amanda drafted a standardized ladder of engagement framework that linked day-to-day organizing with their broader goals of expanding membership and leadership in the next ten years. Because it was rooted in their long-term strategy, the draft clicked with others in the network and helped build buy in.

If your organization’s strategy is in flux or being re-assessed…

You can use the conversation about metrics to help your organization sharpen their strategic analysis. You may need to clarify your current strategy before deciding on long-term metrics. Use this opportunity to raise questions like:

• What are you trying to win? What forms of power do you and your opposition have, respectively? What efforts would you need to make to build up your power?
  
• What metrics that you’re collecting right now feel empty or uninformative about your work? Why is that the case? What data would you like to see instead? What metrics would you want to track over time to be able to see not just short-term impact, but whether or not you’re building long-term power?
  
• If you’re building a base, who’s your base? How do you bring folks into your base? How do you identify your leaders and how do you empower people to become leaders? How do you track the growth and progress of your base and your leaders over time? How would being able to see changes in your base and leadership inform your strategies and tactics?

📝📝 STORIES FROM THE FIELD 📝📝

As Fair Count was preparing their 2024 outreach strategy, Thomas and Rachel saw an opportunity to use Pathways metrics to focus the conversation on how the organization builds long-term power. At an org-wide retreat, Thomas and Rachel first led staff through a series of exercises to map the organization’s current work onto the six Pathways to Power. Together, they reached a consensus that they were already employing base-building and leadership development strategies. From there, each team were able to identify existing and new power-building metrics that were relevant for both short-term get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts to re-engage successful contacts from their GOTV efforts post-election and absorb them into Fair Count’s other civic engagement programs. Organizers felt energized by this approach because it reflected their deeper aspirations to build a strong, lasting base.

Take Leadership by Gathering Materials and Creating Shared Space to Discuss

As you begin identifying and implementing metrics for your organization, you may come across two common tensions. First, you may want everyone involved. But there’s a real risk to having too many cooks in the kitchen; work with your leadership to set clear expectations for who is involved and how decisions are made up front. Second, this work takes time, but you’ll need to be realistic about how much work other stakeholders already have on their plates (also see the section, “Acknowledging and managing capacity challenges”). To navigate both of these tensions, here are some practices that might help.

Bring people together into the same physical space. When you’re working with other busy people, it can be difficult to get them to read a memo that you sent or have them share their ideas for implementing new metrics. If you work at an organization with a shared space, schedule a meeting for folks to sit down together with built-in time to co-work and discuss. This is exactly what Danny did at Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, an affiliate organization of People’s Action. He blocked off time on everyone’s calendar. He dedicated a chunk of the agenda for folks to independently read the original Pathways to Power toolkit. Afterward, attendees had time to discuss their takeaways and next steps.

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Who should I invite?

Try to invite at least one representative from each stakeholder group. If you’re trying to gather ideas or feedback, consider inviting folks who you know will have diverse options. If you’re trying to complete a specific task, then also ensure that the group you’re inviting can collaborate with each other.

What are some preparations that I might need to make?

Printouts of readings; facilitation questions; an agenda you share in advance; donuts (optional, but delicious!)

My organization is remote. What now?

Host a virtual meeting instead. If you’re having folks co-work, then prepare some music that you can stream in the background. Invite folks to go off camera during the duration of the co-working period.

Create something for others to react to. At some point, cohort members from all four organizations realized that others in their organization were looking to them for leadership around this work. Others had given them implicit permission to design infrastructures or draft new frameworks. You may want to co-create everything, but your organization may have already entrusted you to be a thought leader. Gather whatever information you need from other stakeholders and create something that others can react to.

📝📝 STORIES FROM THE FIELD 📝📝

When creating something for others to react to, Amanda Weaver at People’s Action recommends collecting existing organization documents and build from what you have. She shares:

I think the thing I wasted time on that I would encourage other people to do is to go actually straight to the step of starting with what you have. Like if you’re trying to build a ladder of engagement or the system and there’s already some set of… I just wish I had gone to like, ‘Alright, we have all of these ladders of engagement. Look at them.’ I wish I had gotten to that step without asking for permission or like trying to build this with a set of directors and organizing directors for a year.

Lay Out the Benefits of This Work

For some folks, metrics may bring up uneasy feelings around job performance and hitting quotas. Metrics may feel like top-down micro-management of their work. You’ll want to talk through folks’ concerns and also share your vision of this work. Be serious about addressing their concerns. Take the time to articulate how better data collection and metrics can produce insights to help with their jobs. We’ve got some practical steps that may help you achieve this goal.

Identify allies and champions to lay out the benefits. Implementing metrics in an organization is an internal-facing organizing project. As we all know, messengers matter. The right allies and champions can advocate for you and clarify how this work benefits other stakeholders. They can also give you feedback that sharpens how you’re approaching the work. Data managers, in particular, may want to identify an organizer to champion the work. Working closely with an organizer, who understands how data and metrics make organizers’ jobs easier, can bust open new opportunities for collaboration.

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At People’s Action, Viswa teamed up with Amanda. Amanda has years of experience organizing on the ground in Illinois and nationally. Amanda sharpened the focus of their project by identifying areas where a data gap causes strategic challenges. Also, she communicated with organizing directors about how data and metrics could help power their Organizing Revival. Viswa explaind:

“You need to have your people in alignment that data is gonna be the source of power, especially when you wanna do this work at scale, and the source of giving you the feedback loops for your power. And I think unless you get to that clarity, you’re just not gonna put in the energy and investment that it takes to build this infrastructure. And you need an Amanda that can convince people that we need to do this.”

Show how metrics empower organizers to tell compelling stories to leaders, volunteers, funders, and others. Organizers’ hard work sometimes becomes visible only when they win a campaign. But organizers cultivate relationships and develop agency and leadership within volunteers that persist long past the campaign’s end. Metrics can help organizers tell the story of this work. At Fair Count, Rachel and Thomas showed how metrics can tell compelling stories by circling back to their organizing teams with a dashboard of metrics and visuals that reflected what organizers see or experience on the ground (see “Step 3” in the “Developing Metrics” section). It demonstrated how metrics can celebrate organizers’ work rather than function as punitive oversight.

Talk about potential funding impact. Discuss how metrics can show funders the impact of your work and how your power is growing over time. At People’s Action, Amanda constantly emphasized to other organizers that the Organizing Revival involved doubling their base and cultivating more member leaders, which they needed to demonstrate somehow. Fair Count also found that funders were interested in hearing about this work; funders wanted to learn more about the new metrics that were being tracked and how they connected to long-term goals.

Emphasize how metrics can help organizers and leaders make better decisions. Better metrics can help organizers categorize their relationships, determine who to follow-up with (e.g. prospects, potential leaders, lapsed members), and gauge the strength of their base. Good metrics can help leaders make better program, organizational strategy, and organizational management decisions. Metrics can also push organizations to think about the organization more holistically by linking short-term campaign efforts (e.g. voter registration and get-out-the-vote) to long-term base-building work (e.g. absorption and retention).

For organizers, in particular, emphasize how data and metrics can provide them with additional insight about their work. Kim, from Organizing Power in Numbers (OPIN), said, “I think we got the buy-in from organizers because we’re like, ‘Hey, if you log your event data here, you will also be able to see how many times we texted them and how many actions they signed up for.’”

Use easy metaphors and humor. What you’re leading may seem very new to other stakeholders. When laying out the benefits of this work, a good metaphor can help you translate your vision to others in your organization and circumvent intimidating jargon. Humor can further disarm their discomfort with adopting something as wonky as metrics. When rolling out the ladder of engagement measurement framework (see “Step 2” of “Developing Metrics”), Viswa Challa and Darren Kwong relied on a silly example about fruits and fruit baskets to explain how observed actions help us identify the different rungs of a leadership ladder. Others laughed about the metaphor and then commented how helpful it was to wrap their head around measuring their work.

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Emojis can help reinforce your metaphors. At Fair Count, Thomas and Rachel popularized the use of the 🔋 (battery) emoji in organization-wide Signal threads to react to photos of community gatherings. The emoji reflected a metaphor that they had introduced in presentations: base building was like charging a batter. This simple gesture became a casual short-hand to celebrate organizing wins and reinforce momentum without needing a dashboard or formal metrics update.

Acknowledge and Manage Capacity Challenges

Implementing metrics will require capacity, and there’s competition for that capacity. For many organizations, this work may be one of many projects that they’re trying to complete. In a presidential election year, our learning cohort members had to balance the incremental work of base-building with immediate electoral demands—like voter registration or get-out-the-vote programs. You will have to experiment with different ways to make space for this work to move forward and thrive in your organization. We’ve listed some ideas below.

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Kim at OPIN expressed this tension most clearly from her lessons working with organizers over the course of the year. She said,

Organizers very much value reporting and analysis and deeper strategy. But they don’t value that as much as getting the stuff done… There’s a fear that information gathering will hinder impact. I know measuring is a net positive. I’m figuring out from the cohort how to do a cultural shift without adding so much bureaucracy and hours to an organizer.

Carve out time blocks and space to do data work together. Scheduling time and space for people to focus on data can give others a collective permission to focus on this work (also see section “Take leadership by creating shared space and material to discuss”). At Maine People’s Alliance (an affiliate organization of People’s Action), the Data Team and Organizing Team have “Data Entry Parties” on Fridays. Organizers can join to complete their data entry for the week. Their data gurus are available to provide support as needed.

Make data collection easier for organizers. Select simple, easy-to-use tools and provide in-person training and documentation for later reference; pare down data and metrics to those most meaningful to your work; and standardize data collection processes. This can make data work feel less tedious and perfunctory. It can also help build good will among organizers. For more practical tips around simplifying data collection, refer to the “Sketching the Blueprint of Your Data Infrastructure”.

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1. A “network organization” is an organization made up of affiliate organizations. For instance, People’s Action is a national organization made up of 40 organizations in 30 states. Network organizations are sometimes also called “umbrella organizations.” We prefer to use “network organizations,” because it more aptly describes the structure and relationship between the organizational entities.