Early in my career, I turned down a job at a union where I would have held a digital organizing role within a communications department. I already had a handful of years of on-the-ground organizing experience building a base, recruiting people into organizing committees, running campaigns. But I had no experience writing a press release, running a social media account, or coming up with a narrative strategy. I was confused why this digital organizing role would require me to report to the communications director instead of the organizing director.
To this day, digital organizer positions are often housed within communications teams rather than organizing teams.
I think this is a mistake.
This profound conceptual confusion between digital communications, digital organizing, and field organizing has led to structural issues within our organizations. But if movement organizers and leaders can start to collapse the distinction between field and digital, then our organizing can become more integrated and ultimately more impactful.
When digital organizers work within a communications department rather than an organizing department, their success is inevitably measured by reach, impressions, and clicks rather than leadership development and other metrics of power.
The Blurred Lines of Organizing
In a research survey I conducted in 2025, an overwhelming number of practitioners said that in their organizations digital organizing sits in the communications department (28 percent) rather than an organizing department (12 percent). This lack of alignment leads to weakened effectiveness and confusion of roles within our organizations.
There is no more online and offline, we exist in both simultaneously.
Political scientist Hahrie Han defines mobilizing as engaging people who already agree with a cause in centrally coordinated actions, often at scale. But organizing also involves developing leaders from within the base, often people not part of “the choir,” who are then able to set their own strategy and campaigns.
Historically, organizing has been split between field organizing (which happens in person) and digital organizing (which happens online). This division has outlived its usefulness as the boundaries between online and offline are increasingly blurred. The distinction fails to reflect how people live and engage with each other: There is no online and offline anymore; we exist in both simultaneously.
Here’s the paradox: On one hand, we overinflate the term “digital organizing” by using it to mean everything that happens online; on the other hand, we underinflate the term by seeing it as a set of inert tools and tactics rather than a place to build and wield power. And when digital organizers work within a communications department rather than an organizing department, their success is inevitably measured by reach, impressions, and clicks rather than leadership development and other metrics of power.
Building on Past Experience
After two years of interviewing and surveying hundreds of organizers working across issue areas and geographies, I put forward a framework for collapsing the distinction between field organizing and digital organizing in a recent report, Beyond Bifurcated Organizing. This kind of blended organizing framework has been suggested by others and is used successfully in a handful of organizations, but it still largely remains on the fringes.
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Digital organizing methods were new two decades ago with the launch of progressive digital organizations like MoveOn, Color of Change, 350.org; and honed further during electoral campaigns for Howard Dean, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the terrain for organizing, as organizations had to scramble to move previously offline efforts online. Of course, some communities were already well-versed in building communities online.
The soft skills of organizing are far more difficult to teach than the technical skills of database management, writing and sending email blasts, and setting up an ad campaign.
Since the advent of the internet, chronically ill people, disabled activists, trans and queer youth, and rural communities have all leveraged online spaces to find each other, mobilize shared resources, and organize across distances. Jamie Lauren Keiles, who wrote The Third Person, a forthcoming book about nonbinary gender, documents the very early days of trans people using the internet for this kind of community building. People have organized online for decades and will continue to do so with or without institutions.
Reorienting How We Organize
Now, we face a predicament. Many of our organizations split organizers into their field or digital programs, or else have abandoned the basics of slow, methodical, rigorous organizing in favor of shallow online mobilization. As a result there is often a lack of skills for one-on-one conversations, assessing support, developing leaders, and power mapping within our organizations.
After many years of supervising and mentoring organizers, I have seen that the soft skills of organizing are far more difficult to teach than the technical skills of database management, writing and sending email blasts, and setting up an ad campaign.
It is now common knowledge that a big email list doesn’t necessarily mean deep engagement, and it certainly doesn’t lead to power. Yet more than 65 percent of digital organizers I surveyed said they are responsible for building their organization’s email list. This was the third most common responsibility listed, despite a majority of respondents ranking growing the email list in the bottom quartile of effective tactics. It appears we are moving along grooves carved by earlier realities, doing what we’ve always done, despite knowing it is no longer working.
Seasoned organizers often cite early mentors as the key to their development: supervisors who shadowed them for years, debriefed every meeting, and brought them into strategy decisions. I still remember my first supervisor, Kim Cook, listening in on my organizing conversations to give me feedback: where I should have pushed harder, where I could have asked more questions, where I missed an opportunity to agitate. She regularly blocked off time to come with me in person to watch me interact with people in the real world. It was a gift, and it helped me develop my skills very quickly. This kind of hands-on management is happening less and less frequently.
Critically, as authoritarians consolidate power, this moment requires progressive movements to both double down on what we know works and to do things differently. Our problem isn’t just one of scale. I’m not convinced that more organizers or more people in the streets will help us win. In their 2021 report, Building Structure Shapes, social movement researcher Melanie Brazzell argued that an organization’s structure enables it to shape power in a process where leaders manage trade-offs and tensions in the service of building internal and political power.
We need to reorient around how we organize in the internet age. This will require sharp strategy and hard decisions as we restructure or pivot within our organizations, and it might even require us to build new organizations for this moment. But ultimately, organizing is the most essential tool we have for shaping our collective future toward a prefigurative democracy.
