How we organise
Go where the people are, and organise where you stand.
There is no proprietary method here and nothing that needs explaining twice. Four lines describe what we do, eight stages describe how a single activity runs, and seven principles describe what we will not do to get there.
The method
Four lines, arrived at in the field.
This was not designed in a room. It is the shortest honest description of what worked across nineteen states during a national campaign, and it has not needed changing since.
- 01
Go where the people are
Plan outward from the centres, not around them. The communities furthest from a campaign office are the ones an organised network exists to reach.
- 02
Understand the community
Learn the local operating environment, the existing structures and the people who matter in them, before proposing anything.
- 03
Build relationships
Contact is the point. A relationship established through a conversation outlasts a rally that visited once and left.
- 04
Organise locally
Hand responsibility to a coordinator who lives there. Local leadership is what allows the structure to survive the end of a campaign.
The organising loop
One loop, and it does not stop at the election.
Every activity the movement runs, whether a rally, a town hall, a well or a night screening, goes round the same eight stages. The last one feeds the first, which is why it is drawn as a ring and not as a pipeline.
The two stages people skip are Document and Measure. Skipping them is how a movement ends up unable to say what it did, which is the position most grassroots organisations are in by the time anyone asks.
- 01
Identify
Identify the community, the activity or the requirement, and the geography it belongs to.
- 02
Understand
Understand the local operating environment, the existing structures and the people who matter in them.
- 03
Engage
Make contact through an appropriate, lawful community or campaign activity.
- 04
Organise
Coordinate local volunteers and coordinators, with clear assignments and named responsibility.
- 05
Execute
Deliver the planned activity on the ground.
- 06
Document
Capture photographs, video, attendance and field notes at the point it happens.
- 07
Amplify
Turn what happened into communication that reaches the people who were not there.
- 08
Measure
Review reach, participation and outcomes, then start again with better information.
Who runs the loop
Whoever lives there.
The loop is run at the level the activity belongs to. A ward activity is planned, executed, documented and measured by the ward, not reported upward for someone else to run.
- 01North
- 02Zone
- 03State
- 04LGA
- 05Ward
- 06Community
- 07Polling Unit
Our principles
What we will not do.
A grassroots movement is judged first on how it behaves in the communities it enters. These are not aspirations. They are the limits, and the last one is why there are so few numbers on this website.
- 01
We organise lawfully and peacefully.
Every activity we run is a lawful public or community activity. We do not organise, encourage or take part in violence, intimidation or disruption.
- 02
We do not induce voters.
We take no part in the facilitation, financing, recording or logistics of vote buying or inducement of any kind.
- 03
We do not spread disinformation.
We do not produce or circulate false claims. Where we cannot verify something, we do not publish it, including about ourselves.
- 04
We do not run inauthentic digital activity.
No bot amplification and no coordinated inauthentic behaviour. Our digital reach comes from real people who chose to carry the message.
- 05
We protect the people in our network.
Coordinator and volunteer details are held for coordinating the movement's own activity. They are not sold, transferred or handed to third parties.
- 06
We do not collect sensitive data about the public.
No religious, ethnic, health or biometric data on members of the public, and no individual political profiles of private citizens.
- 07
We publish no figure we cannot evidence.
The only numbers on this site are public INEC figures describing the geography we organise in. We do not print counts of our own reach that a reader has no way to check.
If you see the movement, or anyone claiming to act for it, breaking one of these, tell us. A principle nobody can report a breach of is a slogan.
This is the whole method.
Nothing on this page requires an office, a budget or permission. It requires somebody who lives in the community and is willing to run the loop once.