When you’re working to influence public policy, one of the most powerful tools at your disposal is building and demonstrating widespread public support for your issue. Even if you don’t have as much power or influence as the groups pushing against your proposals, decision-makers care about what the public thinks. If you’re working on issues that affect the student body, there are always a ton of students who care and are willing to take action – by signing a petition or postcard, writing a letter, or making a phone call.
Common types of grassroots actions:
- Petitions and postcards – This is often the most effective way to get a large number of people to take action. With a good plan and enough volunteers involved, you can collect thousands of postcards or petition signatures. These are also great tactics for recruiting volunteers, if you just add a check-box to your postcard or petition that says “Yes, I want to volunteer.”
- Letter-writing – Getting students to write hand-written letters is a way to convey compelling personal stories of how a problem really impacts students. Hand-written letters have a bigger impact on legislators than petitions, since they show a greater level of commitment from the writer and convey your message in a more tangible way. But they take a lot more effort, so you won’t be able to collect as many of them.
- Phone calls – You can organize a tabling event where you stop passers-by and ask them to make a short phone call to a decision-maker. If you generate a lot of phone calls in a short amount of time, you can guarantee the issue will get noticed by your decision-maker. These are a good tactic when the timeline is urgent.
- Online petitions – Online actions work best if you have a very large list of people you can email, if you can get a lot of faculty or student organizations to forward an email to their classes or members, or if you use tools like Facebook to draw a lot of students to your website. Like regular petitions and postcards, online petitions can be a good tool to get a ton of people to take action. However, this tactic lacks the face-to-face interaction that can help build visibility for your campaign and your student government.
- Photo petitions or video petitions – These are a great way to convey your message in a creative way, while also demonstrating widespread public support. For example, to highlight the problem of student debt you could get students to snap a photo holding up a sign listing the amount of student loan debt they have.
- Sign a prop or banner – Like photo petitions, this is another way for petitions to convey your message in a creative way. For example, you could get hundreds of students to sign a banner that says “Support Student Aid.”
- Make it an event – Never just have an empty table with some clipboards and petition sheets. Bring out some candy or cookies, play music, make a banner and maybe some other big props, have volunteers wear t-shirts for the campaign, etc. Make it fun!
- Don’t stand behind the table – Tabling is about asking as many people as possible to take action. So set up on the quad or a high-traffic area, stand in front of the table, actively greet passers-by, and have a quick intro question you can use to stop people like “Hi, do you have a second to save student aid?”
- Know your goal and how many volunteers you need – One volunteer can collect an average of 10-15 petition signatures in an hour. So, if your goal is collect 100 petition signatures, then you need roughly 10 volunteer-hours. In other words, 5 volunteers could table for 2 hours. Hot tip: recruit twice as many volunteer-hours as you need to hit your goal, because inevitably some volunteers will bail.
- Invite the media – If you have a lot of volunteers and good visibility, tabling events are a great way to get your campus paper or local media to cover your campaign.