In 2021, more restrictive abortions rights bills were passed by state legislatures than in any year since Roe v. Wade. With Roe v. Wade itself now being threatened to be rolled back, Women’s March knew they needed to galvanize women and allies fast. With the pandemic still preventing in-person gatherings, Women’s March came to Mobilize with the idea to hold a series of educational trainings to teach and galvanize their supporters.
The following case study walks through how Women’s March and Mobilize worked together to recruit supporters, engage them in a series of events, and drive turnout to help Women’s March exceed their attendee goal by 400% and their reach goal by 50%.
About Women's March
Women’s March is a women-led movement formed in January of 2017 with the mission to harness the political power of diverse women and their communities to create transformative social change: a feminist future.
As an organization, Women’s March provides intersectional education on a diverse range of issues and creates entry points for new grassroots activists and organizers to engage in their local communities through trainings, outreach programs, and events.
The series
With record-breaking state-level abortion restrictions in 2021, Women’s March engaged Mobilize in Fall 2021 to launch an experiential virtual political education series: the Feminist Futures Institute. Through eight interactive, story-based digital events, The Feminist Futures series focused on training, educating, and exploring the question: What does a feminist future look like?
The goal
Women’s March set a goal of 10,000 unique supporters signing up for the Feminist Futures series, with the additional goal of reaching 100,000 people through streaming and recording of this series. Achieving a large reach for this series was important to ensure that a significant number of Women’s March supporters would be able to build hard skills around the restrictions happening where they live, across the country, and develop resilient communities to fight back.
"Mobilize gave us the flexibility to quickly and easily scale our Feminist Future series to reach thousands of people and gave us the tools and automations to ensure our supporters stayed plugged in and engaged."
- Aquib Yacoob, Women's March
The how
Women’s March harnessed Mobilize to run the Feminist Futures series by creating one main event with eight different sessions offered. The Mobilize platform allowed Women’s March to register supporters, communicate information about upcoming sessions, utilize automated reminders and event suggestions to optimize turnout, as well as take advantage of network features like promotions to meet their reach goal. Over 13% of Feminist Future signups came from Mobilize features, including organizations promoting this event (including Mobilize.us), supporters sharing the event with their social networks (5% of all signups), and automated event suggestions (7% of all signups). Additionally, Mobilize’s ability to host virtual events at scale made it possible to coordinate and manage thousands of signups quickly and efficiently.
Once the Feminist Futures series had been planned and the event was created in Mobilize, recruitment began. Using multiple recruitment channels, Women’s March successfully recruited both new and ongoing supporters to their Feminist Futures series. This series happened to coincide with Texas enacting SB8 in September of 2021, one of the most restrictive abortion rights bills passed in 2021. Due to this, the Women’s March website drove a lot of traffic and engagement to this series. Women’s March also made use of their large email list and sent out a kick-off email announcing the series, as well as a midway recruitment email to re-engage their audience.
Along with traditional means of recruitment, Women’s March made use of social media including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok to reach new attendees. For TikTok, they used segments from their previous series to produce promotional clips for TikTok audiences. Feminist Futures series presenters also shared out the event on social media, tapping into their own audiences.
The results
Women’s March exceed their goals for the Feminist Futures series, by a lot. By the end of the series, there were over 39k sign-ups for the Mobilize event exceeding their goal of 10,000 attendees by nearly 4X. Women’s March also exceeded their 100,000 person reach goal by 50%!
With this level of engagement, Women’s March was able to funnel these supporters (including a lot of new folks) into future events and activities. This included their Women2Women Circles groups, a volunteer-led community based groups; Digital Defenders, a program that trains activists to fight alt-right disinformation, and coalition and partner work across the country. These supporters are now primed and ready to engage in the 2022 midterm election cycle. Based on the success of the Feminist Futures series, Women’s March is already planning similar initiatives for the future - using Mobilize to help optimize signups and recruit new supporters every step of the way.
Take-aways
- Mobilize is an adaptive tool to organize and scale virtual or in-person events seamlessly — Mobilize’s automated nudges and reminders remove a lot of the behind-the-scenes work typically done manually by staff.
- Mobilize was helpful for remaining adaptable when Women’s March needed to swap out video links and communicate with attendees regarding changes.
- Women’s March was able to use Mobilize’s automated post-event feedback feature to gather helpful information and learn that their supporter experience was overwhelmingly positive. Our post-event feedback provides great insights into how your supporters are receiving your events, as well as actions to take to make improvements in future engagement opportunities.
- By having a plan for incorporating supporters into future events and activities after the series wrapped, Women’s March was able to encourage supporters to deepen their relationship with the organization.
- Women’s March found success surpassing their recruitment goals by making use of multi-channel recruitment, lean on their speakers and guests to share with their social networks, and using Mobilize’s built in network and promotions features to optimize turnout.
Links
Women's March Feminist Futures
