Everything You Need To Know About Digital Organizing in 2027

Digital organizing works when each ask is only slightly harder than the last. A follower signs a pledge. The signer joins a training call. The trainee takes a phone banking shift. A few months later, that same person runs their own volunteer team.

That’s the ladder of engagement, and it’s how political campaigns, advocacy groups, unions, and nonprofits turn online attention into votes, signatures, and turnout.

You’ve probably heard the story about the frog in slowly heating water. It’s usually told as a warning. Organizers can read it the other way: Ask for a small enough change in behavior, and people say yes. Keep each next step small, and over time folks take actions they’d never have agreed to on day one. The smaller the friction, the higher the conversion.

As Hester Leyser, Mobilization Director for MJ Hegar for US Senate, puts it, “Suddenly you’ve got somebody doing really incredible work for you all the time even if they initially only just followed you on Twitter.”

Small steps to big change aka “the ladder of engagement”. Illustration credit: Open Peeps by Pablo Stanley

The hard part isn’t getting seen. Your posts reach people, and your emails get opened. The hard part is turning those views into shifts, signatures, and votes, while your lists sit in three tools that don’t talk to each other.

Below, I’ll walk through how volunteer recruitment, texting, calling, events, and relational outreach fit together at each rung of the ladder, and which tools move people up without a spreadsheet export in between.

What is digital organizing?

Digital organizing is the practice of using online and mobile channels, like texting, calling, email, social media, virtual events, and relational apps, to recruit supporters and move them into action. Political campaigns, advocacy groups, unions, and nonprofits use it to turn followers into volunteers, voters, donors, and leaders, one small ask at a time.

Digital organizing uses virtual tools to move passive citizens (eg., social media followers) into active stakeholders in your organization (eg., phone bank host) who take meaningful actions towards electoral change.

The ladder of engagement is an organizing framework designed around this approach, developing supporters into volunteers and volunteers into invested stakeholders through a series of steps that are only slightly more difficult than the previous one.

The digital engagement tactics in the ladder of engagement span three areas:

1. Identification (and recruitment)
2. Engagement
3. Activation of supporters.

Here’s what that looks like on a real campaign, and where a unified outreach platform fits at each rung.

The ladder of engagement in action

Here’s how the ladder worked for the MJ Hegar for US Senate campaign in 2020:

1. Step 1: A supporter clicks a link on Twitter and registers on the campaign website.
2. Step 2: The campaign asks them to join a volunteer training call.
3. Step 3: Attendees are asked to join a phone banking shift.
4. Step 4: Volunteers who attend the shift are asked to commit to a regular weekly shift.
5. Step 5: Regular volunteers are asked to help train new volunteers.
6. Step 6: Super-volunteers who’ve been helping with training are asked to lead their own training.

Every step is a small jump from the one before it. Nobody was asked to host a phone bank on day one.

The five rungs and the ask that fits each one

Most organizations can sort their supporters into five rungs. Each rung has a natural next ask and a channel that makes saying yes easy.

How to tell someone is ready for the next rung

Watch what people do, not how excited they sound. A supporter who replies to two texts in a row, or a volunteer who finishes three shifts without a reminder, is telling you they’re ready. Tag those actions on the contact record so you can sort people by rung and send the next ask to the right group.

People stall, too. When someone hasn’t moved in a couple of months, don’t jump them two rungs. Offer a smaller ask at the same level, like a one-hour shift instead of a weekly one, and thank them for what they’ve already done.

Tools built for member and supporter mobilization track these steps for you, so the next ask goes out when someone is ready, not when a staffer remembers.

Identifying and recruiting potential supporters

Using owned media

“Go where your people are. Don’t go where you think people have to be online,”

– Stefan Smith, Online Engagement Director for Pete Buttigieg

Don’t go to TikTok because you want to target Gen Z. Don’t go to X or Bluesky because that’s where ‘the influencers’ are.

Find out where your audience hangs out.

That may be on Pinterest, subreddits, or closed Facebook groups. Find those spaces, build your presence, and create opportunities for people to join you.

Motivate folks to share their email, phone number, and zip code through different creative asks.

MJ Hegar campaign collects supporter details by asking them to pledge to vote.

The pledge asked Texans to commit to vote in the July 14, 2020 runoff, make a plan to get to the polls, and sign up for reminders.

Allison Fine motivates visitors who click through to the campaign website to share their details by inviting them to a “virtual living room conversation”.

The objective behind both asks is to identify and recruit supporters.

However, they target audiences across different levels of engagement.

A less committed supporter might be open to pledging a vote, while a strong supporter would be happy to join a live event. The idea is to be as flexible as you can with your asks to appeal to a diverse audience.

Recruiting supporters through town halls hosted via Mobilize.

Flake rates will be high for new signups. Email and SMS reminders help ensure people who sign up follow through on their commitment.

For example, sending out a personal SMS before an event can boost attendance by serving as a helpful reminder and making supporters feel valued.

If you have the capacity, send a personal nudge using peer to peer texts, but if you’re pressed for volunteers and time, a broadcast SMS will still work.

To avoid the hassle of shuffling contacts between multiple tools, build a tech stack with digital tools that work well together.

For example. Allison Fine’s “virtual living room conversation” is set up on Action Network.

Connecting CallHub to Action Network lets you add new signups directly to a peer to peer texting or SMS broadcast campaign without exporting and importing spreadsheets.

Once you get folks to attend a call, make the slightly more difficult request for them to sign up for a volunteer shift. Some of them have the potential to become volunteer leaders who can take up leadership roles in your organization.

And it’s also okay that most folks will be too busy to volunteer their time. Keep them in the loop with webinars, town halls, community-building calls, and live events, and smaller actions like signing petitions.

Use paid channels to identify supporters

Paid ads are how most organizations reach supporters they can’t find organically, and nonprofits keep spending more on them. The 2026 M+R Benchmarks Study found that nonprofit digital ad spend rose 18% in 2025, with organizations putting $0.10 into digital ads for every dollar raised online.

Where that money should go depends on what you want the ad to do:

• Building your list: 71% of lead generation spend went to social media. Meta still matters most for nonprofits, while spend on TikTok and Snapchat fell.
• Raising money: Search and social together took more than two-thirds of direct fundraising spend.
• Brand awareness: The most varied mix, with social media at 44% and almost every other channel playing a part.

AI is changing where ads pay off. M+R saw display and video spend drop as AI answers pull readers away from publisher websites, while nonprofits more than doubled their spend on Google’s multi-channel formats like Performance Max. Organic search traffic to nonprofit websites also declined through 2025, though it still brought in 39% of all visits.

Two things decide whether ad spend turns into supporters: Who sees the ad, and what happens after they click.

Accurate targeting

Ads only work when they reach the right people with the right message. If you’re building custom audiences, data vendors like L2Political and TargetSmart can supply targeted voter lists or add phone numbers and other data points to the lists you already have.

Use the same list in your ads platform and your outreach tool. That way, the people who click an ad on Monday can get a text or a call from a volunteer by Thursday.

Conversion-optimized landing pages

Your landing page is the first thing visitors see after they click an ad, so make the next step obvious. The example above compares the 2020 Senate primary volunteer pages for MJ Hegar and Royce West.

The page on the left says what the campaign needs and why, next to a large, legible form. On the right, visitors have to scroll down and click through to another page before they can sign up. The lower the friction for visitors, the higher your conversion rates will be.

Check your pages on a phone, too. In the 2026 M+R study, 52% of nonprofit website visits came from mobile devices, but 11% of desktop visitors completed a gift on the main donation page, compared to 8% on mobile. If the form is hard to fill in with a thumb, you’re paying for clicks that never convert.

Suggested reading:

1. How to set up your Election Campaign website
2. Mastering the Art of Community Organizing: 6 Essential Steps for Success
3. Community Organizing: Important strategies to keep in Mind
4. Step by step guide to building a great nonprofit website (with examples for inspiration)

Creative examples of Digital Organizing for inspiration

Sunrise School

Sunrise Movement, an early champion of the Green New Deal launched the “Sunrise School”, a digital organizing training program where supporters across the country can apply to learn skills ranging from visual art, video production, and graphic design as tools for organizing. Sunrise Movement understood the pulse of their audience and created a way for them to channel their energies into something productive and positive during the 2020 lockdowns. That’s why a program that organizers expected to draw around 600 participants attracted interest from more than 3,500 people.

Here are 5 more organizations conducting digital organizing training:

• Mobilization Lab
• Movement School
• Social Movement Technologies
• Netroots Nation
• Power Labs

Virtual Action Center by DCCC

DCCC launched a virtual action center to engage new supporters online. Interested volunteers can take a range of actions on the action center, from following DCCC on social media to phone banking or hosting their own event. DCCC’s goal? To “enlist an online volunteer army”. This builds on the previous tactic of giving supporters more flexibility in how they engage with your campaign.

Engaging supporters for long term retention

Once you bring folks into the fold of the campaign, different supporters will require different levels of engagement.

That supporter who signed up for a phone banking shift? Follow-up with an ask to commit to two shifts every week. First-time event attendee? Invite to a weekly town hall.

For committed volunteers you’re trying to move up the ladder of engagement, phone calls will help you have more effective, persuasive conversations. People can be mean over a text, but when folks are listening to you talk, they’re actively engaged, and you stand a higher chance of getting them to take higher-barrier actions.

Once they’re committed, SMS texts are a personal, quick, non-intrusive way to confirm before the shift, and automated reminder workflows can send them for you.

‘“Hey James, just want to make sure you have the Zoom link for the 5 pm shift. 😀”

How to keep phone and text banking volunteers engaged

Volunteers stay when the work feels easy, social, and fits their schedule. Here’s how to get all three:

• Train them before their first shift. Not everyone is comfortable with new tools, and a confusing first shift is often the last one. Start with something as simple as this phone banking guide and onboarding video from Democrats Abroad, followed by a short practice call.
• Give them help in real time. Set up a Slack, Discord, or WhatsApp group where volunteers can ask questions during a shift, or name one staff contact they can reach. Remote volunteers can’t lean over to the person next to them to ask for help.
• Make shifts social. Host virtual phone banking parties where volunteers join a Zoom call and spend a few minutes getting to know each other before and after the shift. Special guests help, too. In 2020, the Warren campaign saw a spike in registrations when it announced that campaign manager Roger Lau would join the phone bank.
• Let them pick their hours. Democrats Abroad had live campaigns running across multiple states in CallHub. A volunteer could log in when they had spare time, see the list of live campaigns, and join any that interested them. With unlimited volunteer accounts, you don’t have to ration logins. Read the full story of how Democrats Abroad managed their distributed phone banking efforts.
• Prepare them for “now’s not a good time.” Volunteers will hear it a lot. Teach them to ask for a better time and log it. In CallHub’s call center software, the volunteer can schedule a follow-up call, and the dialer connects them to the contact at that time.

Call center screen showing follow-up scheduling for busy contacts

For a step-by-step plan, the volunteer retention playbook for campaigns covers onboarding, recognition, and shift scheduling in more detail.

Some supporters will be too busy to give time to a phone or text bank. Use regular events to keep them close.

In 2020, New York State Senator David Carlucci hosted two Facebook Live sessions every week, a virtual town hall of sorts, often with special guests joining him to talk about local issues.

Source: David Carlucci on Facebook

For live events, try Gatheround (formerly Icebreaker) for community-building and Streamlabs for multi-platform streaming.

If you don’t have the capacity for events or a weekly town hall, try a lighter approach as the one students at American University used.

American University students passed around digital flyers to urge the university to divest from fossil fuels. Each member sent the flyer to at least five of their contacts to explain the student body vote. Each contact was then nudged to spread the word on social media, through texts, and in direct messages.

Your engagement tactic could be a weekly livestream, an engaging flyer, an occasional personal email, or any of the hundreds of ideas on the Mobilize events page. Whatever you choose, keep the relationship alive between asks.

Related reading: How 350.org kept supporters engaged with text conversations, petitions, and art builds before activating them to join a rally.

Activating supporters to become stakeholders

Supporters who’ve regularly been engaging with you can be activated to take slightly more difficult actions that bring more people into the fold of the campaign or take up opportunities that create a larger impact. These are actions that have a direct impact on the ballot.

Use relational organizing to engage contact circles of supporters

For most folks, that could mean a relational organizing app they download to share regular updates with friends and family.

CallHub’s Relational Organizing and other relational apps, such as Impactive, let folks map their contact list to the voter list for that constituency to identify friends and family members in the electorate who are registered to vote. Templated text messages and social media updates make it easy for supporters to personalize them and quickly share them within their network.

Ready to revolutionize the way you organize online? See how Relational Organizing will help you build real connections and drive results.

Tip: Ask volunteers before and after a shift to reach out to 5 contacts and ask them to register to vote, share an update on social media, call a member of Congress, become a volunteer, or get out the vote. Volunteers are more likely to take action as part of a group than on their own much later. Contacts are also more likely to follow through on a request from someone they know than from a stranger.

Related reading: Relational organizing GOTV: A practical field guide

Lead up to a fundraising ask

While fundraising happens across the ladder of engagement, it’s still a high-barrier ask that requires folks to actively support your campaign. And in most races, winning or losing comes down to how much money you have in the campaign coffer.

The ladder of engagement applies to your fundraising tactics as well.

1. In 2020, Bernie’s campaign saw donations increase when they made the ask right after a supporter pledged to vote for the candidate. The campaign sent out emails to supporters asking them to fill out a form to pledge support. On submission, the form redirected them to a donation page.
2. Mobilize reported in 2020 that 17% of supporters donate when asked after they sign up for a shift.

This approach can be used across multiple modes of engagement. If you are collecting petition signatures, make your fundraising ask right after a supporter submits it. The initial effort to support the campaign makes people more invested and more likely to take further action.

Fundraising tip: Supporters increasingly look for campaign information on your website. The 2026 M+R Benchmarks Study found that organic (unpaid) search brought in 39% of visits to nonprofit websites in 2025, but only 1.6% of all website visitors donated. Start building relationships with visitors from the moment they land on your site. And use the ladder of engagement to multiply your asks. Anedot found that almost 25% of donors took additional action by making their donations recurring or giving to a similar organization when asked after their initial donation.

Maximize volunteer recruitment through network effects

Democrats Abroad volunteers during a phone bank

Network effects play a crucial role in getting you more phone and text banking volunteers. Mobilize reported in 2020 that organizations signing up with them saw a 38% uptick in shifts, primarily owing to their large network of volunteers and the ease of discoverability for events from different organizations. Every time a volunteer signs up for a shift, the platform shows them similar events that might interest them. You can also co-host events with partner organizations so each of your events appears in each other’s timelines.

For volunteers who’ve consistently taken up shifts, ask them to help with volunteer training, and gradually move them to lead their own training efforts.

Tip: Get on more frequent calls with your volunteer leaders. Hopping on quick calls to discuss ideas makes folks more invested and active stakeholders in your campaign.

Related reading: How to plan a virtual event (with examples)

Digital organizing tools: Build a stack that talks to each other

The best digital organizing stack is the one where a supporter’s history follows them up the ladder. When the person who signed your petition gets a text, and the volunteer who answered that text gets a shift invite, without anyone exporting a spreadsheet, you’ve built a ladder people can actually climb.

Start by matching each job to a channel:

Then connect it to the place your list lives. CallHub syncs with NGP VAN, EveryAction, NationBuilder, Action Network, and New/Mode, along with other CRM integrations. Survey answers and tags flow back to each contact record, so you can build segments by rung and track every channel in one unified dashboard.

Use AI for the busywork, not the relationship. AI is good at drafting script variations, suggesting replies to common text responses, and summarizing call notes. CallHub’s Elevate suggests replies for peer-to-peer texting so volunteers can answer faster. Have a person review anything that goes out under your name, and keep the actual asks human. People climb the ladder because someone they trust asked them to.

Not sure where to start? The free Unified Strategy Builder maps out a multichannel outreach workflow for your type of organization.

Final thoughts

No single ladder works for every organization. In 2020, the Bernie campaign gamified its virtual events, and congressional candidate Allison Fine sent weekly newsletters made to look like they came off a Smith Corona typewriter. Both worked because they fit their audience.

Three things hold true no matter what your ladder looks like:

1. Keep every ask small. Move people one rung at a time.
2. Follow up across channels. People not picking up the phone? Follow up with a text message letting them know why you called.
3. Keep your data connected. Every action should land on the contact record, so the next ask fits the person.

The ladder works the same way whether you’re running a political campaign, an advocacy organization, a union, or a nonprofit. Want to see how it would work with your own lists and volunteers? Talk to a CallHub expert.

Appreciation:

We’re deeply grateful to the teams at ANOTHERACRONYM, Blueprints for Change, Mobilize, MobLab, Higher Ground Labs, and M+R for creating content that inspires folks to think strategically about bringing power to the people.

Frequently asked questions

What is digital organizing?

Digital organizing uses online and mobile channels, like texting, calling, email, social media, and virtual events, to recruit supporters and move them into action. Campaigns, advocacy groups, unions, and nonprofits use it to turn followers into volunteers, voters, donors, and leaders.

What are the levels of the ladder of engagement?

Most organizations use five rungs: Follower, supporter, volunteer, regular, and leader. Each rung has a next ask that is only slightly harder than the last, like moving from signing a pledge to joining a training call. Some frameworks group these into three stages: Identifying, engaging, and activating supporters.

What tools do digital organizers use?

Digital organizers typically combine peer-to-peer texting, mass texting, phone banking, email, event tools, and relational organizing apps, connected to a CRM such as NGP VAN, EveryAction, or Action Network. The key is integration, so every action a supporter takes lands on one contact record.

What’s the difference between digital organizing and relational organizing?

Digital organizing is the broader practice of organizing through online and mobile channels. Relational organizing is one tactic within it, where supporters reach out to people they already know, such as friends, family, and coworkers. It usually sits at the top of the ladder because it asks supporters to put their own relationships on the line.

How do you move a supporter up the ladder of engagement?

Make the next ask small, specific, and well timed. Ask right after someone takes an action, like requesting a donation after a shift signup, and follow up on the channel they responded to. Track each action on the contact record so you know who is ready for the next rung.