<aside> 💡 To win our campaigns, we must consider a range of social forces beyond “us vs. our target”

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Campaigns are rarely won by overpowering or convincing our target. We win by undermining their power through engaging a broad range of allies and shifting support toward us, weakening their pillars of power. Rather than viewing our strategy as just “us” vs “them,” this tool maps people and groups along a spectrum of support, helping us identify action opportunities, secondary targets, and key allies.

In between us, the campaign organizers, and our target, we can identify individuals, groups, and constituencies across levels of support:

• Active Support - those who agree with us and are taking action alongside us
• Passive Support - those who agree with us but aren’t doing anything about it (yet!)
• Neutral - those who aren’t sure, don’t care, and/or are uninformed
• Passive Opposition - those who disagree with us but aren’t doing anything to stop us
• Active Opposition - those who disagree with us and taking action against us

We can map the spectrum of support at any stage of our campaign. When mapping, it’s helpful to be as specific as possible. Instead of “churches,” we might have “progressive pastors of downtown churches” as passive support and “conservative megachurch newsletter writers” as active opposition. As much as possible, we should map support based on observations, actions, and evidence, not just our assumptions.

What’s key here is that power is built by shifting groups one wedge to the left — toward us — to undermine support for our target. Our strategy aim is not to move every group into active support all at once. Change is often won by moving key groups one step in our direction, from active opposition to passive opposition, passive opposition to neutral, etc. In this way, we can win campaigns and political struggles without our direct opponents having a ‘change of heart.’

Guiding questions to evaluate the spectrum of support:

• Who can influence or force our campaign target to make the change we’re demanding? Who has leverage? This could look like a someone moving from active opposition to passive opposition or a group from neutral to passive support, etc. These key people are referred to elsewhere here as “secondary targets.”
• Where are opportunities to grow allies? This could look like creating more action opportunities for active supporters and learning what’s keeping passive supporters from becoming active.
• How can we isolate our active opposition? What concerns or interests can be addressed among passive opposition to move them to neutral or at least prevent them from becoming active?

Sometimes our campaigns also have a villain. A villain might have a little or a lot of power to change the the status quo, but we don’t believe any amount of leverage will force them to change their behavior. For this reason, our villain is not our target. For moveable people on the spectrum of support, we highlight the contrast between ourselves and the villain, forcing others to choose between supporting them or supporting our demand.

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