Glossary of Common Terms

Active Listening
The ability to focus completely on a speaker, understand and internalize their message.

Audience
The key constituencies you are trying to target for a campaign.

Building Grassroots Power
A strategy to equip people with knowledge, skills, and opportunities to address significant oppositions. The goal is to secure institutional change to improve lives. Grassroots power building usually, but not always, places particular emphasis on elevating marginalized, disenfranchised, and heavily-impacted communities and individuals. It also gives these populations access to positions of power to facilitate and create positive, effective, and broadly inclusive comprehensive change (Source: USCAN).

Campaign
A time-bound series of tactics that leverage the resources you currently have, or can gain access to, designed to strategically achieve an overall advocacy goal or set of goals. This can be everything from passing a specific piece of legislation to simply elevating the profile of an issue - or both.

Campaign Plan
A written document that maps out key elements of a campaign and guides the subsequent work to achieve specific outcomes. Plans are constantly changing and it is important to never be closed off to making changes or adjustments to adapt to new information, shifting political events, shifting partnerships or other changes.

Civic Engagement
Active participation of individuals in their communities and in the democratic process through activities like voting in elections, participating in public comment periods, and communicating directly with government officials and decision-makers with the goal of addressing issues of public concern and the betterment of society.

Community Mapping
A process to build knowledge of a community. It involves both research methods to understand fact and numbers, as well as relationships and dynamics. It helps tell a story about what is happening in our communities.

Community Organizing
An organizer works with community leaders to build skills and knowledge to advocate collectively for the solutions that the community has identified.

Core Concerns
The core values your audience holds and what barriers may stop them from being engaged.

Diversity
Diversity is often used in reference to race, ethnicity and gender; however, it also includes age, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, socioeconomic status, education, marital status, language, physical appearance and many others. Diversity also includes diversity of thought: ideas, perspectives and values. Diversity is the outcome of inclusion and equity efforts both internally and externally.

Earned Media
Any material written about you or your work that you haven’t paid for or created yourself. Media was publicly gained through social efforts or as a result of media relations.

Entering the Community
To establish a shared understanding of the problem and available solutions in collaboration with the people who are most impacted by the outcome. This is a period of listening and learning (without asks) in order to build a more effective and collaborative campaign.

Equity
Equity is inherently different from equality as it strives to rebalance disparities. It is the fair treatment, access, opportunity and advancement for marginalized people, while identifying and eliminating barriers that have prevented the full participation, engagement and prioritization of marginalized groups.

Field Organizing
Organized efforts to engage with voters or stakeholders directly in their communities.

Goal
The concrete policy or organizing outcome that helps you achieve the vision of your campaign and would be considered a win if obtained.

Grassroots
Ordinary people, as contrasted to elites or grasstops, who take collective action to affect change and whose political power comes from coordinated rather than individual action.

Grasstops
Community leaders and influencers – individuals whose choices and decisions are likely to sway a range of individuals and groups in the community.

Ground-Truthing
Testing your plan’s assumptions by overlaying the real-world factors that may impact your ability to be successful with a set of tactics. This means asking questions like: Do we have a budget? Do we have the necessary field, online, communications staff or capacity to execute?

Growth Mindset
In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.

Inclusion
Inclusion is celebrating, centering and amplifying the perspectives, voices, values and needs of people who experience systemic disadvantages, barriers or mistreatment based on their identities, in order to ensure they feel a sense of belonging. Inclusion is not merely tolerating or accommodating differences; it’s about actively accepting, valuing and honoring them. In our work, inclusion involves not only welcoming diverse perspectives but actively involving them in all decision-making processes. Diversity is what we are, and inclusion is what we do.

Issue Organizing
A problem and solution have already been identified by an organizing, group or individual. An organizer recruits more and more people to collectively advocate towards that solution.

Justice
Justice is both a process and a goal. This process seeks to identify, understand and dismantle systems of oppression that create systemic disadvantages and barriers. The goal is to have full and equal participation of all groups in a society judiciously crafted to meet their needs (both physical and psychological).

Ladder of Engagement
A plan for building the leadership of key members of a campaign using the power of asking. Over a period of time, by continuously educating people involved with your campaign, building a relationship of trust and asking for incrementally more difficult or time-intensive actions, you build leaders and spokespeople for the campaign.

Lobbying
To seek to influence a decision-maker on an issue. (This is the common definition of lobbying. There is a legal definition of lobbying that is different and distinct. For a more nuanced, legal definition of lobbying, see this resource from Alliance for Justice.)

Long-Term Organizational Outcome
How this campaign serves, builds and strengthens your organization in the long-term. This could be a conservation and/or organizational goal such as building the conservation army, fundraising, building critical partnerships, etc.

Message
What should be said, shared, taught, amplified about your campaign in order to engage a broader audience.

Messengers
The organizations or individuals who deliver the message of your campaign.

Movement
Sustained grouping of organizations, affinity groups, leaders and networks that share values, a common narrative, a deep broad base, and a long-term commitment to change.

Non-Opinion Media
The subset of earned media that is written with some degree of objectivity and not an opinion piece.

Opinion Media
The subset of earned media that is expressing an opinion. This can be an Editorial, written by a newspaper’s Editorial Board and not attributed to a specific person, an Op-Ed, which is an opinion piece written by a specific person or people, or a letter-to-the-editor, a short piece written by an individual usually in response to an Editorial or a news story previously printed by a news outlet.

Organizing
Inspiring and empowering individuals to work together towards a shared political objective by using their collective power to influence decision makers. Organizers select tactics that are aimed at either building your collective power, or persuading a decision maker.

Paid Media
As a contrast to earned media, this is media that you pay for in order to distribute your message, such as paid advertisements in print or online publications, on social media.

Phone Banking
Calling a large volume of people in order to generate actions on a campaign.

Pitch
A brief description of a newsworthy event, activity, or resource meant to generate media interest in a particular story.

Power Mapping
Identifying the specific people, organizations or business which have the ability to strongly influence your target decision-maker. This is particularly valuable in meeting any short-term policy goals.

Privilege
A set of unearned benefits given to people who fit into a specific social group.

Rap
A script that briefly outlines a campaign narrative in an effort to motivate some action.

Readiness
The knowledge and comfort level your audience has around an issue. It is important to know where your audience stands on an issue and if they would be/what it would take for them to be motivated to take action.

Reporting
Sharing, usually through some predetermined system, the specific metrics that have been achieved on the campaign.

Stakeholder Mapping
Identifying the key stakeholders who are most impacted by the problem or issue that is being addressed by the campaign.

Strategy
The broad categories of things campaigns do to persuade a person or group of people to do something that he/she/they is reluctant to do or are opposed to doing. In order to win on our campaign goal, certain key levers will need to be influenced.

Social Justice
A concept of fair and just relations between the individual and society. This is measured by the explicit and tacit terms for the distribution of power, wealth, education, healthcare, and other opportunities for personal activity and social privileges (Source: USCAN).

Social Sector
The group of organizations that consist of both nonprofit and philanthropic organizations (Source: USCAN).

Structural Racism
The arrangement of institutional, interpersonal, historical, and cultural dynamics in a way that consistently produces advantage for whites and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color. It illuminates that racism exists without the presence of individual actors because it is systemically embedded. When the United States was founded, racist principles were codified in governance structures and policies. As a result, racism is embedded in institutions, structures, and social relations across American society (Source: USCAN).

Tabling
Collecting petition signatures or another grassroots action. This is often called petitioning, postcarding, or clipboarding. It is called “tabling” most frequently due to the common use of tables at public events to display information and materials.

Target
A key decision-maker who we are attempting to influence on our campaign. This can be a Member of Congress, the President, a Governor, a State Legislator, a State or Federal Agency head, etc.

Tactics
The specific actions that you take on a campaign.

Theme
The big picture you want to appeal to your audience.

Transactional Relationships
Based in quid pro quo, or “this for that.” At best, transactional relationships are a balance of distinct interests between the parties. Often, one party presumes a common interest that does not exist, and is likely to alienate the other as a result.

Transformational relationships
Based on an expectation of learning, growth, and change as a result of working together. They are based on trust and openness. As a rule, they are slower to develop, stronger, and more durable than transactional relationships.