Overview

Lessons from the groundbreaking grassroots campaign that helped launch a new political revolution Rules for Revolutionaries is a bold challenge to the political establishment and the ""rules"" that govern campaign strategy. It tells the story of a breakthrough experiment conducted on the fringes of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign: A technology-driven team empowered volunteers to build and manage the infrastructure to make seventy-five million calls, launch eight million text messages, and hold more than one-hundred thousand public meetings-in an effort to put Bernie Sanders's insurgent campaign over the top. Bond and Exley, digital iconoclasts who have been reshaping the way politics is practiced in America for two decades, have identified twenty-two rules of ""Big Organizing"" that can be used to drive social change movements of any kind. And they tell the inside story of one of the most amazing grassroots political campaigns ever run. Fast-paced, provocative, and profound, Rules for Revolutionaries stands as a liberating challenge to the low expectations and small thinking that dominates too many advocacy, non-profit, and campaigning organizations-and points the way forward to a future where political revolution is truly possible.

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9781603587273

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<em>Rules for Revolutionaries</em>is a lamppost for those who are committed to causes of community uplift, grassroots empowerment, and organizing for good. Insurgents get ready, this is the book for you. <strong>--Nina Turner, assistant professor of African American history, Cuyahoga Community College; national surrogate, Bernie Sanders campaign; former Ohio state senator</strong></p> </p>

<strong><em>Kirkus Reviews</em>-</strong></p> Senior advisers to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign leadership offer pointers on how to start the next movement--or perhaps continue the one they started. By some lights, Sanders should have won the Democratic Party nomination in 2016. By any measure, his 'revolution' was an extraordinary success, taking a little-known, admitted socialist from a small New England state and propelling him to the national spotlight--and, though a half-century's age difference prevailed, capturing the hearts of countless millennials. Bond and Exley, members of a team of 'go-for-broke irregulars, ' did much to propel the Sanders movement in their daily work, much of which hinged on old-fashioned principles of campaigning. As they note, 'when you look at the actual campaign results, the gold standard for moving voters in elections is a volunteer having a conversation with a voter on the doorstep or on the telephone.' How do you get volunteers inspired? How do you organize them, especially when they're working for an out-of-the-mainstream candidate and may incline to the anarchic? How do you keep the bossy ones from cowing the more sheepish among the crew? Bond and Exley, alternating chapters and anecdotes, have plenty of answers: don't ask who wants to be the leader but instead ask 'who wants to get to work.' Make everyone feel welcome. Above all, make everyone feel as if they're taking part in a historic moment, in something big. That said, the authors note, there are some necessary evils, including hiring professionals once an electoral movement gets to a cer tain momentum and courting wealthy donors. Again, they have answers: 'Puritanism is a bad thing!' they admonish, meaning there's not much room in practical politics for purity of procedure--to which they add, helpfully, that the path to change means being 'willing to throw out old practices.' <strong>A lively update of and rejoinder to Saul Alinsky's <em>Rules for Radicals</em>, which, as this book very well may do, has long offered guidance to the right as well as the left</strong>. </p>

Author Information

Becky Bond served as a senior advisor on the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and was an architect of the campaign’s national, volunteer-driven grassroots campaign. Prior to joining the Bernie Sanders campaign, Becky served as political director at CREDO where she was an innovator working at the intersection of organizing, politics, and technology for over a decade. Becky is a cofounder of CREDO SuperPAC, which was named by Mother Jones as one “2012’s Least Horrible Super-PACs” for helping to defeat five sitting Tea Party Republican Congressmen. She lives in San Francisco, California, with the writer, designer, and book artist Emily McVarish. For more information about Becky, Rules for Revolutionaries, and a downloadable, open-source teaching tool to help you implement change in your community, visit www.bigorganizing.com.  Zack Exley served as a senior advisor on the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and was an architect of the campaign’s national, volunteer-driven grassroots campaign. Zack was a union organizer before becoming MoveOn.org’s first organizing director in its campaign to prevent the war in Iraq in 2003. As an early advisor to the Howard Dean campaign, he helped transfer MoveOn.org’s early fundraising and organizing discoveries into presidential politics, and he then served as John Kerry’s director of online fundraising and communications in the general election where his team raised more than $100 million online for the nominee. Subsequently, Zack worked as a consultant to global NGOs, campaigns, and companies, and served as Wikipedia’s chief community officer and chief revenue officer. For more information about Zack, Rules for Revolutionaries, and a downloadable, open-source teaching tool to help you implement change in your community, visit www.bigorganizing.com. 

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