Participation for Transformation with Ned Howey of Tectonica

Ned Howey (he/him) is the co-founder and CEO of Tectonica Digital Campaign Solutions, where he has led the social impact company’s growth as it has worked across over 500 projects in 40 countries. His new book, Fixing Our Democracies and Winning Elections in The Age of Junk Politics - A Guide to Transformational Campaigning, was published in partnership with Tectonica and Ecanvasser in June 2024 and can be downloaded for free here. If you’d like to hear more about Ned’s background and story, as well as the book, check out his recent interview on The Great Battlefield Podcast with Nathaniel G. Pearlman.

Tectonica Digital Campaign Solutions is a movement building agency based in Barcelona, Spain. Tectonica offers a broad array of strategic, creative and technological services to help organizations, political parties, candidates and unions unlock transformational opportunities, build movement infrastructure, and run successful social and political campaigns rooted in people-power. As part of its social mission, Tectonica hosts the Tectonica Organising Network (TON): a community of progressive campaigners working and innovating to win social and political change through people-based power. 

Transformative Electoral Campaigning

MOLLY So you just published this book, you and Tectonica! One of the core concepts is “transformational campaigning,” specifically related to electoral work. From this book and from your own experience and perspective, what do you mean by transformational electoral campaigning? 

NED We have this divide of describing different types of work and approaches, between the transactional and the transformational. That's very baked into community organizing practices and that way of thinking about things, but it's not as present in the work of electoral campaigns.

[Marshall] Ganz has a lot of work out there about transformational leadership. Definitely Hahrie Han's 2014 book [How Organizations Develop Activists] is very strong at defining and connecting “mobilizing” with transactional practices and “organizing” with transformational practices. Electoral campaigns, because of the short cycles, generally are very transactional. By nature, they're going to be about mobilizing more than anything else.

That said, I do fundamentally believe that transformational practice happens in electoral campaigns. Sometimes people will just think, oh, you are talking about just changing voters or constituents. But the reality is that transformational practice is not just change. And oftentimes it doesn't mean, for example, moving somebody's core beliefs. In fact, I'd say it really is about moving from a place of core beliefs. It's actually people aligning with their identity and their core beliefs, or un-layering their core beliefs, or becoming more authentic with themselves or realizing that a lot of their issues or policy beliefs are not necessarily connected with their core beliefs, somehow it's gotten mixed up. And discovering for example that, hey, you know what? LBGTQ rights are actually aligned with true Christian values.

We're not necessarily changing somebody's beliefs, but how people relate to their beliefs. We're transforming the way that people relate in the world, their identity, and the belief systems that they have, in the work that's being done.

Without that, I don't think our electoral practices, our models, work—which is what I tried to demonstrate in the book. At the end of the day, what really makes transformational practice different is that your leadership, your constituents, anyone who's involved is basically connected in some way through a higher purpose. 

MOLLY Electoral campaigns run on these very short, fast cycles. But we can also have a longer arc that travels through many electoral campaigns. What do you think are the potential cumulative benefits, or new possibilities, opened by practicing transformational campaigning in the long-term?

NED I don't see democracy as just an exchange of ideas: people get together, whoever has the best idea is what we vote for, and it's a survey in time of what people think. I think that there is an actual process, and the process itself has value. And if that process is transformative because the process is valued, then the process is part of the product of democracy, because it shifts and changes us and transforms us in ways that are needed to have better outcomes, better agreements. And without that, I don't believe we have democracy. 

That's a really radical statement. But if we take our imagination to the wildest extreme, which is we have no electoral campaigning, everybody just goes out and there's an AI that can perfectly cumulate exactly what everybody thinks—this is a lot of like, “direct democracy,” people think we're going to create some app that's going to do this—what we actually lose is the process of democracy. And that process is where we tap into the deepest and best parts of our human nature, our social nature and solidarity and love and all this stuff, and we actually can develop better outcomes for our group. And that's where transformational practice plays a really deep role, an important role. I don't think it's democracy without some degree of transformational possibility.

MOLLY And that's not just a theoretical, future thing, the AI app that creates “direct democracy.” I'm thinking about Italian and Spanish politics in the last 10 years, the Five Star Movement and Podemos. They talked about direct digital democracy, but in practice it’s just like, vote for your leaders on an app.

NED And that’s very cool, if it increases accessibility and participation, but way cooler if people actually have a way to connect with each other and have something that's actual discussion, actual participation. Because their beliefs are not just formed by being told an idea and then “yes,” ”no.” Up vote, down vote. Beliefs are formed by people participating in some way, large or small. They’re formed in part by experience, and the opportunity to have that creation of experience is really what facilitates democracy. The process itself of democracy is what makes democracy. If we take the trend right now of political innovation where things become continually more transactional, if I take that to its ultimate infinite end, it no longer is democracy.

So, transformational campaigning is the way in which experience and participation can change us, not just as individuals, but as societies and groups. To fundamentally shift and bring us to better democratic processes that can have better outcomes because we've shifted along with the process itself. Again, we don't have to actually reinvent democracy to do this. We just have to be intentional about the values of the process that we have. 

That's why I really wanted to feature Gwenn Craig’s story [legendary organizer and queer elder who helped defeat California's anti-gay Proposition 6 in 1978] at the start of the book. They hadn't had a single LGBTQ victory they could point to and say, is it even worth us to go out and try to make this change as our communities are being attacked? And they did something very brave. 

[Fixing Our Democracies and Winning Elections in the Age of Junk Politics, page 35]

Gwenn Craig was asked by [Harvey] Milk to be the co-Campaign Manager of the effort to defeat the initiative. The campaign brought LGBTQAI+ and supportive volunteers across California—often in rural and conservative places—to knock on doors in 1978. I asked Gwenn if they thought they could change people’s beliefs and she responded to me with this:

“Unequivocally YES. We sent our canvassers out to talk to the voters they encountered with scripts that asked them what they thought about the Briggs Initiative and then asked if they realized that the initiative would do x, y, and z, and get their reactions to the facts that they were presented with. We created such scripts with the belief that we could change their attitudes about the initiative if they realized such facts as that a) gay and lesbian teachers would lose their jobs based only on their own personal identity and b) even non-gay teachers and school workers would lose their jobs if they supported the rights of LGBTQA+ people.

Moreover, we believed that there were extremely powerful and effective attributes from the very fact that the voters we encountered were being given the opportunity to address a subject matter that they rarely had the ability to discuss, debate or even hear about from someone they might presume to be gay or lesbian, or at least an ally. These brief encounters seemed to break down barriers, bring about some inkling of familiarity, and perhaps even destroy some of the stereotypes that John Briggs was depending on for the passage of his heinous legislation. In those few minutes of a short exchange, perhaps those voters could see that this canvasser was not unlike their coworker, their next door neighbor, or the deacon in their church. They got to have that moment of humanity at their front door and that might have made more of a difference than anything else."

The initiative was defeated and the campaign enters history as the first such victory for LGBTQAI+ rights.

NED That story is about how being able to see that human in front of you is able to provide an opportunity, right in that interaction, that human connection, the transformational potential that happens to the person who's having their door knocked and the person knocking the door. There's all kinds of elements in the book that I think feed into making [these connections] more transformational. But at the end of the day, the way that we do this is that we first transform ourselves and then we present ourselves before others.

Notes from Europe

MOLLY Tectonica has—probably not a unique, but an unusual position where you work with organizations in many countries, both inside the United States and outside in a number of places. And Tectonica doesn't only support organizations doing electoral work, it's also issue campaigning, base building, leadership development. So if we take that broader set of work, and you think about the organizations you've supported who are outside of the United States, who comes to mind as people who are doing really transformative work in those areas?

NED What we’ve found was that it wasn't actually the bigger, richer, larger organizations or places where there were more resources.

In our report on The State of Digital Organising in Europe, which we conducted in 2020, we found more deep, organized work happening in Eastern Europe, for example. We don't have the data to back it up, I want to be clear, but our thinking is that’s caused by the fact that they have to. If you're in Hungary and Viktor Orbán's party basically controls all the airwaves, you've got to actually organize. It's much easier to do transactional stuff when you can say "let's just do a big ad spend." You don't have that option when you have less resources.

So in this odd way, it could be possible that people are sticking to more participatory methods and therefore, either intentionally or not, coming across more transformational practices simply by the fact that they're having to work with the human resources that they have rather than just going out and going with a new flash of technology, or big ad buys, or whatever kind of transactional things are available.

MOLLY Do you find that your clients inside and outside the US use are choosing from broadly the same set of tech tools? Is it globalized in that way, or do different countries or different regions choose from a pretty different potential tool stack? 

NED It definitely comes geographically with differences, culturally with differences, and even more so the theory of change that particular organization is trying to blend to the particular culture they have.

Because there's more resources in the [U.S.] system, a lot of the technology is being developed in the U.S. and that sidelines a lot of needs of other areas, whether that’s geo-coding, the way people donate, the donation systems, more technical things like that. Legal things, like whether they consider GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], whether they consider any of the very excellent European regulations that are in place to make data private, consensual, many of the good laws that seem like a pain in the butt at times, but that really are fundamentally very good laws for the way to treat people. 

Ideally data, for some folks in Europe, is on European servers. Many of the [U.S.-based tech companies] don't offer that. 

I'm very happy to see a very strong burgeoning civic tech sector in Europe that wasn't there even five years ago. There’s really a lot of great innovation happening here, and I don't just say this because I'm the vice president of the Association Civic Tech Europe! [Laughing] But I am. It’s really amazing to see a lot of these organizations, companies developing specific needs to fit the European market, as well as just developing really smart civic tools that are then often being used in other places like the U.S. A lot of these tools are really getting a lot of uptake in the U.S. market, where you would think there would be more competition, but they're, you know, very highly specialized and highly popular and very powerful. So it's great to see that sector emerging in Europe, as I'm sure it is in other areas in the world as well, although I'm not quite as tapped in.

We need more out of the box thinking as we innovate in general. I think we need to look beyond just like, the U.S. makes the tech, then we do the thing that tech does for the U.S. I don't think that's a very good thing, it really misses a lot of opportunities. 

Europe at its core has a very solid value of democracy in its very makeup, what it is by identity. There's a lot of belief in these technologies—not just serving the media, organizations, or campaigns, but I see the people that have built these companies fundamentally dedicating themselves to the deeper levels of meanings and ways that we're doing democracy. And that’s great.

MOLLY So watch the European civic tech space is what I’m hearing! 

NED Yeah, I think so. There’s more regulation and there's a harder investing environment. There are several factors that make it a little more difficult in Europe. And I don't think that really matters at the end of the day, because there's actually really great innovation happening in Europe.

Start with Best Practices for Humans

MOLLY When we talked before, but also in this interview you just did with The Great Battlefield Podcast, you talked about how part of Tectonica's consulting approach is to really customize how you're working with every client. What are their actual needs? What are their strengths? What knowledge and expertise do they have within their own organization and staff? That sounds right to me, from the last two and a half years of supporting grassroots organizing groups to build out data infrastructure and strategy. That's just what you gotta do. 

And, a hypothesis of this project is that there are also patterns. From Tectonica's work, particularly on the side that's more around tech tools, data systems, data strategy, have you seen patterns in what organizations need? 

NED Every organization's different, their needs are really different. As general practice, we don't have the solutions. Our clients don't even have the solutions. Their communities have the solutions. They're there to help facilitate that and to learn with their constituents. What that means is that we really start with the humans that are involved, and that methods need to follow that. So we're going to look at supporter journeys and user flows or whatever you want to call it. It's really about first, not just creating a data infrastructure because that's the thing you want, or even creating a tech stack because these are cool techs, it's really about first looking at what the humans need to do to build power. 

That can look really different in different instances. You've got a coalition organization at an international level, it's going to be totally different than a very grassroots group at a smaller level. We’ve had cases where we’ve helped folks, they’re working with youth in places where there’s not much cell access. They don’t have service, they don’t have laptops, there’s all sorts of considerations.

But one of the things that is a universal here in terms of data basics is that the end goal is not just to measure numbers and resources, but having data that's actually going to reflect depth of relationship. The one thing that this absolutely has to be is about the connection between people. 

You're planning basically for the relationships, is what you’re doing when creating a user journey. And the more you can plan for and adjust those relationships and then make the data match that, that's the observation of the actual power and value that you have in the work that's being done. 

But we don't actually have very good methods for doing that. It’s a lot harder to work with that data than a lot of the resource-based data or data that's easily translatable. Money is very easily translatable, you know? Relationships between people are much more complex. But yeah, fundamentally it's the relationships between people that we know make the change at the end of the day. 

MOLLY Yeah, can I zero in about supporter journeys? I think that's one of these patterns. Even if the journey itself looks different for every organization, the concept of a supporter journey is important. It's like, what are the journeys that the people who interact with the organization go on and how to track that. Is that, in some form, something that you think about with a majority or all of your organizing clients? 

NED Most of our clients, honestly, are in very different places. Some clients are not even at that spot and we're moving them towards there. It's always built into the work that we do, which is moving them towards that at the end of the day. 

A really good example is Milieudefensie, which is Friends of the Earth Netherlands. There's much more to come there, but we're looking very intensively about how to support their movement building through technology and through use of a very powerful database system where we're extremely intentional about best practice setups for that data system, for that CRM. 

[But] at the end of the day, we want best practices, not for technology, or not starting with best practices for technology—we want to start with best practices for humans engaging in civics. That means first going to where they are, how they are, how they want to be, what their motivators are, the cultural context, and listening to the community. That's gotta be the start. 

MOLLY And then the tech and data strategy, and tool selection, grows from that foundation.

NED Yeah, and then what builds off of that is some general universals of the human experience. If you don't have a transparent theory of change, people are not going to get into it. There is this layer of like, generally the ways humans behave and what drives us. Belonging is a really strong one of them. Human connection is a really strong one of them. We need to build that consistently, because a lot of what's being done in organizing is actually about the development of culture. I'm not just talking culture in terms of American identity or whatever. I'm talking about the cultures that we create within our organizing work. And we do create them. 

MOLLY Yeah, always, always. 

Got an idea for a future post, someone I should talk to, or feedback of any kind? Email me at molly@tallgrassco.com! I'd love to hear from you.