Messaging and comms
Recruitment
Now that you have your basic action design and plan in place, you can work out what roles need to be filled, what skills are needed and how many of each role you need. So now you can start recruiting.
You might be recruiting people to:
- Help with planning
- Take a specific support role
- Take a specific participant role
- Or just to turn up on the day
Whether it is an open or closed action will determine how you go about recruiting.
Open - you can reach out using any communication route available to you - Telegram, WhatsApp, Action Network emails. You may want to use the design tool to make a nice graphic to get people excited. You may want to put on an open call so you have the chance to convince lots of people all at once to join your action. You can go to different local group meetings and persuade them to support.
Closed - Your routes for reaching out are far more limited. Ideally you can reach out to those who you know and trust for secure elements of an action and ask them to use their networks of trusted rebels to recruit. However, this does mean that you aren’t being particularly inclusive to newer rebels so you may want to try getting people vouched - see below. This can be time consuming and does increase the risk of a closed action being compromised but it helps to bring more people into NVDA.
With both open and closed actions, take the time to speak 1-on-1 with your recruits is specific roles to ensure they are bought into the action, to make sure they are available, they have any necessary skills or attributes and that you know about any adjustments that might need to be made to make sure they can take part. This also makes them feel valued and part of the team.
Security
As mentioned before security and inclusion can become two ends of a scale. To make an action more secure often means making it less inclusive. As above there are ways to try to lessen this affect.
For closed planning you will likely need to communicate with your planning team and any other rebels that need to know restricted details using Signal messaging app.
The key thing here is to give information on a need to know basis. Encourage everyone to be super vigilant with this rule. Stagger giving spicy info like this - Eg. We’ve got this kind of action in late May, would you be interested? If yes, then give the date, are they available? If yes, then give the types of roles you are recruiting. If yes, then give the final details you are prepared to share.
Getting people vouched - This means inviting people on open/public channels to take a role and asking those that respond to provide someone who can vouch for them who is known to the movement (i.e. a LG coord or someone in an XR circle). Verify their phone number rather than going on a name or handle/alias, as names are often shared or different on different platforms.
On Signal turn on admin permissions for admitting new members so you know you only have trusted people in your chat group.
(Signal chat description in the header is visible to anyone even if they are not a member of the chat. So be careful what information and links you put in there.)
Coordinating roles
Here is a non-exhaustive list of roles in addition to those purely participating on the day. For simpler actions, many of these roles will either not be needed or can be held by more than one person.
- Action planner
- M&M
- On the ground coord
- Action support coord
- Protest liaison
- Stewards
- Wellbeing
- Deescalation
- Legal
- Back office/PSS
- Outreach
- Creatives
- Programming
- Rhythms coord
- Budget holder
- Photo/video/livestream
- Banner holder/roadtakers
- Spokes person
You will likely need a regular meeting with your action planning team made up of some of the people holding these roles. And you will need an accessible way of communicating regularly like Telegram or Signal. You may choose to organise this over more than one channels.
Aside from planning meetings, it’s a good idea to hold briefings with participants so they can meet and feel part of the team. You might hold different ones for mass participants, spicy rebels, action support etc.
If you have a spicy element to your action, you need to take extra care to balance the info given to them so they can commit and feel bought into the action, without having more info than they need. Get a legal briefing from one of our legal reps and share this so they can weigh up the risks and potential consequences.
Make sure they have time and space to discuss concerns about the action and don’t feel any undue pressure.
All rebels participating in actions should have agreed to the Rebel Agreement beforehand
Extra arrangements
Do you need any extra training? Check participants have had NVDA training. You might need to rehearse using equipment or arrange rehearsals for performances.
Will you have rebels traveling from further afield? Can you offer travel expenses or can you seek out hosts to provide accommodation for the night before/after? Check for train strikes early and continuously.
Use this guidance to make sure you make your action accessible and inclusive to all… Diversity & Inclusivity at Actions - Google Docs. Are there any accessibility issues that you might need to plan for? Ask if rebels have any specific needs and discuss how to adjust for them. This might mean adjusting your march route, or finding accessible travel options.