The past year has galvanized many of us to begin seeking community and to advocate for change within a system that promises a lot and provides very little. My first experience with community organization came from working in animal welfare. When I first started working in the foster department of my local SPCA, I had no idea the journey I was about to embark on. My department consisted of two people: myself and my boss. Our goal? Completely revamp the foster program and start saving more lives.

Prior to our arrival at the organization, the foster department was run by other departments who would step in as needed. This meant that the program was dysfunctional and in serious need of structure. The system through which they advertised foster animals consisted of an email list and a PDF sent out once a week. We recognized that we needed the need for something far more proactive and infinitely more accessible and immediately got to work.

Our first step was to completely change the process for requesting a foster animal. Initially, we did this as a few other rescues were doing: through a Trello board. However, this wasn’t very effective as the link was confusing to our older foster parents and very difficult to use on a mobile device. With most people are accessing the internet through their phones this quickly becomes an issue.

So, we pivoted! We changed our weekly email to a newsletter that shared photos from our foster parents celebrating their little wins and encouraging others to do the same. We told stories of adoptions, shared our stats, and included a photo and brief bio of a few animals we were hoping to send to foster that week. However, that didn’t solve the accessibility issue and soon I was building an entire foster request website that included filterable pages, resources for our fosters, contact forms for specific needs, and a section for our most at-risk animals.

Needless to say, we experienced a HUGE boom in fosters! They were no longer limited to a single email a week. The foster request was updated DAILY as new animals came in and provided a plethora of information to allow the foster parents to make informed decisions. For the next two years we sent out thousands more animals than any previous year.

Then COVID hit and animal welfare as we knew it changed.

While this could have been devastating to our efforts, this is when I learned how to think on my feet, how to bring more people into our work, and the importance of community. In preparation for potential lockdowns, we took our adoptions staff through a crash course in fostering. From how to foster an animal out, to counseling, to prepping the supplies- we gave them the most pertinent information which allowed us to foster animals out on the fly- no waiting for appointments. We started advertising walk-in foster signups online and to people who weren’t ready to adopt but were ready to help.

We launched trial adoptions, created entire processes for online pre-counseling, placed protocols for medical appointments, and more. The mission was successful and the shelter closed down with enough animals in homes that we could function on essential workers only.

This is all, of course, a very short version of what went down. The point, however, is to stress that in order to organize you need to be prepared to think quickly, plan efficiently, and accept help. Even if it isn’t up to your ‘standard’! Would we have been as successful if we’d stuck to our guns and required our usual protocol? Hell no. We adapted, and we were better off for it.

In 2023 and 2024, I spent a significant amount of time organizing the boycott of St. Martin’s Press alongside others. This boycott focused on the systemic racism sparked by anti-Palestinian sentiments from an employee of the publisher and spanned nearly an entire year.

The knowledge I’ve gained, the lessons learned- they’re all incredibly valuable. It’s my hope that I can share these lessons with you, impart some knowledge, and equip more people with the means to make a difference in a world that would prefer them to stay silent. Please note: I am by no means an ‘expert’ in organizing. However, my hope is that I can share what I’ve learned and help others organize within their own communities.

PLAN BEFORE YOU POST

This is perhaps the most important bit of advice I can give. Often, activists forget that the responsibility of organizing falls on the person who called for the action. When you fail to have a plan, your movement will fizzle out before it even starts. You cannot simply tell people to boycott, protest, etc. you have to give them both a reason and a way to do so.

Understanding this information is vital for both informing those who seek to join you and fending off those who seek to discredit you. It is important to have a solid foundation for your movement to build upon. Determining actions later down the road will be infinitely more difficult if you don’t understand the movement yourself. You cannot educate others if you do not already have the answers.

If you are organizing a boycott, it is imperative that you determine the guidelines for participation and make them widely available to the public. This means determining both what a participant should and shouldn’t do. Having these guidelines available helps your participants gain confidence in joining and helps them make decisions when gray areas appear. Your guidelines could include:

• Who you are asking to participate.
• The basics of participation.
• What a participant shouldn’t do when supporting your movement.

When Readers for Accountability, a collective of influencers, organized the boycott of St. Martin’s Press, we created guidelines for the main target (influencers) as well as guidelines for other members of the book community. Our primary focus was to withhold free labor (aka promotion of SMP titles) until our demands were met. We included different methods of participation such as:

• Using stickers to cover book titles.
• Reviewing with the promise of revealing the title once demands were met.
• Providing information on the boycott in posts where titles were redacted.

New situations arose quite often. Participants wanted to know how to handle reviews on ARC distribution websites such as NetGalley, author events, and what to do if they accidentally posted a boycotted title. Eventually, we worked those into our guidelines as well.

CENTRALIZE YOUR INFORMATION

Once you have the foundation of your movement, it is important to have that information come from a singular source. Relying on individual accounts is often ineffective and confusing for your participants. By placing that information in a central source, you make it easy for people to direct newcomers to you and ensure they have the correct information.

We did this through the creation of Readers for Accountability in which we made social media accounts and a website that contained the following:

• An outline of how the boycott started that included screenshots and videos from the original creator.
• A page with all of our participation guidelines.
• An FAQ featuring questions we anticipated and those we were asked down the line.
• An updates page that included upcoming actions, solidarity from book companies, and articles written about the boycott.

We also shared the emails sent to the publisher as blog posts for transparency as well as posted our statements to our blog. The blog was a great way to add additional information, such as tips for approaching those who were breaking the boycott. Having these links available meant we could share them with people in our DMs, direct people to them on social media, and use them when we were planning upcoming events.

Having this information centralized was also incredibly important in dealing with naysayers who frequently made false claims about the movement in attempts to discredit us. We could quickly share our website and dispute those claims, and it allowed participants to do the same. They didn’t have to go searching for information, because it was there!

However, this didn’t solve all of our problems. Despite regularly sharing and directing people to our boycott outline, many people would still share inaccurate information about the origins of the boycott. The same goes for our participation guidelines. 

This is why it’s also important to share that information within your content and do so regularly. This is an area I wish we’d handled differently.. It’s important to remember that just because 6,000 people saw your post about participation last week, doesn’t mean everyone did. Recycle your posts, save them as templates, and share them over and over again!

Further, make sure that all of your content includes your handle. This means that users who screenshot to share will still be directing the recipients back to you!

ACCESSIBILITY MATTERS!

When creating social media content, it is of the utmost importance to make accessibility a focus. This goes hand in hand with determining what message you want to send and if you’ve provided the right amount of information for someone new to the movement. When we started out, we didn’t have an accessibility team and our graphics were often difficult to read. Thankfully, with feedback from our own members as well as participants, we were able to identify where we were falling short and how we could fix it.

This resulted in forming an accessibility team comprised of a lead and multiple coordinators who worked hand-in-hand with our graphic design team to make sure our content was accessible. We had multiple processes we went through to create the workflow, but ultimately focused on utilizing Discord channels to do so.

Once a graphic designer completed a design listed on the task channel, they would share the post in the accessibility/design channel and tag the role “Accessibility Team”. Then, a coordinator would reply to let them know they were working on it and send the alt text for that graphic once completed. If the coordinator felt the post wasn’t accessible, they’d give feedback on how to improve the graphics.

To make this easier, our lead created an accessibility handbook for the team to reference as needed. Afterwards, I went in and created a brand kit based off those guidelines for our team to use in Canva. This allowed us to create a steady flow of accessible information across our social media channels.

We then took accessibility a step further. It isn’t just making sure people can get that information, it is making sure they can share that information. As such, our team set up a Ko-fi where participants could download free graphics to share on their social media. This meant those with chronic illnesses and disabilities could better participate. Often, people are exhausted, in pain, and dealing with issues that make creating content difficult. By doing it for them, we opened our movement to a broader audience.

Your movement will be hindered if you do not put accessibility at the forefront of your planning. We have been told time and time again that people were participating in the boycott because this was the first time a movement made participating accessible to all. You can do this by:

• Placing captions on all of your video content. Make sure your captions have a contrasting background for legibility.
• Summarizing that information in the captions of your videos.
• Writing alt text for every post you make and placing it in the caption and/or comments. If placing it in the comments, pin the comment.
• Text heavy graphics should have a corresponding web post to direct participants to as social media still makes accessibility difficult.
• Avoiding overcrowded graphics with too many elements or large amounts of text.
• Creating shareable graphics for the community and making them easy to access.
• Creating and updating a word document ‘toolkit’ with all of your important information. Ours contained our demands, our outline, participation guidelines, FAQs, updates, and links to resources.

LEVERAGE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA

As we’re organizing online, social media is one of our greatest tools. It’s also one of our greatest enemies due to censorship and algorithms and part of organizing online includes finding ways to ‘game the system’. Our team helped bolster our accounts by using the ‘collaboration’ feature on Instagram that enabled us to share our content with the followers of specific team members. This was a great help to us starting out and allowed our community to grow quickly. We also made sure to have our team direct people to our accounts constantly. By doing so, we were able to make our social media accounts the central hub for information and therefore grow our accounts.

Further, we treated our followers and participants as a community rather than an audience. The way that you engage with your community can make a huge difference in their participation (ie: engagement) with your accounts. For our specific movement, we were supporting our own community (the book community) and therefore this came very naturally. We focused on community in a few ways including:

• Accepting feedback and implementing change when necessary. An example of this would be our use of “stand in solidarity” in shareable graphics. When a member of our community educated us on the ableism in this phrase, we switched to “join us in solidarity” to avoid isolating our participants. We were transparent about this by removing the graphics, posting the new graphics, and explaining why this was done.
• Posting content that encourages people to share their thoughts and feelings and then using those responses to create new content.
• Interacting with our community in DMs, responding to comments, and regularly sharing content about our movement.
• Asking the community for specific content and then using that to make video content about our movement.

COMMUNICATION IS KEY

A particular issue our volunteer team faced is the need for anonymity. This isn’t unusual in spaces like this, but it can be confusing for people. It is not uncommon for activists and organizers to face legal, social, and financial repercussions for participation in liberation movements. While our particular boycott wasn’t a liberation movement, it was very heavily in support of Palestine and therefore made it imperative that we protect our team and those who worked alongside us.

Our team primarily organized through the Discord app, but also organized in other spaces. Our ‘leadership’ team had both a text chat and an Instagram chat. Our volunteers organized through project management websites such as Trello and ClickUp. When we consulted Palestinians who had opted not to join the Discord, it was done by members of leadership to protect them as our socials were handled by multiple people.

While this was important to the work we were doing, it also created issues that we did not see at the time. There were many occasions in which a leadership member consulted with someone, spoke with the leadership chat, and then informed the volunteers of next steps. In doing this, we often failed to provide context for our team of volunteers. They may not have known that we consulted someone or perhaps didn’t know why we were doing something which then caused confusion and at times, distrust. While most of the team understood that we functioned anonymously (aside from volunteers who offered to be forward facing), we should have found a way to safely provide context regarding these important conversations. This likely could’ve been solved by easily saying, “We spoke with an anonymous Palestinian consult and after a discussion, leadership has decided…”

By failing to do this, I feel we hindered our movement and did a disservice to those who were volunteering their time. This is not to say that every member of a movement needs to know every decision, every conversation, and every conflict- that can actually cause more issues. However, we still need to find ways to keep everyone ‘in the know’ about what we’re doing for the sake of transparency.

Similarly, we should’ve done the same for our broader community. Again, the broader community shouldn’t know everything, but transparency is important. In hindsight, I feel we could’ve included a section on our website that explained our anonymity and outlined how our consults and teambuilding worked. We were always transparent about our communications with St. Martin’s Press by posting our emails and statements both to social media and our website, and that practice should’ve carried over to other aspects of organizing.

Internally, a solution I feel would’ve been helpful due to the sheer size of our team (ranging from 60-80 people) would’ve been an internal handbook that lived in our Discord. This handbook could’ve outlined items such as:

• The structure of our volunteers and usage of ‘consults’ aka Palestinian creators who were consulted that either were not active on Discord or chose not to be involved in that way.
• The decision-making process including how voting worked when making important decisions.
• How each section of our team functioned and worked together.

Building a team that feels confident in your work involves making sure that the team is informed and respected. Communication is a key component of that and therefore requires that we find the balance of protecting information and sharing context.

PREPARE FOR BACKLASH

When the boycott of St. Martin’s Press began, we were aware that there would be significant hurdles to face. Prior to the official formation of the collective, team members had already seen users actively work to discredit the movement. Further, we had seen that there were groups of people eager to intimidate us into silence. While we were aware that this would happen, it was difficult to fully grasp the level of stress this would cause individual team members.

In dealing with detractors, it became clear that we had to be incredibly precise about our language, our goals, and our actions. Any and everything we did was analyzed and used as a weapon against us from the start. As our particular cause focused on systemic racism sparked by anti-Palestinian rhetoric from an employee, this meant that Zionists were quick to attack both volunteers and participants.

Organizing in Discord often allowed us to alert one another to these online attacks swiftly, share information about accounts that were potentially dangerous, and collaborate on ways to manage attacks. It also allowed our team to carefully consider their interactions with these accounts so as to avoid acting from emotion. If we had failed to do so, it was entirely possible that our reaction to these attacks would’ve been further weaponized against us.

However, backlash doesn’t just come from those who actively dislike you- but from those who feel inconvenienced by your work. Meaning, that they are more likely to believe falsehoods, spread misinformation, and find ways to discredit your movement to remove the inconvenience.

An example of this was often the use of White Woman Tears to claim all participants and organizers were bullies for requesting their participation. It often did not matter if we were asking politely, making suggestions, or just directing to our social media accounts- being asked to do something that inconvenienced them often sent creators into victim-mode. To help combat this, we created guidelines for approaching influencers breaking the boycott.

When creators made accusations that the collective condoned bullying, we were able to direct them to that resource to show that we did not condone bullying and had standards for communication. It worked as both a code of ethics and PR.

Preparing for backlash also involves putting systems in place for community care. The psychological and emotional toll of not only organizing such an effort, but combatting regular death threats, comment brigading, and efforts to intimidate can quickly deteriorate the mental health of your team. It’s important to consider how you can help everyone keep their spirits up, relieve them when it’s too much, and provide spaces to vent.

Ultimately, everyone involved with organizational efforts must understand that there is always something that can go wrong and mistakes that will be made. However, it is my hope that this resource will help you be successful in your efforts. Remember: these movements are communal efforts that should focus on the cause versus an individual. Work with others, not above them. Learn to resolve intercommunity conflict in ways that don’t allow your opposition to further discredit and harm your movement.