Introducing Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment
The mission of the ACCE Institute is to improve the lives of California's traditionally underserved residents, including communities of color, low-income and working families, and the undocumented population, by carrying out work that fosters deep, indigenous leadership development, policy creation, robust civic participation, and broad community empowerment.
Impact of Mentorship
Our mentorship with ACCE focused on helping the traditionally offline organization embrace new media tools as a way to strengthen their grassroots work. In the end, New Media Mentors increased the power of every organizer on ACCE’s staff and made it easier for them to keep in touch with constituents, turn out supporters at rallies/events, and influence decision-makers. Because of this important work, in the long-run ACCE will have more wins and create more change within California.
How We Got There
When we started working together, ACCE had the basics in place (a website, several Facebook pages, etc.), but the content was stale and the tools weren’t being used consistently. The traditionally offline staff tended to think of new media as an add-on, rather than a central part of campaign planning. New Media Mentors worked with ACCE to figure out why staff members weren’t using online tools more, and focused on teaching them how online tools could strengthen their campaigns. In addition, we introduced a campaign planning template and helped them introduce processes so they could use online tools without creating a lot of unnecessary work.
Together we made ACCE’s online work more consistent, coordinated and effective among the organization’s six local offices. Learning modules included:
- Internal processes for content generation
- Website
- Rapid response
- Social media
- List building
- Campaign planning
- New Media Roadmap
- Measurement
“We now have tools that work for us! We went from haphazardly doing things to now being able to say, “This is what we do, this is who does what, this is how we do it well, this is what we don’t do.” We have it clearly written down in our social media policy, our online push and rapid response plans – and the new media road map to guide us into the future. All of this, layered on top of our traditional on the ground base, will help us win our campaigns.”
Banner image courtesy of ACCE.
