Murmuration's Organizing & Advocacy Playbook is back with a fresh update. Building on last year's edition, the 2026 version is expanded, refined, and ready to to help community organizations like yours amplify their civic engagement work.
It's designed as a practical companion for the organizing and advocacy efforts you're already leading. You'll find templates, fill-in-the-blank sections, and tips for putting these ideas into action using data-driven tools. Use what fits, and make it your own.
Ready to dig in? Download the 2026 Organizing & Advocacy Playbook →
What’s Inside the 2026 Organizing & Advocacy Playbook?
The Playbook covers the full lifecycle of an organizing and advocacy effort, so you can find what's most relevant wherever you are in your work.
The 2026 Playbook includes updated resources, including:
- Ready-to-use phone banking and canvassing scripts
- Fill-in-the-blank email campaign templates to help you communicate compellingly
- A step-by-step guide to preparing and delivering effective legislative testimony
Background: Why Organizing and Advocacy Matter
Before diving into tactics, it helps to have a shared foundation. This section lays out the key concepts:
- The difference between organizing and advocacy
- How advocacy differs from lobbying
- Why both are essential to long-term civic change
You'll also find an overview of the Advocacy Action Plan, the framework that organizes everything in this Playbook. It breaks down the work into five phases—Learning, Planning, Implementation, Execution, and Reflection—that provide structure while remaining flexible enough to fit the reality of how campaigns unfold.
Learning: Know Your Community and Your Tools
Strong organizing starts with strong knowledge of your community, your base, and the tools available to you. The Learning section covers the foundational work that makes everything else more effective.
Inside, you'll find guidance on:
- Identifying Your Base: Who your current supporters are, who your target audience is, and how to use data in Organizer—Murmuration's outreach and organizing platform—to find and segment them.
- Digital Relational Organizing: How to use platforms like Instagram and TikTok to build authentic connections and bridge digital engagement to real-world action.
- One-on-One Meetings: A cornerstone of relationship-based organizing, with a guide to structuring meaningful conversations with potential advocates.
- Surveys: How to design effective surveys that yield actionable data about your community's needs and priorities.
- House Meetings: How to bring community members together in small, personal settings to build trust and momentum.
- Power Mappings: A framework for identifying the key decision-makers and influencers who will play a role in your effort.
Plus: This section also includes an Organizer tip on how to use Community Builder, Organizer's built-in segmentation tool, to filter and identify your target audiences using available data.
Planning: Build a Strategy That's Ready to Execute
Once you understand your community, it's time to get strategic. The Planning section helps you translate your goals into a concrete, executable plan.
This section walks through:
- Identifying Your Effort: Clarifying what you're trying to accomplish and why, so your strategy stays focused.
- Identifying Targets: Mapping the final decision-makers and other important stakeholders who will shape whether your effort succeeds.
- Core Messaging: How to build a shared messaging document that keeps your entire team aligned on the same foundation.
- Field Planning: How to define your demand, set SMART goals, establish weekly metrics, and plan your budget in a way that's both realistic and ambitious.
The Playbook includes templates so you're not starting from scratch.
Implementation: Activate Your Infrastructure
The Implementation section is where strategy becomes structure: setting up the systems, data, and tools you'll need before your effort launches.
Here, you'll find guidance on:
- Importing Organizational Data: Ensure your existing member lists, event attendance records, and other data can be matched to Atlas data in Organizer, Murmuration's civic data infrastructure that enriches your records with deeper community insights.
- Building a Ladder of Engagement (LOE): An LOE lets you track how engaged your community members are and identify your "power members.”
- Tracking Progress: A simple framework for setting metrics, monitoring progress, and making data-informed decisions throughout your effort.
Data and Tools Activation: A deep dive into Organizer features, including Community Builder, model scores, phone banking setup, and canvassing setup, all oriented around how to put them to use for your specific effort.
This section provides a clear picture of how Organizer fits into the arc of your organizing work. If you're not yet a partner, it's a great place to see what the platform can do.
Want to learn more? Request a demo with our team →
Execution: Engage Your Community
The Execution section covers the full range of tactics your organization might use to reach people, build support, and create pressure for change.
You'll find practical guidance on:
- Legislative Outreach: How to determine your advocacy goals, identify the right targets, and choose the most effective outreach approach.
- Running Legislative Advocacy Meetings: A step-by-step guide to requesting meetings with lawmakers, preparing your team and talking points, and planning for follow-up.
- Providing Public Testimony: How to prepare compelling testimony for committee hearings, including a testimony template.
- Door Knocking: Canvassing fundamentals, plus a pilot test protocol and nightly sync checklist to help you run high-quality field operations.
- Phone Banking: Script examples for different voter segments, guidance on handling common objections, and best practices for consent and opt-in texting.
- Voter Registration and GOTV: Key considerations and SMART goal benchmarks for organizations engaged in voter mobilization.
- Other Outreach Methods: Including op-eds, public demonstrations, and media advocacy.
Throughout this section, you'll find specific Organizer tips that show how each tactic maps to tools that would be available in your account.
Reflection: Learn, Improve, and Carry It Forward
The Reflection section might be the most underutilized part of any organizing effort—and one of the most valuable. It's here that you take stock of what worked, what didn't, and what your data is actually telling you.
This section includes:
- A weekly huddle guide for building real-time learning into your campaign.
- A post-cycle review framework for comprehensive assessment when a full campaign cycle closes.
- A KPI table and board-ready summary template for communicating results to leadership or funders.
- Guidance on pulling data from Organizer for reflection analyses—including how to build communities that help you evaluate your inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes.
- A framework for identifying next steps based on whether your metrics effectively reflected your work and whether your targets were reached.
- A reflection memo and post-mortem template to guide your team through a structured debrief.
As the Playbook puts it: Good reflection doesn't just ask whether you hit your numbers. It asks whether your strategy was right and what you'd do differently next time.
A Resource Built for You
We built this Playbook because we know community organizations like yours are doing important, hard, consequential work in city halls and neighborhoods across the country. We want to make sure you have every possible resource to do that work well.
This Playbook is yours to use in whatever way is most helpful. Adapt the templates. Skip the sections that don't apply. Return to it when your effort enters a new phase. Our goal is to make the work you're already committed to more focused, strategic, and impactful.
The 2026 Playbook is available now. Grab your copy and make it your own →
See Organizer in Action
If the Playbook resonates with you and you'd like to explore how Organizer can support your organizing and advocacy efforts, we'd love to connect.
Request a demo to see how Organizer can help your organization make an even bigger difference in the communities you serve.