Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything
Digital strategists from the Bernie Sanders campaign identify 22 rules of 'Big Organizing' drawn from running one of the most ambitious grassroots operations in American political history — covering volunteer coordination, distributed logistics, and how to scale participation without losing coherence.
Key Takeaways
- 22 operational rules from the Sanders campaign's grassroots machine
- How to scale volunteer coordination without losing coherence
- Distributed logistics for national-scale organizing
- Digital-to-physical organizing pipeline techniques
- Written by senior strategists from a 50-state operation
The Sanders campaign built one of the largest grassroots organizing operations in American history. Bond and Exley were there. Their 22 rules distill the operational lessons of scaling from a few hundred volunteers to millions of coordinated participants — including the failures and the systems that prevented collapse.
Becky Bond and Zack Exley were senior advisors on the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign, where they developed and ran the 'Big Organizing' model — a distributed volunteer operation that reached every state. Both are longtime digital and grassroots strategists.
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