Step 4: Move people up the participation scale.

You might ask, so what? What do 35 million calls really add up to?
Isn’t this just clicktivism? Hazare turned those phone numbers into
real, on-the-ground power. Two weeks after this call to action, his
campaign had the world’s largest spreadsheet of phone numbers of
supporters. People on the list were contacted to help turn out
hundreds of thousands of participants to real-world protests in
Delhi and other cities. And while Hazare’s bill didn’t pass as is, the
government accepted some demands, and his campaign helped
push through sweeping changes to laws against corruption.

To build a lasting movement, followers need to be moved up the participation scale. Courtesy of Jeremy Heimans
and Henry Timms.
When you’re trying to build a movement or grow a crowd, you get
people in the door via simple, low-barrier asks. Once you have
recruited these new participants, the job is to keep them engaged
and to move them up the scale, toward higher-barrier behaviors
like adapting or remixing the content of others, crowdfunding a
project, creating and uploading their own unique content or assets,
or, at the top of the scale, by helping to shape the community as a
whole. Think here of the Airbnb super-hosts who set norms for
others on the platform, the significant but informal role played by
the Black Lives Matter founders, or the most influential volunteer
moderators on Reddit.

The public realm is becoming a kind of Hunger Games for

organizations and brands. The most effective crowdbuilders will
be those who are able to move people up the participation scale
and sustain and nourish a community over the longer term, dealing
with the many challenges, compromises and balancing acts that
requires.

Excerpted with permission from the new book New Power: How

Movements Build, Businesses Thrive, and Ideas Catch Fire in Our
Hyperconnected World by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms.
Published by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House,
LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms.