Come for the heat pump, stay for the (climate justice) revolution? A bold bet on a new kind of advocacy-focused business model

This summer, if all goes according to plan, residents in three regions of the country will be able to type their postal code into a new website and get a precise sense of the sometimes-deadly risks of climate change they face in their neighbourhood. 

In Vancouver, the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, for instance, it may be flooding, caused by extreme storms, unsafe indoor temperatures, caused by heat waves, or food insecurity, resulting from climate-related breaks in supply chains. 

But perhaps more important, even, than predictions of doom — the platform will also provide a draft plan for what residents can do about it: How to sign up for emergency weather alerts, get a grant to retrofit their house with a heat pump, or contact their local politician to demand better flood-proofing for the future. 

The effort, through the new organization My Climate Plan, is the brainchild of a team of campaigners, techies and policy wonks — folks with a couple of decades of combined experience in climate advocacy, who are aiming to help make Canadian communities “climate safe,” says co-founder Jamie Biggar. (Disclosure: Biggar and one of the initiative’s five other co-founders, Reilly Yeo, are both friends of mine.) 

It’s a timely idea that, while focused on individual needs, has been developed with a much larger mission in mind: To engage a base Canadians — dubbed the “moveable middle” — who, despite being increasingly concerned about climate change, have evaded being engaged in the climate fight. 

It’s the mobilization of these millions of Canadians, Biggar says, that will determine how quickly politicians of all stripes act on the climate — and in turn, the speed and severity of the heatwaves, floods, and food insecurity we’ll face. 

To engage the unengaged, My Climate Plan is taking an unconventional approach. 

They’re ditching the traditional business model of most advocacy organizations — of relying on grants and donations — and instead, putting their full weight into creating a “beneficial membership” business model — of getting Canadians to sign up as dues-paying members. 

In exchange for a monthly fee, Biggar says, members will get discounts on products and services they want (like the installation of that heat pump or the purchase of an emergency evacuation kit), a chance to build community with likeminded people, and an opportunity to power the organization’s advocacy. 

The business model pick was inspired, in part, by the research of American campaigner Peter Murray. In a 2013 article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Murray argued that when it comes to business models, progressive advocacy organizations need to start acting less like Greenpeace and more like the National Rifle Association. 

The American political Right is using functional organizing to grow: Murray

Murray wrote that essay for the American social sector publication following a seven-year stint at the helm of the Centre for Progressive Leadership, a national American training institute for civic leaders. During his time there, he recounts in the SSIR article, his organization trained hundreds of leaders but he also noticed a thorny sector challenge: civil society advocacy organizations weren’t growing to scale. 

To understand why, Murray embarked on a research project, analyzing every large-scale civic organization he could find, he says. The project turned up something surprising. 

He found found that none of the country’s best known issue-focused advocacy organizations — Greenpeace, the American Civil Liberties Union, or Amnesty International, to name three — could hold a candle to scale achieved by the country’s largest “functional organizations” — the NRA, the Catholic Church, or the American Association of Retired Persons. 

Unlike most issues-focused advocacy organizations which rely principally on grants and donations, Murray wrote, functional organizations invite people to become dues-paying members in exchange for benefits and services, which in turn, power the organization’s advocacy.  

In the case of the NRA, he argued, many members joined the organization for the lifestyle benefits — the discounts on gun insurance, access to local hunting clubs, shooting and safety classes, kids and family programs, and subscriptions to the organization’s popular gun magazines. From there, he wrote, the NRA encourages further participation in its advocacy campaigns. Come for the discounts on ammo, stay for the (gun rights) revolution. 

Murray argued further that the NRA’s membership dues are the foundation for its advocacy success. 

In 2013, when the article was written, the organization had about 5 million members, generating $100 million per year in dues and an additional $30 million from corporate sponsorships — businesses who paid to be part of its discount network or advertise in its magazines. (In total, he found that the NRA earned two thirds of its income from earned revenue and member dues.) 

“Most Americans don’t view themselves primarily as activists,” Murray wrote. “As a result, issue organizations rarely grow to engage more than a few hundred thousand members.”

Looking at the contemporary political landscape, Murray says, in an interview with Future of Good in May, that American conservatives are continuing to use functional organizing to drive their political agenda and secure policy victories.  

He points, for instance, to the growth of the American evangelical church movement, which has helped to advance the anti-abortion and anti-transgender movements in recent years. While churches might not ask for “dues” in the same way the NRA would, they do indeed ask for ongoing financial support. In return, Murray says, they offer many of the hallmark benefits of functional organizations: community gatherings, social services, such as childcare and food programs, and political advocacy on issues of common concern. 

About 40 years ago, the American political Left, too, relied on functional organizations to power civil rights victories, Murray says. He points to the strength of Black and white churches, at the time, and to the strength of labour unions, too. (Labour unions, for their part, ask members for dues in exchange for services like negotiating better wages and benefits.)

He says, however, that both institutions on the American political Left have seen considerable declines since their peak, and have been replaced with issue-focused advocacy organizations, which rely on grants and donations to campaign for racial justice, LGBTQ rights, and more. 

“[Issue-focused organizations] play an important role in the ecosystem,” Murray says. “But we think of them as the tip of the spear. They can be very focused. They can drive action. But you have to have a spear — you have to have the full length of a spear in order for them to be effective.”

Modern functional organizations see success

Based on his research in 2013, Murray launched a new organization, Accelerate Change, to incubate functional organizations. While not every attempt since has succeeded, there have been notable successes. 

PushBlack is one of them. It’s a non-profit media organization for Black Americans that serves 9 million people through podcasts and digital media content and, unlike most media organizations, also mobilizes its community to engage in criminal justice advocacy and voting campaigns. 

In 2020, a get-out-the-vote campaign led by PushBlack and allied groups was so successful, Murray said, in a 2020 webinar, that the average American Black voter received a staggering four text messages from friends and family encouraging them to get out to the polls. “That’s a massive, unprecedented scale,” he said. 

To power the creation of the content (a service) that their member community wants, and to engage them in advocacy, PushBlack generates revenue from advertising and sponsorships, readers and listener donations, and foundation funding, Murray says. 

In addition to PushBlack, Accelerate Change has also supported several other media-based functional organizing initiatives. These include ParentsTogether, a non-profit news organization that reaches more than three million subscribers and Pulso, which reaches two million Latinx Americans each month, according to AccelerateChange. 

In Canada, too, there are long standing organizations that continue, today, to have advocacy success powered by a membership-based business model. Perhaps best known among them is the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, which, with its 350,000 members, is the largest seniors organization in the country, says CARP’s Chief Operating Officer Bill VanGorder. 

Asked about their advocacy wins, VanGorder lists off several. For one, Ontario’s minister and deputy minister of long-term care both resigned during the pandemic, following a CARP campaign for both to be fired, VanGorder says. He adds that the organization also successfully advocated for a boost to the Canadian Pension Plan rate, and for a one-time $500 payment for low-income seniors whose Guaranteed Income Supplement money was clawed back after they received CERB or other federal pandemic benefits.  

VanGorder, a former fundraiser, says that while the organization’s membership comes with discounts on insurance, travel, financial and health products, members tend to pay the annual $20 fee, not for those benefits, but for the community — the chance to join chapters, make friends, and go on vacation with other members; in addition for the opportunity to power the organization’s advocacy. 

He adds that when comparing the two business models — grant-reliant or member-reliant — he much prefers the latter. It’s a tougher fundraising climate now than when he was in the business, he says — more crowded and more reliant on hard-to-snag major gifts. Further, he adds, asking for membership dues is easier than asking for donations. When it comes to membership, he says, “$20 per year doesn’t sound like a lot of money.” 

In 2022, about 85 per cent of the organization’s $1.9 million budget came from membership dues. The rest came from sponsorships and advertising, including in CARP’s affiliated Zoomer magazine.   

CARP is one of the organizations that has inspired My Climate Plan’s own “beneficial membership” business model, which, Biggar says, will be powered principally by membership dues, with additional funds coming from foundation grants and donations, and transaction fees, paid by companies, like heat pump contractors, who benefit from customer referrals. 

CARP is also a lighthouse for another Canadian organization, Super Majority, that much like Accelerate Change in the United States, is seeking to incubate functional organizations in Canada. 

In their case, Super Majority is focused on building organizations that can engage “moveable middle” voters in swing ridings — places where elections are decided by a few thousand votes. 

Aaron Myran, president of Future Majority, Super Majority’s first incubated initiative, says these voters — often in suburban ridings, or ridings with a large share of newcomers — are often overlooked by traditional advocacy organizations. These organizations, he says, typically develop their campaign messaging with voters in big cities and then try and import it into these other ridings. 

It doesn’t work, he says, because while issues like climate change or affordable housing are concerns, they’re less top-of-mind than stress about inflation ratcheting up grocery prices or concerns about things their kids are reading online. 

Super Majority’s next initiative will aim to “meet folks where they’re at,” Myran says; and like CARP, or PushBlack, will ask them to become members to help pay for it. 

“It’s a different way of approaching an audience,” Myran says. “If you’re really providing something that people care about, they’ll give you money.” 

Yet despite the savvy strategy and compelling proof points, recent experiments in functional organizing also show that the business model is risky — and can pull staff away from time focused on the advocacy issues they care most about. 

‘It failed’: Generation Squeeze’s functional organizing experiment

About five years ago, Dr. Paul Kershaw and his team at Generation Squeeze embarked on a functional organizing experiment inspired by Murray’s research, hoping to sign-up hundreds of thousands of Canadians as dues-paying members to drive policy change around issues that matter to Millenials. 

Unlike PushBlack or CARP, however, the experiment didn’t work. “It failed,” Dr. Kershaw says, a half-decade later. “We had a chicken and egg problem.” 

The organization’s functional organizing plan hinged on being able to get Millenials to pay for membership in exchange for discounts on phone plans, insurance, car share fees and other products. But when they tried to negotiate these deals with providers, Dr. Kershaw says, they didn’t have a large enough existing base of members to get companies to drop prices enough to attract new members. 

In the two-year period where this hustled to make functional organizing work, they struggled to bring in about $200,000 per year in revenue, Dr. Kershaw says. 

Asked about this challenge, Murray says that discount-focused business models in this day and age are tough. “The internet broke that model,” he says. “Discount networks and insurance networks are not the future of functional organizing.” 

In the United States, Murray says the fastest-growing functional organizations are not the NRA or others like it, but rather digital media organizations, like PushBlack and Pulso, which rely on reader donations or member contributions, in addition to ad revenue and foundation funding. 

Business model aside, however, Dr. Kershaw adds that there was a second big challenge with the functional organizing model: The amount of time it diverted from their advocacy. 

For the decade it’s been in action, Generation Squeeze’s core mission has been to advocate for the improved wellbeing of young-ish Canadians — through better policy around childcare, work-life balance for parents, and affordable housing. Trying to build a membership program good-enough that Canadians would pay for it, however, pulled Dr. Kershaw and his team away from these causes, he says — focusing them instead on jockeying for contracts with telco providers and insurance companies. 

But no more. The organization has since reverted to a more traditional issue-based advocacy business model, he says, now pulling in about $400,000 per year by relying on grants and donations. 

“We may not grow to the scale that Peter Murray enticed us with. We may not get as big as CARP,” Dr. Kershaw says. “But at least what we’re doing when we’re engaging with people…will be much more on-mission for us.” 

My Climate Plan: $200k in donations so far, and building

In January, the team at My Climate Plan received some encouraging news. Data gathered on their behalf by a market research firm projected that, in the first five years, the initiative has the potential to sign up over 240,000 dues-paying members and net $30 million in member revenue. 

Those are big targets. 

To date, despite having not yet formally launched their product, the organization has signed up about 75 dues-paying members, who are collectively giving about $600 per month. The initiative has also raised about $200,000 in grants from Vancity, the Catherine Donnelly Foundation, and the North Family Foundation, among others, Biggar says. 

In his 2013 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, Murray argued that functional organizing initiatives are high-risk, high-reward. 

“Only a small fraction of functional organizing initiatives will succeed,” he wrote. But those that do, he said, have the potential to truly make a dent. 

 

This story was first published with the headline: “Can you use the NRA’s business model to make people care about climate change?” While provocative and factually accurate, upon reflection, our team felt as though this headline implicitly celebrated the business model of an organization that has contributed policies that have harmed many. We thus removed this reference from the headline.