When you’re at your local bar and people around you start talking about targeting (c’mon, you know you’ve been there!), they’re usually talking about how advertisements are aimed at certain demographic groups, or how candidates are focusing their campaigning on certain constituencies.  Many of our clients who do grassroots organizing initially think that targeting is only used to help win elections, and don’t realize what a useful strategy it can be for nearly any kind of grassroots initiative.

Targeting is really about efficiency more than anything else.  Simply put, if you target the right people you waste less time and money talking to the wrong people and your results are stronger.  When we discuss targeting services with our clients, it often prompts some really helpful conversations about who the client is trying to connect with, and why those particular constituents or supporters are important to them – which may have been only vaguely defined before.

Here are some examples of how grassroots solutions has used targeting for different types of clients:

• In their efforts to organize communities around smoke-free laws, we helped ClearWay Minnesota build a targeting database to match swing-vote legislators with organizing capacity in various counties.
• We helped find activists that were willing to take action and call their state legislators on various environmental issues on behalf of the Sierra Club.
• We helped Communities for Quality Education find parents who wanted to protect education spending for their local public school during a ballot initiative campaign in Utah.
• We helped Clean Water Action identify a set of legislative member targets that made sense both for their issue and the politics in their state.

In all these cases, making targeting part of their grassroots solution helped these clients achieve stronger organizing results, considerably more cost-effectively.