Community-Building in Europe: Theory and Six Practical Steps
How movements actually grow: the theory behind community, a framework for digital organising, and a six-step ladder that turns followers into organisers who create other organisers.
Sebastián Rodríguez Pérez is a European campaign strategist with direct experience running and advising campaigns for some of Europe's largest pro-European organisations. He founded the European Campaign Playbook to codify practitioner knowledge across the EU's 27 political environments and make it accessible to campaign professionals, advocacy teams, and civic organisations working at the European level. His work spans electoral strategy, EU public affairs, digital campaigning, and the integration of AI tools into political communication workflows.
Disclosure
Sebastián Rodríguez Pérez is the founder of the European Campaign Playbook and Campaign Intelligence Library. He has worked with pro-European organisations across multiple EU member states. He maintains editorial non-partisanship in all published content; where articles relate to campaigns or organisations he has directly worked with, this is disclosed within the article. He holds no current positions in active electoral campaigns.
What it covers
Why communities, not just audiences, drive social change; the theory behind them (public narrative, resource mobilisation, collective identity and leadership development); Tectonica’s five-part framework for digital organising; and a six-step ladder for turning supporters into organisers.
Who it is for
Campaigners, organisers and public affairs teams who want to build durable, people-powered movements rather than one-off mobilisations.
When to use it
When you are moving an organisation from broadcasting to organising, designing a volunteer journey, or deciding how much responsibility to distribute beyond the central team.
Key takeaway
A movement scales when its volunteers stop waiting for the next task and start helping others take the next step. Measure the capacity you create, not the effort you extract.
In brief
- Followers, subscribers and attendees are the beginning of a community, not the community itself.
- Four traditions explain why communities matter: narrative creates purpose, identity creates belonging, organisation creates capacity, and leadership development grows it.
- Top-down models generate attention but rarely lasting capacity; distributed organising sets purpose and guardrails, then transfers responsibility.
- Tectonica’s five-part framework runs from broadcast to fully decentralised organising, and you move through it deliberately.
- The recurring cycle is simple: find, involve, mobilise, repeat.
- The six-step ladder: enter, participate, help, organise, lead, multiply.
- Measure capacity created (people who moved up, organised, or trained others), not effort extracted.
from organiser to community-builder
I have spent much of my career working at the intersection of political organising, communications and technology.
I began as a volunteer and organiser in London, when I became active in the Liberal Democrats, where I learned the practical foundations of organising: clear methodology, distributed responsibility and technology that helps people coordinate.
I later started my own company to work with grassroots movements across Europe. This included the European Movement in the United Kingdom, liberal-centrist movements in Romania and the civic mobilisation in Catalonia on 8 October 2017.
I subsequently helped lead a campaign to increase participation in the European elections across all 28 EU Member States, advising the European Parliament on volunteer management, digital campaigning and campaign strategy. Turnout in the 2019 election ultimately rose by 8.06 percentage points, reaching its highest level since 1994 and reversing the downward trend for the first time since the initial direct elections in 1979.
Afterwards, I served as Head of Communications for Ciudadanos in the European Parliament and as an economic adviser in the Renew Europe political group. Since 2022, I have continued working with European and grassroots movements in countries such as Belgium, with the European Movement International, Hungary and Serbia.
Across these very different organisations, I have learned many lessons. This masterclass gathers them, and the article below expands on them.
why communities matter for social change
A community is a group of people who voluntarily coordinate around a shared purpose. Social media followers, newsletter subscribers and event attendees may be the beginning of that community, but receiving information from the same organisation is not enough. A real community develops when people build relationships, accept responsibility and gain the confidence to act together.
The importance of community is supported by several influential traditions in the study and practice of social change.
Marshall Ganz’s public-narrative framework explains how leaders enable collective action through a story of self, a story of us and a story of now. The story of self communicates why a leader has been called to act. The story of us reveals the values and experiences that people share. The story of now turns those shared values into an urgent challenge, a source of hope and a choice to act together.
The story of us is particularly important. It transforms a collection of individuals into a constituency capable of recognising itself. People may first arrive because of an issue, event or leader, but they remain and take responsibility when they understand who “we” are, what “we” value and what “we” can accomplish together.
Public narrative should not be reduced to emotional messaging. Its purpose is to enable agency, not to manufacture consent. It must be based on authentic experience, an honest representation of the community and respect for the choices of the people being invited to act.
Resource-mobilisation theory adds another part of the explanation. Concern and frustration are rarely sufficient to produce sustained social change. Movements also need relationships, organisational infrastructure, knowledge, resources and connections to other actors. Communities provide the structure through which these resources can be assembled and used strategically.
Research on collective identity further explains why people participate even when there is no immediate material reward. Shared identity influences the causes people recognise as their own, the tactics they consider appropriate and the meaning they attach to participation.
Finally, research by Kenneth Andrews, Marshall Ganz, Matthew Baggetta, Hahrie Han and Chaeyoon Lim found that the effectiveness of civic associations cannot be explained by favourable circumstances and available resources alone. Internal leadership practices, member engagement and leader development account for much of the difference between organisations that merely exist and those capable of exercising public influence.
Key message. Together, these approaches tell us why communities matter: narrative creates shared purpose, identity creates belonging, organisation creates capacity, and leadership development allows that capacity to grow.
leadership should create a platform for action
Many organisations still operate through a traditional top-down model. A small central team makes the decisions, produces the materials, organises every activity and then asks supporters to participate.
That model can generate attention. It rarely generates lasting capacity.
If every new volunteer requires more work from the central team, growth eventually becomes a burden. The organisation may have more names in its database while remaining dependent on the same small group of people.
Distributed organising does not mean abandoning leadership, standards or strategy. The role of leadership is to establish a clear purpose, provide common tools and create the conditions in which other people can contribute responsibly. Leaders define the destination and the essential guardrails, while leaving genuine space for participants to shape the route.
The cause must remain more important than the organisation carrying it.
When people understand the objective, have a meaningful voice and can see how their contribution matters, they are more likely to take responsibility. They stop behaving like recipients of instructions and start behaving like participants in a shared effort. This requires transparency: not bringing people in without explaining what they are joining, and not presenting them with a finished plan in which every meaningful decision has already been made.
a framework for digital organising
A particularly useful model for understanding this transition was developed by Tectonica, a movement-building agency specialising in people-powered political change.
Tectonica’s Five-Part Framework classifies digital activity according to the depth of supporter engagement. It moves from one-way communication towards increasingly personalised relationships and increasingly decentralised decision-making. The framework evaluates what technology enables people to do, rather than which particular tools an organisation owns.
1. Broadcast communication and social media
The organisation publishes information through websites, newsletters, mass email and social media. Communication is primarily one-way, and the organisation retains control over both the message and the action. This creates awareness, but supporters remain an audience.
2. Recruitment, list building and engagement
The organisation introduces simple forms of two-way participation: registrations, petitions, surveys, donations and event sign-ups. People can respond, but the centre still defines the available choices.
3. Audience segmentation and organisation-directed activism
Communication becomes more personalised. The organisation listens, segments supporters and offers different messages or actions according to their interests and level of involvement. A ladder of engagement may appear at this stage, but strategy and decision-making remain largely centralised.
4. Supporter-based organising
Supporters begin creating content, hosting events or leading activities around a purpose or theme established by the organisation. The centre continues to provide direction, tools and boundaries, but volunteers gain meaningful operational responsibility.
5. Fully decentralised organising
Autonomous groups develop and implement their own strategies. Technology enables coordination, peer-to-peer relationships and accountability without requiring the central organisation to control every decision. The organisation becomes accountable to its activists as well as responsible for supporting them.
Tectonica makes two qualifications that matter. First, this is not a measure of doing “more” or “less” organising: a sophisticated broadcast campaign is still broadcast communication. Second, organisations do not occupy one permanent position; they can conduct activities across several categories, and the right balance depends on their purpose, readiness and theory of change.
Used as a transition guide, the framework suggests a practical sequence: build a reliable entry point, develop genuine two-way relationships, listen and personalise, give supporters bounded opportunities to lead, and decentralise strategic decisions only when capability and accountability are strong enough to support them.
Decentralisation without preparation creates confusion. Preparation without the transfer of responsibility preserves central control. Successful distributed organising requires both.
find, involve, mobilise and repeat
Most community-building strategies can be reduced to a recurring cycle:
- Find people. Identify those potentially aligned with the cause and give them a clear, accessible way to enter.
- Involve them. Help them form relationships, experience an early success and accept progressively greater responsibility.
- Mobilise them. When an election, referendum, campaign or legislative moment arrives, coordinate the community around a specific action.
- Then repeat. Each mobilisation creates new relationships and brings new people in. Some will leave after one action. Others will remain, deepen their involvement and eventually help the next generation enter.
The participation ladder provides the structure for that journey.
the six-step participation ladder
1. Enter
The person registers, receives the essential information and takes part in a welcome event. The objective is not to overwhelm them with content. It is to offer a clear first step and an early sense of belonging.
2. Participate
They attend a local activity, join their territorial community and begin meeting other people. At this point, the relationship becomes social rather than purely transactional.
3. Help
They collaborate several times on straightforward activities alongside someone with more experience. Small, supported responsibilities let people build competence without being left alone or exposed to unnecessary risk.
4. Organise
After demonstrating commitment and reliability, they begin organising small activities using shared guides and procedures. Common methods matter here: they let the organisation distribute decisions without losing quality, safeguarding or strategic coherence.
5. Lead
The strongest volunteers coordinate others, welcome new participants and develop emerging organisers. Leadership becomes less about completing tasks personally and more about helping other people succeed.
6. Multiply
The final objective is not for a volunteer to do more and more work. It is for that person to create other volunteers who are capable of organising independently. This is the point at which the model begins to scale.
measure capacity created, not effort extracted
Volunteer programmes often measure registrations, attendance, messages sent or hours contributed. These indicators can be useful, but they do not reveal whether the organisation is becoming stronger.
The more important questions are:
- How many people moved to the next level of responsibility?
- How many organised an activity without central staff doing it for them?
- How many welcomed or trained somebody new?
- How many leaders created another capable organiser?
- How many decisions can now be made responsibly outside the centre?
A healthy movement does not extract ever more effort from its most committed people. It distributes knowledge, relationships, trust and responsibility so that more people can contribute without burning out.
Technology can support that process. It can make onboarding easier, help people coordinate and give organisers access to shared methods. But it cannot create a community by itself. The decisive ingredients remain shared purpose, practical experience, human relationships and earned trust.
building a professional community with a cause
This philosophy also informs european campaign playbook, the community I founded for campaign professionals across Europe.
We bring together practical campaign craft, emerging technology and artificial intelligence with innovative approaches to public influence and grassroots organising. But our value does not come from content alone.
It comes from creating a professional home where practitioners can learn from one another, contribute their experience and help other people develop.
Anyone can publish another guide or deliver another workshop. A living community becomes valuable when its members build relationships, take responsibility and strengthen the people around them.
That is the transition organisations must make: from broadcasting to involving, from involving to organising, and from organising to multiplying.
Because a movement truly begins to scale when its volunteers no longer wait to be given the next task. They are ready to help somebody else take the next step.
Sources
- 1.Marshall Ganz, public narrative — the story of self, us and now — https://commonslibrary.org/the-power-of-story-the-story-of-self-us-and-now/
- 2.McCarthy & Zald, resource-mobilisation theory — https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/226464
- 3.Polletta & Jasper, collective identity and social movements — https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.283
- 4.Andrews, Ganz, Baggetta, Han & Lim, “Leadership, Membership, and Voice: Civic Associations That Work” — https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/leadership-membership-and-voice-civic-associations-work
- 5.Tectonica, The Five-Part Framework for Digital Organising — https://www.tectonica.co/posts/the_five_part_framework_digital_organising
- 6.European Parliament, final turnout data for the 2019 European elections — https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20191029IPR65301/final-turnout-data-for-2019-european-elections-announced