Backgrounder: How New/Mode will use AI to help you build power

I’m excited to announce that we’re working on a New/Mode AI Campaign Strategist to support advocacy campaigns on the most important issues of our time. 

We’ve learned much from supporting leading social good organizations across many countries to send over 80 million messages to government decision-makers. 

We’ve always tried to share what we learned with our community. We started by releasing the Full Spectrum of Engagement Framework, and we’ve built on that with many free trainings and other free resources. 

We’re taking the next step by leveraging AI technologies to empower civic campaigners further. Read on to learn more, and please fill out this very short survey to guide how we use AI technologies.

Those of us campaigning for a better world need all the help we can get.  At New/Mode, we’ve felt a deep obligation to see how we can thoughtfully use AI to build community power. We’ve long used AI technologies to support campaigners, but for the most part, it’s been behind the scenes in our platform. 

Stepping into a new era

Early last year, we started exploring how generative AI can help us learn from the performance of different campaigns on our platform and how the technology might enable us to democratize access to sophisticated strategic insights. 

Since then, we’ve worked with AI researchers and leading product designers to build our new offering. 

*A screenshot of a ranking process we engaged in as part of setting the weights and measures our new  campaign Impact Score.

What will New/Mode’s AI Campaign Strategist do?

Imagine having a collaborator who can instantly analyze hundreds of millions of data points generated from the best campaigners around the world and answer your questions about campaign strategy, tactics, power-building theories, and content. 

That’s our vision for New/Mode’s AI Campaign Strategist.  The Strategist will make proactive recommendations to help your campaigns start strong and grow stronger over time. 

Will this replace human campaign strategists? 

No! We’ve seen time and time again that for those who can afford it, the return on investment in hiring a good campaign strategist, consultant, or digital agency can be huge. 

Campaign strategists and digital agencies will become even more valuable because they will enjoy access to data and insights that are currently unavailable.  They’ll have unique expertise in AI prompts and other expertise that can deploy to get the most out of this service. 

Creativity matters. The specific context you’re campaigning in matters — the contributions of your community matter. The strategist will help you get the most out of what matters. AI allows and provides individuals and small organizations to get a baseline of strategic insights previously unavailable to them. 

How will this rollout?

We want to make sure we do this right. We’ll start small and build up to the full vision of a full AI Campaign Strategist over time. 

The first stage of our rollout will include the following elements

1. The Advocacy Impact Score:  an amalgamation of several pieces of data that align with effective advocacy campaigns and it will learn from other successful campaigns on the platform over time.
2. Advocacy Impact Insights: Key unique policy impact metrics with accompanying color-coded evaluation bar.
3. Engagement and Impact Recommendations: A recommendations panel for each New/Mode campaign that provides recommendations designed to increase conversion rates, campaign sharing, and policy impact. 

We’ll begin making these elements available to those using our Grassroots Service in the coming weeks. You can sign up for a free account here if you want to see the first iteration. Once the model has trained on more data and we’ve ironed out any initial issues, we’ll begin releasing it to subscribers using our paid professional tiers of service.  

The impact score and other components are built off Machine Learning trained on a subset of the 80 million messages sent to government decision-makers plus other data points. It is the underlying engine that will power our full Campaign Strategist in the future. 

We’ll initially focus on refining our weights and measures for the impact score and recommendations engine and then we’ll start building the New/Mode Campaign Strategist in dialogue with movement leaders and experts.  

*A screenshot of our impact score and some of the recommendations

We know even though we’re relying on our data, AI projects are often fraught with bias, exploitation, and other negative externalities. 

We want you to help guide our work in this area. Please fill out our very quick AI Campaign Strategist survey. We’d love for you to weigh in on our approach to weights and measures and flag any concerns you have.

There are numerous reasons to be critical of many AI projects but at the same time it’s a powerful technology that those working for social good can’t ignore. In a time of overlapping crisis we need to gain an edge on regressive forces. 

I hope New/Mode’s use of AI technology will be a meaningful contribution to giving our communities and movements an extra advantage in these challenging times.