Measuring participation in social movements

What is active support?

Being an “active supporter” essentially means participating – it is how many people in a population are dedicating sustained effort to moving the goals of the movement forward, whether by voting on a particular set of issues, volunteering, protesting, organizing, or otherwise.

Read more on “passive support” – those who agree with the movement’s visions but haven’t participated in a sustained, active way before.

Metrics of active support

The most common active support metrics we think of in the Momentum model include:

• Protest events

• Organizational growth

• Growth of organizations in an issue area

• Voting patterns

• Outreach efforts, such as door-knocks or calls made

• Money raised or contribtued

In the report affiliated with this website, we determined that our research would focus on amassing any existing metrics of passive support, because many active support metrics such as internal organizational growth are not publicly available – yet they are part of the common sharing between organizations and their funders.

Where we did find active support metrics that were important – for example, total participation in immigration marches in Los Angeles in 2006, as catalogued by academic researchers – we included them.