From Campaign Organizers

What kind of campaigns can GetCourageNow be used for?

GCN can be used for any kind of grassroots (e.g., social, economic, climate) or electoral campaign.

What makes GetCourageNow better than other applications used for organizing people en masse (e.g., Mobilize America, Facebook, Twitter)? 

Though such tools can certainly initiate a ladder of engagement into any sort of grassroots campaign, and are used to keep people informed and reminded, they are not tools specifically designed to address the various barriers unique to recruiting large numbers of people for powerful, ongoing mass civil resistance strategies.

How does GetCourageNow increase enrolment rates?

GCN integrates 5 features that have been individually proven to increase supporter engagement.

• Crowd-acting: Think kickstarter meets movement organizing. This feature enables the user to choose the level of confidence they need in the likelihood of the campaign’s success to be willing to commit, just as Kickstarter enabled the user to commit their money only if enough others do the same to reach the minimum funding needed for the cause. See here for 3 min animation explaining how crowd-acting works.

• Various concepts from behavioral economics: This feature enables the user to identify and inform the campaign of the specific needs they have to be willing to commit (e.g. transportation, childcare, an invitation from a friend).

• Peer-bonding: Gives users the opportunity to connect with like-minded people in their community.

• Expanded role choice: Provides the user with the opportunity to help the campaign in 20+ ways, encouraging a greater variety of participation for ‘on the fence’ users.

• Motivational videos: Emotionally moving short video clip interviews with resisters voicing either their deepest felt motivations or the immense feelings of joy, contentment, and satisfaction of being involved in the movement.

How do you know the 5 engagement features actually increase enrolment rates?

All 5 features have individually achieved proof of concept.

• Crowd-acting was the key component to Groupon’s success.

• Many behavioral economics experiments have validated the power of “easifying” actions (i.e. removing barriers to commitment).

• The effectiveness of peer-bonding has been demonstrated by apps or systems such as VoterCircle and Outvote.

• Uprise.org has already demonstrated the effectiveness of offering “expanded role choice”.

• The advertising industry and political campaign industry has used motivational (testimonials) videos for many years with abundant studies proving their effectiveness.

Will the Kickstarter concept of crowdfunding really transfer to courageous action? What if the user changes their mind?

GCN removes the major reasons for not showing up (e.g., the fear it will be a waste of your time, that the campaign won’t really succeed, lack of social support/community, needing transportation/housing/childcare) and gives users more ways to contribute or support those who participate. While this should encourage many more people to remain involved, and we could experiment with other strategies, there of course will be a percentage of user drop out.

Why would campaign organizations benefit from using GetCourageNow?

By having five successfully proven features in one place, GCN becomes the first and only tool that provides an urgently needed campaign support system that encompasses a greater number of people’s engagement needs. The collaboration tools embedded into the app also allow easy campaign coordination and communication between organizers and users.

Are there any other benefits of GetCourageNow?

Yes! First and foremost, GCN will become a laboratory with the ability to determine what specific supports certain people need to take courageous action, as well as what does and doesn’t work to keep people engaged in a campaign or movement.

How do you solve the marketing challenge of attracting potential users to download the app?

By integrating (white-labeling) GCN into the ‘take action’ or ‘join’ tabs of any campaign or organization’s website. This means that the platform will automatically attract users without having to build up a brand name and audience from scratch, thereby eliminating digital marketing expenses and leaving more funds to improve functionality for grassroots movements using GCN.

From Developers

What is the stack?

Flutter and Golang only.

What’s your open source policy?

100% open all the way down, forever.

How does a user know that the software running on their device is the same as is in the Github?

Software notarization.

• The code is currently reproducible, meaning that what is in Github is also what is in the binaries using continuous integration and tagging. 

• The code is signed and then the app stores cross check the signing.

How do we protect against being taken down?

This area is multifaceted.

• We are in discussion to be part of Project Shield that gives DDOS protection.

• The client code can run on the web, so if we are blocked from the app stores it’s fine. Getting taken down at the domain name level is subjected to ICANN rules.

• On Android we can side load and side update. Unfortunately you can’t do this on IOS.

• The server code can run on Raspberry Pi’s in distributed locations and be hidden through a layer 4 global proxy and other means.

• There is also the option to run on open source mobile phones.

  1. We are in discussions with running on PinePhone, which only requires porting the Flutter embedder.