More Members When?
A Playbook to Prepare for DSA Membership Spikes
Huge turnout at a NYC-DSA 101 event. Source: https://x.com/nycDSA/status/1856693748530303073
By: Allegra R
For those who haven’t dissociated yet, we all recognize the political moment is rough. We’re about to face four years of fascism under Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the Democrats can’t even protect the National Labor Relations Board. It’s very easy to submit to the doom and gloom and consider fleeing to Luxemburg if you’re wealthy enough, but for those of us who can’t afford to, who know better, or who want to stay and fight back, there’s another option, which is joining DSA. We’ve seen thousands of new members join across the country, and over 700 join where I’m writing from in New York City. These members will constitute what we hope to be a second Trump Bump, but we’ve got to make sure these new members are prepared to help us build the left and fight the right. But we have to make sure that we have clear pathways to get them organized. Let’s dive into how we can do that.
Maybe you’ve been around the block for a while, comrade, and you joined DSA during the Trump Bump or the Bernie Bump at the end of the 2016 presidential election. We hear people mention these increases in membership, but we don’t often hear about the infrastructure and people power required to onboard those new members, and if we can prepare more for these moments of membership spikes.
I’m the treasurer for NYC-DSA, and in my day job I work in marketing analytics, which means I have opinions about comms and opinions about data. While looking at data may seem corporate, it is really important in how we identify and use trends to build momentum on the left. In NYC, our chapter steering committee stepped into leadership a week before the 2024 presidential election. We had a choice: see what the vibes are after the election and react to the moment or plan for both scenarios and be ready to respond in the immediate days after. We chose the latter. NYC-DSA steering had text-bank scripts ready for a Harris win and a Trump win. The target list was to everyone on our email list who wasn’t a member, and the primary ask was to join DSA. We sent that text out on Thursday morning. In the following days, DSA 101 meetings were scheduled for every day of the week following over 300 people in attendance in the 1st 101 scheduled after the election, and now we’re seeing that increase in overall membership in NYC-DSA jump even higher to over 700.
A mass movement requires not just a mass of people, but also an orientation toward mass politics. That means writing and fighting for legislation that will save millions of lives, electing leaders who will fight for that life-saving legislation, as well as building out a strong labor movement that protects workers from fascist bosses like Trump, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. How we mobilize our members at this moment is not just a practical question, it’s also political.
Providing mass political work for a new member to plug into such as legislative or electoral work with tangible tasks such as tabling or making phone calls will help them see the power of organizing with small wins that lead to larger scale wins over time. These wins can save thousands of lives, but DSA needs people power in order to win. Allowing members to join naturally without existing organizers going out of their way to recruit reduces the influx of potential members and then our people power is negatively affected.
Our efforts have been a good call. The graph above from Google Trends shows a search interest score in DSA. Over time, the election week shaped up to be the largest bump in search since October 7th, 2024. DSA national is reporting over 3,000 members have joined since the election. Working people want to know what we can do next and are looking for what we can control. It's our role as elected leaders in the largest socialist organization in the US to give them tangible ways of getting involved.
As comrades continue the fight to build the left and fight the growth of fascism in the USA, if we want to grow, we need to recognize these political moments and be prepared to respond. Every national election is an opportunity, and every socialist we elect to office is also an opportunity to get new members into DSA. These moments are predictable, and could be used to pave the way for future membership spikes. Other examples of these predictable moments are local elections. We’ve seen larger bumps of interest in DSA and membership in New York City when Julia Salazar was elected, and when AOC was elected for the first time. Defeating incumbents makes headlines, headlines drive interest, and interest brings in new members. Of course, it would be easier to not do anything to promote new members and see if they come to us naturally. And yes, we did get more members through Trump’s election, but we got even more members by being proactive in the moment and making the hard ask. A lot of people are actively looking to do something, but many more don’t know where to turn. Maybe they’re looking at the Working Families Party, or the Party for Socialism and Liberation, but if we give them that nudge to turn to us, then we find ourselves with even more people joining, helping us build our movement further than it could have with being passive.
There are several ways to prepare for an influx of new members, and I recommend the following:
The Membership Spike Playbook
Get your onboarding machine ready for people who join
Keep your sign-up form up-to-date, with relevant fields such as if a prospective is a union member, and functional on your chapter website: make sure you have a way of tracking HOW members are finding out about DSA and WHERE they found out about us. In NYC-DSA, almost all of our joins come from our website directly, and almost all of our website traffic comes from people Googling us. Use source codes on your join form in tweets, emails, textbanks, and wherever you’re telling people to join so we can track that sweet sweet member data.
Identify potential onboarders: these can be relatively new members or established leaders, but the one thing they have to do is be reliable. They have to be ready to schedule one-on-one conversations with potentially dozens of members. They have to have the resources available to them to know how to do that. Build out onboarding guides for your new members, have sample scripts ready, and a simple FAQ on hand for more difficult questions about the current political moment.
Keep track of your onboardees through a tool. It could be AirTable, it could be a spreadsheet but you must track notes from one-on-one conversations somewhere, along with what their first DSA event RSVP is, to their second RSVP, and their third, and so on.
Keep track of membership ebbs and flows. When do you see spikes and do they correspond to the political moment? Did you see a spike after Trump bump 1? What about during a local election?
Have campaigns or organizing work for new members to plug into
Maybe it’s hot labor summer and you’ve just elected a UAW candidate to the assembly. Get thee to a picket line! Maybe the state budget is about to be finalized and there’s a really cool bill that needs to be passed. Tabling, phonebanking, and rallies, oh my! The possibilities are endless.
Get your comms everywhere
We all know social media can be toxic, but it can also be a medium to plug our organizing work. Let’s go viral together! While a lot of DSA members know they can send emails and post, we can also run ads on social media and other platforms to build the socialist agenda first, all over the Internet, and even TV if you have the budget for it! And make sure you’re tracking the call to action links in those tweets with source codes so your chapter can see what kinds of posts work and what don’t.
Be strategic
It’s one thing to do rapid response, it’s another thing to botch rapid response. If you feel the strategy is moving the wrong way or in a way that is not effective, take a breath and meet. Being strategic means reading the room (DSA) and reading what’s outside the room (the political moment). Discuss what would make sense for your situation, and don’t be afraid to engage in political disagreement. Disagree politically but not personally.
As your chapter builds its membership, there will be group chats and social media where discourse can get heated. It’s one thing to disagree about a political stance or strategy, but it’s another thing to call someone out personally. That is uncomradely behavior and is part of the growing pains of every organization. Every membership squad should have moderators on their group chats with community agreements. Every code of conduct violation on social media can and should be reported to your local steering committee.
Keep track of your costs
You have to spend money to make money (dues). In NYC, the text bank we spent over $600 on netted us 50 new joins and over $500 in MONTHLY dues, that’s $6,000 in annual dues. For every dollar we spent, we made back 10 more just this year! Make sure your treasurer is weighing the cost benefit analysis of organizing work.
Translate positive numbers into positive vibes!
If your chapter is seeing massive amounts of success from their membership operation, post about it! Email membership and thank them. Email non members and tell them this is the time to join!
By scaling up a mass political vision through recruitment, we demonstrate a better future is possible if we organize for it. This alternative vision of the future is what these new members are looking for. They want to do something to make a difference, and the Democratic party has failed them on this account. Every positive ID at every door, every donation made, every letter signed, those are winning measures of building a mass movement in a country where they have taught us that nothing can change. We can change our future, and this political moment will provide challenges, but as we know, when we fight back, we can win, and we do it with the members who join DSA.
And this is the time to join. Now more than ever we are seeing a rightward shift simply because the establishment democrats have failed the working class. In the last Trump bump, we were working with a very different terrain: we were able to push Democrats to the left, ones who are now moving to the right. Liberals across the world still felt they were able to be liberals and hold to their morals. Now it seems more liberals are looking at a binary and choosing socialism instead. It’s not a secret third thing, it’s the next and most powerful threat to fascism in the world, and we can win it together.
