How Campaigns Work

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Frank helps guide you and your coworkers in creating campaigns to improve your workplace. In this post, we’ll walk you through how campaigns in Frank work, what to expect at each stage, and how you may be able to use Frank with your coworkers to make changes at work.

Getting started

You can create a campaign from scratch or use a Template from Frank’s Worker Resource Center. Templates are a useful tool if you know what issue you want to change, but aren’t sure how or where to get started in writing a demand letter. If you start in the template gallery, you can preview templates before selecting.

Whether you start with a Template or create a new campaign, we’ll help guide you through the creation process by breaking it down into sections. If you opt to use a Template as the basis for your campaign, you’ll see that many of these sections are already filled out — but, you and your coworkers have full ownership and the ability to customize.

Here’s an overview of each section you’ll see when you create a campaign:

• Categories identify the issue behind your campaign. They also tell us what workers are most often organizing about so we can create more resources geared towards what you care about.
• The Title of your campaign is your first opportunity to grab your coworkers’ attention. We suggest keeping it short and include your call to action. This way you coworkers will know exactly what they’re being asked to support.
• The Demand Letter is the meat of your campaign. In this section, you should lay out your case for why things must change in your workplace. You’ll be asked to provide the background information about why this issue matters. We recommend being specific about the change you want to see. It’s important to not only identify the problem, but describe the ideal solution you and your coworkers are demanding. If you are drafting a custom campaign, we suggest checking out some Templates as a reference.
• The Attachments section gives you the opportunity to share images, documents, or any links with your coworkers to give them more context on your campaign. You might want to cite specific research or case studies of similar organizing efforts. Attachments are not included in the Demand Letter sent to management.
• Organizers is where you can invite a coworker to collaborate with you as a co-organizer. This will allow them to edit the campaign and share responsibility for managing your campaign.
• Settings gives you options for how you’d like to conduct your campaign. You can set your group goal, allow link sharing, and decide if you’d like to accept anonymous signatures.
• The final step, Review and publish, walks you through what to expect when you publish your campaign. If you aren’t ready for this step, you can always save it as a draft. Fellow collaborators can access and edit drafts, making it easy to work together before publishing.

What’s next?

Congratulations — your campaign is now live. Frank notifies your fellow group members so they can begin to express support. Your role as a campaign organizer is to regularly engage with your group members about this campaign and their willingness to take action.

As a campaign organizer, it is imperative that you work to build support and solidarity for your campaign. You can start by inviting coworkers, sharing updates to your campaign, or engaging in discussions with your coworkers about your demands or actions.

You’ll also be able to edit various facets of the campaign after it’s live.

If your campaign gains support from your coworkers and you reach your signature goal, your campaign is almost ready to deliver to management. The signature goal you set is customizable, but at minimum, we require 51% of your group size. All workers are, of course, free to communicate directly to coworkers or their management at any time, but in order to send a campaign with Frank, we work to ensure your support is strong and wide amongst coworkers. Having strength in numbers helps ensure management takes your campaign seriously. And achieving broad support — called solidarity — is not only key to winning your demands, but protecting yourself and group members from management retaliation. It’s also important at this point to know exactly who you’re targeting with your campaign. This could be your direct manager, the owner of the company, the CEO, or members of a board of directors.

Delivering your campaign

Campaign organizers will modify the Demand Letter section of a campaign into an email to the intended recipients in management. During this phase, it’s helpful to plan for potential responses from management. You can do this by starting a discussion about what Actions your group is prepared to take if you don’t receive a satisfactory or timely response from management.

Frank anonymously sends your approved Demand Letter to the management target(s) you’ve identified. You can opt to list names of all signatories to show strength (this works best when you have all or near all employees signed on) or keep all names anonymous so no one employee is identified and targeted as a leader of the campaign.

In this letter, you’ll outline to management when you expect a response by and what your group expects to happen within that timeline. Any emailed responses to the demand letter are automatically shared with the group. You can often expect management to try to respond off of Frank — which you can notate in Campaign Updates for discussion.

Take Action

As your timeline for a response from management approaches, you can vote on the next steps. This can also be triggered by a lack of a response from management within an amount of time.

If your group is dissatisfied with management’s response, you may wish to take collective action to escalate your campaign. The Actions section of your campaign provides options for sample or custom Actions for your group to vote on, but you can also suggest other ideas. Actions like walkouts, work stoppages or slow downs, sick-outs, social media campaigns, and press releases can put pressure on management to take your demands seriously. These actions, however, are strongest when you have the majority of your group participating and they’re also risky by nature, so it’s important to make sure your group and campaign has strong solidarity.

If you’re satisfied with management’s response, congratulations on having your voice heard. Remember to stay engaged with your group to hold your employer accountable on making the changes you want to see. And you can get started building solidarity on your next campaign.

GetFrank.com is a digital tool for non-management workers, in any type of job, to privately organize with their coworkers and create campaigns to improve their workplace. Want to use Frank in your workplace? Sign up to join Frank.