Dissident organizations have to understand the population that they are trying to organize. So, learn who exists, where they are, how that population is changing, and what those changes actually mean for organizing capacity.
This is going to be the population that you are recruiting members, leaders, donors, volunteers, and eventually families and institutions from.
An important thing to remember is that demographics aren’t destiny, and statistics can’t tell you exactly what people believe. However, demographics certainly help establish the pool of people available to organize and the social conditions under which organizing people should take place.
You need to ask yourself:
Who are the people, where are they, how is their population changing, and what institutions and circumstances shape their lives?
Population Growth
The first thing you need to think about is if the population is growing, shrinking, or remaining relatively stable.
The first things that I would look at are:
Total population
Annual population change
Long-term population trends
Birth versus deaths
Domestic migration
International migration
Household growth
Population projections
A growing population obviously has the potential to provide an expanding recruiting pool, while a shrinking population will undoubtedly force organizers to work even harder to maintain its membership.
Total population is extremely misleading, because a county or region might grow by 10%, for example, while the population an organization actually hopes to recruit remains flat or declines.
So you have to distinguish between them:
Total population growth → target-population growth → potential membership pool → actual recruitment pool.
Also, population projections are essentially educated guesses, so don’t treat them like facts. Different assumptions about fertility, mortality, and migration can produce substantially different outcomes.
Birth Rates
Birth rates obviously tell you something about the future age structure of a population.
The measurements I pay attention to are:
Crude birth rates
General fertility rates
Total fertility rates
Age-specific fertility rates
Births by geographic area
Births by mother’s age
For us organizers, birth rates are extremely important because today’s children become tomorrow’s workers, parents, activists, community members, and potential leaders.
To be clear, you should not make fertility statistics the immediate measure of organizational strength. Just because the organization has a high birth rate, it doesn’t mean that in 18 years time that the organization will be larger or even still around.
You have to think of these outcomes:
Retention
Education
Religious affiliation
Family stability
Migration
Economic conditions
Geographic concentration
Whether young adults remain in the community
You can’t just ask yourself, “How many children are being born?” You really need to think about the population’s age structure in 10 → 20 → 30 years.
Age Distribution
Age distribution is one of the most important demographic considerations for any organizer.
When I am looking at any area to recruit in, I will break the local population down into categories:
Children
Teenagers
18-24
25-34
35-44
45-54
55-64
65+
It’s essentially every ten years.
Then ask what every single category means organizationally to you. For instance, a population dominated by young adults presents a very different organizing environment from one dominated by retired men.
These different age groups are more likely to have different:
Work schedules
Family responsibilities
Disposable income
Social networks
Transportation patterns
Communication habits
Institutional connections
Willingness to volunteer
Leadership potential
It’s also really important to consider how many children and elderly people there are relative to the working-age population.
Migration
Population change isn’t just about births and deaths, because people move.
So, study:
Domestic migration
International immigration
Interstate migration
County-to-county migration
Rural-to-urban migration
Urban-to-suburban migration
Suburban-to-rural migration
Migration of young adults
Migration of retirees
Migration associated with particular industries
Migration could completely transform an organization’s potential geography.
A community may have a declining local population, but rapidly increasing total population because of migration. For instance, if there is an area in Maine that has a declining population, but a bunch of people from Boston are moving there, that could completely change who you would have to attempt recruitment there and how you would need to do it.
So you have to think:
Who is leaving, who is arriving, and who is staying?
Because those 3 different groups could have wildly different relationships to the local community.
Urbanization
Determine how concentrated the population is by asking yourself the following about your potential recruitment area:
Concentrated in one city?
Spread across suburbs?
Distributed among small towns?
Scattered across rural areas?
Concentrated along a transportation corridor?
Divided among several metropolitan areas?
Population density dramatically affects organizing costs, because a thousand potential members living within a few miles of one another is way different from a thousand potential members scattered across the country.
Urbanization really affects the following:
Meeting locations
Travel requirements
Event attendance
Door-to-door organizing
Local chapters or clusters
Communication costs
Volunteer coordination
Family Formation
When I look at population statistics, I don’t stop at individuals. Instead, I also look at households and families.
Specifically, these are what I look at:
Marriage rates
Median age at first marriage
Household size
Number of children per household
Single-person households
Married-couples households
Divorce
Cohabitation
Household formation
Homeownership
Multigenerational households
I mean, think about it… family formation has enormous implications for organizational life.
Look, a 25-year old single person, a married couple with 3 kids, and a 65-year old empty-nester may all belong to the same broad demographic category, but that doesn’t mean they share the same time availability, financial commitments, transportation needs, and social networks.
If you can understand families, then you can build a program around actual household circumstances instead of an imagined member.
Education
Education must be examined at several different levels.
What I measure are:
High-school completion
College attendance
Bachelor’s degrees
Graduate degrees
Vocational education
Apprenticeships
Trade certifications
School enrollment
School quality where appropriate
Fields of study
You have to remember that education can influence someone’s employment opportunities, the amount of money they make, where they can move to or work, their professional networks, their political participation, their civic participation, communication styles, and how involved they can be in institutions.
However, do not automatically assume someone’s intelligence, character, or political beliefs based on their level of education. For instance, I am a high-school drop out, but here you are reading this to learn more about political activism.
Employment
Another thing you’re going to need to understand is how people make their money.
Here’s what I look at:
Labor-force participation
Employment rate
Unemployment
Major industries
Major occupations
Self-employment
Unionization where relevant
Full-time versus part-time employment
Shift work
Commute patterns
Remote work
Median and household income
Wage distribution
Organization memberships are constrained by people’s time and economic circumstances. A community dominated by healthcare workers, for example, may have large numbers of people working irregular schedules. Meanwhile, a manufacturing community may have concentrated workplaces and shift changes that mean different organizing opportunities.
So, your goal isn’t merely to know whether people are “working.” You have to understand the economic structure of their everyday lives.
Geographic Concentration
Once I have done all of that, I map where my main recruitment centers should be created by marking:
Counties
Towns
Neighborhoods
Metropolitan areas
Rural communities
Population density
Transportation
Employment centers
Educational institutions
Existing associations
Then I look for clusters. I won’t tell you what they are for TNW, but lets say that an organization discovered that its potential recruitment centers are distributed nationally but are heavily concentrated in 10 metropolitan areas.
This information will influence how you structure your organization, so it’s best to stop pretending that every single state requires an equal organizational presence—because that won’t be the case.
Think about it like this:
10 strong geographic clusters → regional networks → national organization.
This is the map that should determine your organization—not the other way around.
Rural vs. Urban Populations
“Rural” and “urban” are not to be treated just as two demographic labels.
They represent completely different organizational environments. For instance, rural populations may have:
Lower population density
Longer travel distances
Greater dependence on automobiles
Smaller local institutions
More overlapping social networks
Fewer large public gathering places
Meanwhile, urban populations may have:
Great population density
More potential recruits within a small geographic area
Greater institutional diversity
High mobility
More anonymity
More competing organizations
Also, suburbia deserves a completely separate consideration, because it’s the transitional phase from rural to urban. So, your organization’s recruitment model should reflect the actual communities you’re looking to recruit from.
Generational Differences
People who were born in different time periods do not have identical experiences.
When you’re recruiting, you have to look at each generation:
Silent Generation (Ages 98-81)
Baby Boomers (Ages 80-62)
Generation X (Ages 61-46)
Millennials (Ages 45-30)
Generation Z (Ages 29-14)
Generation Alpha (Ages 13-)
The exact boundaries are less important then understanding the underlying differences. So, different generations will have experienced different economic conditions, technologies, educational systems, family structures, wars, recessions, cultural institutions, media environments, and housing markets.
Undoubtedly, these experienced will affect how people communicate, form friendships, consume information, and participate in organizations.
However, generational categories are analytical tools, not personality types.
Separating Demography from Demographic Narratives
One of the things that I need to address is how demographic data tells you what is happening, while political narratives tell you what someone thinks those changes mean. And this is easily one of the places where most organizers become intellectually careless.
What you need to understand is that demography and demographic narratives are very different things. So, every time you hear a major demographic claim, you must ask:
What is the actual measurement?
Geography
Year
Population definition
Data source
Measurement
What is the time period?
5 years
10 years
25 years
50 years
100 years
What exactly is being measured?
Immigration, foreign-born, ethnicity, race, ancestry, and citizenship are not interchangeable categories.
Birth rate does not equal fertility rate, and fertility rate does not mean population growth.
Population percentage does not equal absolute population.
What are the competing explanations?
Low fertility
Mortality
Domestic migration
International migration
Economic conditions
Housing costs
Aging
Changes in household formation
Changes in geographic boundaries.
Distinguish description from prediction
The claim that ‘a population has become older is different’ than ‘a population will become dramatically older by 2050.’
The first statement is a statement about observed data, while the second is a projection dependent on assumptions, not fact.
Distinguish prediction from political interpretation
These claims are different:
‘The median age is increasing.’
‘The median age will increase over the next 25 years.’
‘This demographic change will destroy our organization.’
The first claim requires historical data, the second requires demographic modeling, and the third requires an argument about organizational consequences. So, don’t let someone try to sneak the third claim into the first.
So, remember to establish the baseline of a time period, because statistics could look dramatically different in comparison. Remember not to immediately assume that a population declining is explained by one answer, because your job when analyzing demographics is to ask which factors actually account for the observed change.
The Core Principle
If you’re trying to be a serious organizer, than you need to move through these four separate stages:
DATA → DEMOGRAPHIC TREND → INTERPRETATION → ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSE
You can’t skip from one to another like:
POLITICAL NARRATIVE → ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSE.
In case you didn’t just see what I did, political narrative is not a stage. So if you use political narratives to determine your organizational response, then you’re an idiot. Don’t do that.
Discipline protects an organization from building its strategy around exaggerated statistics, selective anecdotes, ideological assumptions, and demographic myths.
At the same time, avoiding political narratives does not mean ignoring uncomfortable demographic realities. If the data shows substantial population change, acknowledge it. If the data contradicts a popular narrative, acknowledge that too.
The purpose of demographic analysis isn’t to confirm what you already believe. It’s to find out what is actually happening.
I have decided to put together a worksheet that paid subscribers can use, and one which only they can see.