Introduction

In 2013, an international group of digital activists met in upstate New York. The group included Americans from MoveOn, Germans from Campact, Britons from 38 Degrees, Australians from GetUp and Canadians from LeadNow. They were united by a commitment to progressive values and a distinctive model of advocacy organization. Unlike the wax and wane of many social movements, they all belonged to professional advocacy organizations that have become a permanent fixture in their domestic contexts. They founded a transnational network and spread this organizational model to over 20 countries. The mobilizing capacity and global diffusion of this model are important for gender and politics scholarship. First, thanks to their distinctive model, they attract a large following and can quickly mobilize thousands of supporters online and offline. Second, they often campaign on lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) causes and women’s rights. Third, this model has been emulated by progressive and conservative actors around the world. Collectively, these organizations are changing how activism is done.

A distinctive model and rapid mobilizers

Digital advocacy organizations are digitally native organizations that attract a large membership via Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), email and online petitions (Karpf, 2012; 2016). However, their distinctiveness is not simply that they campaign online, as most non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and advocacy organizations do so today. Digital advocacy organizations have three distinctive features.

First, most of these organizations are multi-issue.¹ Rather than focusing on a single issue, or representing a particular community, they campaign simultaneously across many distinctive issues, from climate change to trade agreements. They seek to build a broad movement of progressives and follow Audre Lorde’s maxim that people ‘do not live single-issue lives’ (Lorde, 1984: 133). Digital advocacy organizations may mobilize members one day on environmental protection and subsequently encourage these same members to campaign to legalize abortion.

Second, these organizations are member driven and member funded. Anyone can become a member by signing up to receive regular emails and do not need to pay membership dues. They have large memberships. Avaaz, an international digital advocacy organization, for instance, claims 70 million members in over 194 countries.² MoveOn, Campact and GetUp all have over one million members. These organizations proudly claim to be majority member funded (often over 90 per cent member funded) rather than receiving funding from philanthropies or foundations (Hall, 2022). Digital advocacy organizations are primarily accountable to these individual members and regularly ‘test’ campaigns to determine which ones gain the most member interest. They will change the framing and even switch issues depending on how well their emails and social media perform (for example, they track open and action rates of their online communications) (Karpf, 2012). This is different from most advocacy organizations that remain committed to their core cause, whether it be LGBTIQ or women’s rights or climate protection. Digital advocacy organizations can be opportunistic because they so closely follow members’ revealed preferences; this can result in them prioritizing easy wins over more difficult or controversial campaigns.

Third, these organizations campaign in rapid-response mode. Thanks to digital technology, they can respond almost immediately to breaking news stories. They can set up new campaigns within hours, for example, by setting up an online petition and mobilizing their members to sign it via email or social media. They may also mobilize people to take to the streets. Thanks to their multi-issue, member-driven and rapid-response nature, they can rapidly mobilize thousands of supporters. Their large memberships and fast-moving activism give them a great advantage over many other established forms of advocacy (Hall et al, 2020). However, there are downsides: they are quick to drop campaigns that are not getting majority member support.

Campaigners for LGBTIQ and women’s rights

Digital advocacy organizations have regularly campaigned for women’s rights and LGBTIQ rights, with some significant successes. They often work in coalition with other civil society organizations and social movement leaders and try to amplify causes with their large memberships.

GetUp, for instance, was a pivotal player in the Australian national postal survey on marriage equality in 2017 (Karp, 2017). They produced powerful content for the campaign – including a YouTube video, ‘It’s Time’, which went viral and was viewed over a million times.³ GetUp staff also built a phone-banking tool (‘Kooragang’), which made it easy and efficient for thousands of volunteers to canvas Australians (Rugg, 2019).⁴ GetUp coordinated large phone-banking campaigns and worked with others, including civil society organizations and companies like Qantas and Monsanto, to advocate for marriage equality. This collective campaign was successful: over 60 per cent of Australians approved changing the law to legalize same-sex marriage.

Digital advocacy organizations have been active in many other countries on women’s and LGBTIQ rights. In Poland, Ackja Demokrajca actively mobilized people onto the streets to protest against the government’s restrictions on abortion. In Ireland, Uplift campaigned for marriage equality in 2015 and for abortion rights in 2018 during nationwide referenda on these issues. Uplift coordinated volunteers to convince undecided voters to vote for the decriminalization of abortion and the legalization of gay marriage.⁵ Digital advocacy organizations’ work has also been recognized as influential. In Austria, Maria Mayrhofer, the director of Aufstehen, won the Vienna Women’s Prize for her work campaigning against misogynistic hate speech online (#solidaritystorm-Aktion).⁶

The global spread of digital advocacy organizations

MoveOn, founded in 1998, was the first organization to pioneer this distinct model (Karpf, 2012). Since then, activists from Australia, Hungary, South Africa and Brazil, among many others, have emulated this model of campaigning organization (Hall, 2022). Europe has the most multi-issue, nationally based progressive digital advocacy organizations of any world region (see Figure 1). The largest progressive digital advocacy organizations in terms of members, staff numbers and funding are based in the Anglosphere (the US, UK and Australia), along with Germany. In addition to these nationally based organizations, there are also regional and international digital advocacy organizations, such as Avaaz (international and multi-issue), WeMove (European and multi-issue) and Ekō (international and targets the power of corporations).

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Map of multi-issue digital advocacy organizations

Citation: European Journal of Politics and Gender 2025; 10.1332/25151088Y2024D000000031

Note: Figure 1 includes only nationally based digital advocacy organizations that are active in 2024. In some countries, digital advocacy organizations have launched but then failed to survive, such as in Italy and Columbia. Some countries have multiple progressive and conservative digital advocacy organizations (for example, the US).Source: Produced by Steffen Lohrey based on data collected by the author.

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Right-wing actors have also emulated this model in the US, Germany, Australia and Spain and at the international level with CitizenGO (Hall et al, 2022). Ignacio Arsuaga, for instance, founded the right-wing Spanish digital advocacy organization Hazte Oir in 2001 and then CitizenGO in 2013 in an attempt to emulate the success of Avaaz internationally. CitizenGO has become a key hub in the transnational network of morally conservative organizations (Ayoub and Stöckl, 2024). This organization claims 18 million members and campaigns in over a dozen languages, including Hungarian, Portuguese, Spanish and English. CitizenGO has a strong ‘anti-gender ideology’, and its campaigns led to the temporary closure of family planning clinics in Africa. CitizenGO contributed US$32.7 million to anti-gender activities in Europe between 2008 and 2018 (Datta, 2021: 47).

Given the proliferation of this model, we need to understand now, more than ever before, when and why this model diffuses successfully. Existing studies highlight that strong personal networks, frequent face-to-face exchanges and supportive organizations in close proximity enabled progressive organizations to diffuse this model (Hall, 2022). Scholars should also examine the role of digital advocacy organizations in forging movements for and against LGBTIQ women’s rights. More specifically, we need to understand the transnational networks that these organizations are part of and when and how they act as a bridge between domestic and transnational campaigns. Scholars should also examine if and how these organizations mobilize members who previously did not care about, or campaign for, LGBTIQ and women’s rights. Given that we do not live single-issue lives, we need to understand how people become active and involved in conservative or progressive causes.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Nina Hall is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Her research focuses on transnational advocacy and international organizations. Her recent book, Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era, Think Global, Act Local (Hall, 2022) won the 2023 International Studies Association International Communication’s Section best book prize and was shortlisted for the Susan Strange Best Book Prize (2023).

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.