Before you start planning your movement, it’s important to take a step back and frame your thinking before you move forward. To prevent hollow organizing as you embark on your struggle, it's essential to understand some key concepts first; so you can guard against engaging thousands of people with no direction.

Strategic thinking can be broken down into five key areas that help develop your plan, from your overall vision to your day-to-day actions. When we think about strategy, it is often confused with tactics or methods (the actions/direct actions you take). This can be a grave mistake because it doesn’t allow you the opportunity to course correct and make the necessary adjustments to achieve your success. In this lesson, we will walk through the steps you need to take to formulate a practical and strategic approach to your movement so that you can achieve the goals you want to achieve.

As we have seen in the past 15 years, getting people to take to the streets is easier and easier. But not all of it is good, as mobilisations sometimes lack discipline and direction. So the question becomes how to build large movements and also enable people in their local areas to bring the most to the table to advance the strategic objectives. Let's walk through how this happens.

We have seen the lack of impact that leveraging digital tools to get many people “into the streets” can have. While numbers are an important part of movement success, it is not the only part. Movements with large numbers need to be clear on the vision they want, their grand strategy and their strategy. The Occupy movement was thinking tactically that if they can engage a large number of people, they will win. That wasn’t the case. They needed to be able to give people some strategic direction, with a clear and defined end state in mind to ensure that the 20,000 people made a difference. Here are the steps you can take to ensure that you can successfully combine offline and online operations for maximum effectiveness

The Bersih movement, which began in 2006 and was rebranded as Bersih 2.0 in 2010, is a coalition-based initiative focused on electoral reform in Malaysia. Initially started by political parties, it has since evolved into a people-powered movement. The Bersih movement exemplifies how digital tools can be harnessed to advance strategic objectives, cultivate relationships, and coordinate offline actions, effectively utilizing the power generated within the digital landscape.

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