Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

Rules for Revolutionaries chronicles the experiences and insights gained from Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, where authors Bond and Exley served as senior advisors. The book outlines key strategies and principles for large-scale organizing in the digital age. The authors present their "rules" through a combination of campaign stories and practical frameworks for mobilizing volunteers and building grassroots movements. Their approach focuses on combining traditional organizing methods with modern technology and distributed leadership structures. The narrative moves through the authors' successes and failures in implementing these methods during real political campaigns. Their system emphasizes the power of trusting volunteers with significant responsibilities and scaling up quickly through peer-to-peer organizing. This manual for modern organizing speaks to fundamental questions about how social movements can harness both human and technological resources to create change. The book offers a blueprint for transforming traditional hierarchical organizing into a more dynamic and accessible model.

Readers describe this book as a practical guide to grassroots organizing based on lessons from the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. Most reviews come from political organizers and activists who applied the methods to their own work. Liked: - Clear, actionable steps for large-scale organizing - Real examples from the Sanders campaign - Focus on digital tools and distributed organizing - Practical advice for managing volunteers Disliked: - Too focused on Sanders campaign specifics - Some concepts feel dated post-2016 - Limited discussion of coalition building - Lack of content on addressing opposition Ratings: Goodreads: 4.1/5 (449 ratings) Amazon: 4.6/5 (157 ratings) Notable reader comment: "The book provides a blueprint for building distributed organizing programs, but needs updating for current social movements" - Goodreads reviewer Many readers noted the book works best as a starting point for organizers rather than a comprehensive manual.

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🔷 Authors Bond and Exley developed their "big organizing" principles while working as senior advisors on Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, where they helped mobilize over 75,000 volunteer teams nationwide. 🔷 The book's title is a deliberate play on Saul Alinsky's influential 1971 work "Rules for Radicals," but presents a distinctly different approach focused on large-scale, distributed organizing rather than small-group activism. 🔷 Co-author Zack Exley previously served as Wikipedia's Chief Community Officer and was one of the first political directors to harness the power of online fundraising during Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. 🔷 The authors advocate for "barnstorming" - a technique where volunteers host house parties simultaneously across the country to build momentum - which helped the Sanders campaign organize over 2,000 events in a single day. 🔷 The term "big organizing" was coined to describe their revolutionary approach of trusting volunteers with real responsibility and meaningful work, rather than limiting them to simple tasks like phone banking or door knocking.