Creating Micromovements

Seth Godin writes that “the key elements  in creating a micromovement consist of five things  to do and six principles:

1. Publish a manifesto. Give it away and make it easy for the manifesto to spread far and wide. (Interestingly in 2003 I wrote an article called “Ten Paradigm Shifts Toward Community Transformation” which I emailed to several folks who mailed it to several others. When I was in Malaysia earlier this month I met a pastor who got a copy of the Paradadigms and had it sent it to all his leaders. I ended up doing an all-day seminar in his church.) ideas don’t sleep when they are in written form. A manifesto like Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” helps people with ideas and language that take root and give birth to creative new ideas. If we want to influence we have to write…simple as that. After Luther translated the Bible into German and got it into the hands of the people he said, “It matters not whether I am sleeping or having a beer in a Whittenburg pub, the Word of God does its work.”
2. Make it easy for your followers to connect with you. Email, Facebook, Twitter, & blogs seem to facilitate this function
3. Make it easy for your followers to connect with one another.  This is a bit harder. Right now we are bulking up www.externallyfocusednetwork.com and putting links for externally focused churches along w/ resources they can use.
4. Realize that money is not the point of a movement. Marketeers try to create viral marketing and use movement language to describe what is happening but every true movement is done by people who work for free.
5. Track your progress.

Principles:

1. Tranparency really is your only option.
2. Your movement needs to be bigger than you.
3. Movements that grow thrive.
4. Movements are made most clear when compared to the status quo or to movements that work to push the other direction.
5. Exclude outsiders.
6. Tearing others down is never as helpful to a movement as building your followers up pp 103-105