Grassroots organizing links people through congregations, secular institutions, boards, volunteers, and personal relationships. The available research describes a field that reached 40 states, represented more than 5 million people through member institutions, and tested several ways of turning social connection into civic action. The figures below span field surveys and experiments from 2011 through 2026; each measurement period and geography is identified where the source provides it.
On this page
- How large the organizing field became
- What a typical organization looked like
- Who participated and how institutions engaged
- Representation and diversity across the field
- Political relationships and public action
- Relational organizing and voter turnout
- The wider nonprofit context
How large the organizing field became
The 2012 report Building Bridges, Building Power described institution-based community organizing (IBCO) as a growing field. Compared with 1999, institution-based community organizing had grown by 42%. The field reached 40 states, and organizing efforts built around congregations and other member institutions collectively represented more than 5 million people.
That represented population was estimated at about 1.5% of Americans. The same report identifies 1% as a historical threshold for influential mass organizations, meaning the field’s reported reach exceeded that benchmark. These are field-level estimates from the 2012 report, not a current population census.
The report’s full census covered almost 200 institution-based community organizing organizations and received a 94% response rate. Its earlier 1999 comparison study covered 189 active organizations. The 2011 field data captured 178 organizations, 4,145 member institutions, 2,939 board members, and 628 paid staff, according to the National Study of Community Organizing Organizations.
The organization-level averages provide another view of scale. The average organization had 23.93 member institutions, including an average of 18.57 congregational member institutions. It had 2.92 paid organizers, 5.41 board members who were clergy, and 1.11 volunteers measured in hundreds, or about 111 volunteers. The average organization was 13.62 years old and reported annual revenue of 3.10 units of $100,000, or about $310,000.
What a typical organization looked like
The 2011 study’s averages show organizations combining a modest paid staff with a larger base of members, boards, and volunteers. The average organization met with 7.26 city officials during the measured period. It mobilized 1.25 thousand people, or about 1,250 people, and its largest single turnout was 0.59 thousand people, or about 590 people.
Faith and organizing were present in the average organization’s regular practice, but the study measured those practices on a 0-to-1 scale rather than as percentages. Regular discussion of the connections between faith and organizing averaged 0.77. Regular inclusion of religious teaching from a leader or clergy averaged 0.57.
The 2017 analysis from Civil Society Organizations and NSCOO associated those practices with larger organizing capacity. Organizations that regularly discussed faith and organizing had 13% more volunteers, met with 23% more city officials, mobilized 12% more people, and had public-action turnouts that were 14% larger.
Organizations that included religious teaching from a leader or clergy had 29% more volunteers. They met with 7.7% more city officials, mobilized 42.5% more people, and had public-action turnouts that were 56.3% larger. These figures describe associations reported by the model; they do not establish that religious teaching or discussion alone caused the differences.
| Organization measure | 2011 average |
|---|---|
| Member institutions | 23.93 |
| Congregational member institutions | 18.57 |
| Paid organizers | 2.92 |
| Volunteers | About 111 |
| City officials met | 7.26 |
| People mobilized | About 1,250 |
| Largest single turnout | About 590 |
| Annual revenue | About $310,000 |
| Organization age | 13.62 years |
Source labels: National Study of Community Organizing Organizations 2011; Civil Society Organizations / NSCOO 2017.
Who participated and how institutions engaged
The 2012 Building Bridges, Building Power figures distinguish membership from active participation. In the typical IBCO, 60% of member institutions were active participants, 32% were partially active, and 8% were not active. The typical organization held 12 organization-wide member-institution meetings in the last year. Sixty-five percent of member institutions attended at least half of those meetings, while 8% attended none.
Public action showed a similar spread of involvement. Half of member institutions both helped plan and attended the most recent public action. Another 30% only attended it, and 20% neither helped plan nor attended. The pattern separates presence from deeper participation: attendance alone accounted for some involvement, while planning and attendance together represented a smaller, more engaged share.
Boards also met regularly. The typical IBCO board met 12 times in the last year. Seventy-five percent of board members attended at least half of those meetings, while 6% attended none. These figures come from the same 2012 field report and refer to the report’s measured year, not to a universal standard for every organizing group.
The field also used ordinary communication infrastructure. Ninety-four percent of IBCOs corresponded with constituents by email, and 82% had a website. Sixty percent of IBCO offices contained objects with religious significance. Together, these measures describe organizations that combined digital communication with physical spaces and institutional relationships.
Representation and diversity across the field
The 2015 report Sustaining the Grassroots by Wood and Fulton found that more than 50% of board members in the field were people of color. For comparison, the report gave 19% as the share of all nonprofit board members in the United States who were people of color and 13% as the share of Fortune 500 board members who were people of color.
The same report found that more than 50% of the field’s board members had household incomes below $50,000. Roughly 25% had less than a bachelor’s degree. These figures indicate a board base with substantial representation from people outside the highest-income and most formally educated groups, though the supplied measurements do not identify a single nationwide demographic profile for every organization.
Member institutions also reflected religious and secular variety. Jewish, Unitarian-Universalist, and Evangelical congregations doubled their representation from a decade earlier. Twenty percent of organizations had at least one Muslim member institution, and secular institutions made up approximately one-fifth of all member institutions. Congregations made up 78% of member institutions.
The 2012 report found that 93% of IBCOs had at least one white member institution, 77% had at least one Black member institution, and 68% had at least one Hispanic member institution. These percentages describe whether an organization had at least one institution in each category; they are not the racial composition of all individual members.
One diversity comparison described member institutions across roughly 44% white-dominant contexts, 18% Black-dominant contexts, 6% Hispanic-dominant contexts, and 31% contexts with no dominant group. The field’s mean diversity score was 0.47, compared with 0.33 for public schools, 0.27 for U.S. counties, and 0.12 for congregations in that comparison.
Political relationships and public action
The 2012 field data measured organizing beyond city government. Sixty-six percent of IBCOs had met with a state-level official in the last year, and 66% had met with a national-level official. The supplied report also lists 84% as having met with a state-level official in the last year; because both figures are attributed to Building Bridges, Building Power 2012 without a further subgroup definition, they are retained as reported rather than reconciled.
Twelve percent had not engaged any political official beyond the city level, while 34% had not engaged any official beyond the state level. The measures show that city-level contact was not the only political relationship in the field, but that engagement varied substantially across organizations.
A separate field experiment offers a more specific estimate of organizing effects. In low-income public housing, an organizing treatment increased validated voter turnout by 3.1 percentage points in the 2018 midterm election, according to Getting Out the Vote in the Projects (2022). That result applies to the experiment and election identified by the source, not to all public-housing campaigns.
Relational organizing and voter turnout
The 2026 Center for Campaign Innovation report described a relational organizing field test in Florida. The test identified a universe of 538,078 low-propensity Republican voters and sent 424,179 peer-to-peer text messages to recruit volunteers. Volunteers received a $5 gift card for each friend they texted. Seventy-five percent of matched voters were shown to relational volunteers, while 25% were reserved as a control group.
One hundred and one volunteers successfully sent personalized text messages. Those volunteers contacted 1,738 voters with existing personal relationships. Voters who received texts from people they already knew were 8.6 percentage points more likely to vote. The recruitment effort had a 0.02% volunteer conversion rate.
The same report sent 100,000 peer-to-peer text messages to a separate voter universe for comparison, and traditional peer-to-peer texting produced no measurable effect on turnout in that comparison. The report also cited a 2018 Outvote field experiment with an 8 percentage-point turnout increase among voters reached by a friend.
| Contact approach or study | Reported turnout result |
|---|---|
| Low-income public-housing organizing treatment, 2018 | +3.1 percentage points |
| Friend-reached voters, Outvote field experiment, 2018 | +8 percentage points |
| Relational texts from known contacts, Florida test | +8.6 percentage points |
| Friend versus stranger, Donald Green study, 2020 | About +13.2 percentage points |
| Agency-based voting-related contact | +11.1 percentage points per contact |
| Traditional door-to-door canvassing | Typically +2 to +3 percentage points |
| Impersonal mass texts and cold calls | Often below 1% or no measurable effect |
The Center for Campaign Innovation also reported that a 2020 study led by Donald Green found about a 13.2 percentage-point turnout increase when voters were contacted by a friend rather than a stranger. It described traditional door-to-door canvassing as typically raising turnout by 2 to 3 percentage points, while impersonal mass texts and cold calls often raised turnout by less than 1% or showed no measurable effect.
An agency-based voter-mobilization experiment reported that each voting-related contact increased turnout likelihood by 11.1 percentage points, according to Can Nonprofit Organizations Increase Voter Turnout? (2014). These study results use different designs, populations, contact methods, and outcomes, so the percentages are comparisons of reported findings rather than a single ranking of tactics.
Community Change Action reported that 44% of people matched to the voter file were Black voters in its relational organizing program. In that same program, Black and Latina women saw some of the most dramatic turnout differences, and 13% of current relational organizing leaders were Latino. The supplied figures do not quantify the turnout difference for those subgroups.
The wider nonprofit context
The Health of the U.S. Nonprofit Sector report from Independent Sector (2026) places grassroots organizing within a much larger nonprofit economy. It reports 1.9 million registered nonprofit and philanthropic organizations nationwide. Nonprofits contributed over $1.5 trillion to the economy in 2024 and employed 9% of the U.S. workforce.
The same report says that 1 in 5 nonprofit workers lived in a household experiencing financial hardship. That figure adds an economic dimension to the field: nonprofit scale and employment reach can coexist with financial pressure among workers. The report’s nationwide organization count, 2024 economic contribution, workforce share, and household-hardship measure refer to the nonprofit sector broadly, not only to institution-based community organizing.