Digital Organizing

Pivoting, Learning, and Adapting

Abstract

During the Covid-19 pandemic, most institution-based community organizations in the US moved to digital tools for their primary organizing work. The pandemic exacerbated inequality, making the work of these organizations even more urgent. Our specific focus for this paper is to look at one network of institution-based community organizations in the U.S. to examine the learning and adapting to digital organizing that was required of leaders and organizers during the pandemic. The Covid-19 crisis offered challenges to traditional face-to-face organizing methods. Drawing from our interviews, we invoke the notion of pivoting to explore the shift in organizing practice. We relate it to the common practice of organizing, disorganizing, and reorganizing and explore their use in the context of the pandemic (Gecan 2003; Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa 2021). We show how leaders adapted traditional organizing tools to the use of digital organizing during the pandemic, and some ways that these tools might continue to be used.