AF Atlanta Learns About “Organizing for Liberty”

On Tuesday, July 22, 2014, the AF Atlanta Chapter hosted Joel Foster from the Georgia Chapter of Americans for Prosperity at the Hudson Grille in Midtown, Atlanta. An award-winning former radio show host, Joel has been a longtime activist in the liberty movement in the Southeast. He wrote for various issues campaigns featured on Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS and was heavily involved in some of the first Tea Party gatherings in Atlanta at the movement’s inception. He led an interesting discussion on “Organizing for Liberty: Getting Involved in the Grassroots” in which he explained his approach to organizing support for liberty causes at the grassroots level to a crowd of 35 young professionals.

Joel’s presentation contained six general principles that should guide the leaders of any grassroots movement. Firstly, he explained that a movement must have its foundational principles defined with a certain target audience in mind; otherwise, it will be rendered baseless and fall on deaf ears. Next, he demonstrated how effective messaging to that audience would lead to increasing numbers of people involved in the movement. Numbers are critical to continuing a movement’s momentum and increasing its commercial vitality to the point that it becomes unignorable to its mainstream detractors.

Third, he explained that building these numbers occurs through strategic action designed to market the message in clever ways that creates a buzz among the public. He described an interesting anecdote of an effective marketing campaign during his radio days in which workers would pass out coffee mugs to people in vehicles at busy intersections of the city as they were listening to his radio show.

Joel then stressed the importance of leveraging scarce time and resources to make sure that message is reaching the public in its most effective way. This led him to his next point, which was to measure, test, and adjust the methods and messages as they go out to make sure they were being received in a way that was conveying the right foundational principles of the movement. Finally, Joel wrapped up his presentation with a call to remain focused in the movement and not to lose sight of the mission.

The Atlanta Chapter of America’s Future Foundation thanks Mr. Joel Foster for his time and his contribution to our chapter with his informative presentation!