Prophetic promotion as a movement strategy

Don’t be the movement who cried wolf

In November 2021, Extinction Rebellion (XR) said it was going to get 2 million people on the streets for April 2022. This certainly didn’t happen, and although I can’t give you a precise figure on how many people did turn out, it was much closer to 10,000. Soon after, XR then said it would bring 1 million people onto the streets in September 2022. However, the Queen’s death meant this particular mobilisation was called off, so we don’t know what would have happened. Let’s just say, I would have been extremely surprised if they succeeded. Now, just a few months later, XR is saying it wants to turn out 100,000 people to ‘The Big One’ in April 2023. Somewhat ironically, the planned ‘Big One’ is 10-20x smaller than previous mobilisation goals, but who’s keeping track anyway…

Anyway, what is going on with these big, lofty promises of mobilising huge swathes of people? And is it helping the cause?

One particular social movement tool is behind these announcements - ‘prophetic promotion’. Simply, prophetic promotion is the idea that mass protest organisations provide a lofty vision for a campaign or action, serving to inspire many more people to take part than would have otherwise. Often this vision is outside of what the organisation can currently deliver, but stating this ambitious goal can galvanise a movement to actually make it happen.

One successful implementation of this, also from XR, was the blockade of 5 central London bridges in November 2018. For context, this was basically XR’s second major protest, and they went big. Most organisations might have decided to organise a march, or maybe even block one bridge. But to have the audacity to attempt to block 5 key bridges in Central London, when your last largest protest involved 1,000 people, is pretty impressive. Not only that, but they totally pulled it off - 5 bridges were indeed blocked for a whole day, and around 6,000 people turned out. 

XR didn’t stop here. They could have easily organised some slightly more ambitious protests for the next campaign, without setting their sights too high, and disappointed no one. But they didn’t want to play it safe - they wanted to go big. They built on their momentum, and they dreamt big. The next campaign goal was to Shut Down London and organise a ‘full-scale Rebellion’ - so pretty out there! In reality, this looked like XR blocking 5 key locations in Central London and occupying them for over a week. Over 10,000 people took part with 1,000 people getting arrested, making it one of the biggest climate protests in UK history, less than a year after XR was founded.

Why does prophetic promotion work? 

Arguably I was one of the subjects this messaging strategy worked on, given that the November 2018 bridge blockades was my first XR protest. A friend reached out to me, saying something like “Hey, there are these big protests happening in Central London. The plan is to block 5 bridges - do you want to come?”. To me, this sounded crazy. Who the hell were these people, and how would we achieve this? I checked out the Facebook event, saw there were a bunch of other lunatics signed up, and thought hell - why not! If this was their plan, I would love to see if it works, and also felt somewhat protected by the idea that there would be thousands of other people there with me. 

There lies two of the key mechanisms behind why prophetic promotion, if done right, can be such an effective tool for mass mobilisation:

1. Safety in numbers - Going to a small protest of 20 people might be scary, as you know that police attention will definitely be on you at some point. But if you’re in a crowd of 50,000 people, there’s often no practical way for police to monitor everyone, let alone intervene in a heavy-handed way. As such, going to large protests feels much less risky, and increases the likelihood that people will actually go.

2. Being visionary - This one feels more hand-wavy, but I think there’s something to it. People want to join something that’s huge, exciting and ambitious. Very few get excited about small, incremental wins. People don’t quit their jobs and work every waking second just so they can secure a 1% improvement for their cause. But changing the world, in a transformational way, that’s worth taking a risk for. So social movements have to provide this vision, to energise people to take part in things that they wouldn’t normally consider. If you want the business-speak of this concept, look no further than the concept of BHAGs: Big Hairy Audacious Goals, developed by Jim Collins as he studied some of the top performing companies.

Another related concept is social proof, a marketing concept which basically means that people do things because they know other people are doing things (i.e. ‘the bandwagon effect’). Prophetic promotion tries to leverage this effect - if you hear 1 million people are (potentially) coming to a protest, chances are that this makes you much more likely to come than if there were only 100 people going. 

How else can activist groups leverage the idea of safety in numbers?

Another tool is ‘conditional commitment’, the idea that an action (e.g. protest, strike, etc) only takes place if a certain number of people agree to take action. For example, Don’t Pay UK ran a campaign to get 1 million people who would stop paying their energy bills, as a protest against rising energy costs and energy company profits. The idea is that there is safety in numbers - if 1 million people sign up, surely there is no way the energy company could come after all of you, so you face little personal risk. If not enough people sign up, which was indeed the case, then you just don’t take action - no risk involved. The downside is that even if you do something pretty spectacular, like getting 250,000 people to sign up to not pay their bills as a mass payment strike, this still wouldn’t meet your threshold and you won’t take action.

Overall, conditional commitment is an extremely useful tool, and mirrors the same principles as familiar things like Kickstarter (e.g. I’ll fund this project if a critical mass of other people think it is worth funding). If you want to read more about this tool, I recommend this piece by Richard Bartlett which is a reasonably good overview of this topic, and this write-up by Roger Hallam if you want quite a detailed dive into the practicalities and logic of conditional commitment. 

For a much deeper dive into the idea of prophetic promotion, I recommend the very helpful video by Paul Engler! I couldn’t find any other writing online about it, so luckily for us that Paul has made such a thorough and interesting video. 

The downsides of prophetic promotion

So, why don’t mass protest groups always claim they will mobilise 50% of the population for their next big protest? Because it’s a gamble. If you promise the world, and don’t deliver, you lose credibility - both with your base and with the rest of society. If you promise to mobilise 1 million people, and turn out 2,000, no one will take you seriously. We all know the story of the boy who cried wolf - people might believe you once, maybe even twice, but your credibility is finite. Soon, people will ignore you, and label you as an unserious group of pie-in-the-sky activists. Getting the balance right is a key skill for social movement organisers, and one that might make or break a campaign.

On that note, we can return back to XR’s plans for April 2023. Will they actually mobilise 100,000 people? Will their their new strategy of no public disruption turn out previously disengaged people in huge droves? I think it’s unlikely, but XR probably knows this too. But whether this is the nail in the coffin of XR’s credibility - only time will tell.