The Messenger Matters More than the Message with Amanda Brink and Tudor Mihailescu | Hello Merge Tag Ep. 41

“The most powerful form of engagement online is when a regular person posts on their channel about something they truly believe in.”

Tudor Mihailescu is a cofounder and CEO of SoSha, an AI powered social amplification platform that helps mission-driven organizations leverage the social clout of their communities. Before SoSha, Tudor did a PhD in political science focused on US Presidential Speechwriting patterns and cofounded a social network for politics called GovFaces.

Amanda Brink is the Executive Director of Empower Project, helping organizations grow relational organizing programs. Prior to Empower Project, she worked with Organizing For America, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Tony Evers first statewide race and beyond.

In 2024, they teamed up on a nano-influencer program. They facilitated 9 million relational conversations with 3 million potential voters across 10 targeted states.

They built a network of Community Mobilizers who collectively earned 80 million organic impressions on social media.

I invited them on the pod to unpack that work—how they built it, what they learned, and they think it means for the future of organizing and persuasion in the digital era.

Listen to the full episode right here, or wherever you stream podcasts.

Find all episodes at HelloMergeTag.com or wherever you stream podcasts.

Links

Here’s a post from SoSha called Revolutionary Analytics Pilot Brings Ad-Tech Precision to Organic Social Sharing

Learn more about SoSha here.

Find Tudor on LinkedIn.

Learn more about Empower Project here.

Connect with them on social: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

Connect with Amanda on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

Big thanks to our sponsors:

Civic Shout. Learn more about the great work they’re doing to help Democratic campaigns and progressive nonprofits build their lists ethically at civicshout.com/partners.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and has not been copy-edited. While it can serve as a helpful guide to our conversation, it may contain errors or omissions. For the most accurate representation, we recommend listening to (or watching) the full episode.

Josh Klemons: Tutor Mihalesu is a co-founder and CEO of SoSha, an AI powered social amplification platform that helps missiondriven organizations leverage the social cloud of their communities. Before SOA, Tutor did a PhD in political science focused on US presidential speech writing patterns and co-founded a social network for politics called Govaces. Amanda Brink is the executive director of Empower Project, helping organizations grow relational organizing programs. Prior to Impra Power Project, she worked with Organizing for America, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Tony Iver’s first statewide race, and a whole lot more. In 2024, they teamed up on a nano influencer program. They facilitated 9 million relational conversations with three million potential voters across 10 targeted states.

Josh Klemons: They built a network of community mobilizers who collectively earned 80 million organic impressions on social media. I invited them on the pod to unpack that work, how they built it, what they learned, and what they think it means for the future of organizing and persuasion in the digital era. So, first of all, thanks for coming on the pod. Let’s start with you each telling us about your respective organizations. Uh, full disclosure, I had the honor of working with Amanda at Empower Project back when they were called uh organizing empowerment, but I want to make sure that we are all on the same page. So, uh yeah, feel free to to tell us about yourself and the work you’re doing, Amanda.
Amanda Brink: Go for it. Too
Josh Klemons: Okay, tutor. Go for it.
Tudor Mihailescu: Uh yeah, think thanks for the invitation, Josh. I I I listen to to the podcast and I’ve heard many people in the we’re speaking about the community that listens to to to the poet. I’ve heard a lot of people in the progressive space uh uh mention your podcast.

Tudor Mihailescu: So, I’m really excited to to to finally be on it. Um yeah, so the work we’re doing focuses on two very simple ideas. One of it is the most powerful form of engagement online is when a regular person posts on their channels about something they truly believe in. Right? that drives more clicks, more engagement than any other type of post, whether that’s an ad or an influencer and so on, because regular people connect with their friends and networks. But even though this is the most effective form of engagement, uh, organizations struggle with it because there’s been no easy way to turn this type of we call it organic social sharing. You can call it user generated content. You could call it word of mouth. To turn it into a marketing category that can be optimizable, trackable and scalable the way advertising is, the way influencer marketing is or texting or all all of the other methods of campaigning. So this is what we’re focused on on social. Is there a way to actually help organizations achieve through the social cloud of their community members the same kind of goals they achieve through advertising?

Tudor Mihailescu: uh which is raise donations, do email acquisition, um drive narrative change or persuasion at scale and how can they how can they achieve that? Um we’ve seen massive growth over the last year. Uh we’ve driven close to two million social posts uh working with amazing partners in the progressive space including the uh uh the Harris campaign 2024 Wisconsin Dems.
Josh Klemons: Mhm.
Tudor Mihailescu: We’re speaking about Wisconsin earlier before the the show started but also uh the human rights campaign, Planned Parenthood uh indivisible empower um and uh and many others.
Josh Klemons: Nice. And Amanda Always.
Amanda Brink: Uh, I’m Amanda. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Josh. It’s good to see you again.
Josh Klemons: Always.
Amanda Brink: Uh, we should get together in real life and not just in this in the virtual space.
Josh Klemons: Definitely. Everybody’s invited.
Amanda Brink: Yeah. Um so empower project uh specializes in relational organizing or friendto friend organizing. We basically are banking on the fact that we think the messenger matters more than the message and it’s important to uh get in front of people’s eyeballs in different ways as we’re seeing less people knocking on doors, less people engaging with digital ads, less people answering the phone, and less people responding to text messages.

Amanda Brink: Um, and so in 2024, we ran a a large-scale paid relational organizing program that you mentioned at the top of the top of the broadcast. Um, where we uh hired 47,000 community mobilizers, aka gig workers, and asked them to talk to their friends and family about the election. And then we started like kicking around and thinking, well, what else can we ask them to do? And one of those things was uh post on their social own social network platforms uh to leverage their own um power with their own followers and their own audience. And so we were looking for a partner to help us with that work. And we talked to a few folks and so who we ended up spending the most time with. Uh, and so since then we’ve, you know, I feel like we’ve been, I feel like Tutor’s been a really good learning partner. I don’t know that everything we’ve tried has all worked out, but at the end of the day, we’re making I think a lot of progress that um, other organizations are um, not jealous, but like envious of and are interested in. And so I think it it continues to be a good partnership from our end.

Amanda Brink: So, so I think um it was surprising to a lot of folks to learn that people are willing to like not just not
Josh Klemons: Well, let’s start there. Like what are some like you jumped right into it, so let’s just talk some like high level like what can folks learn from what you were able to accomplish through the community mobilizers program?
Amanda Brink: influencers of like people who like make money at this every day and do this for a living, but there’s like regular everyday people who are willing to go direct to camera and like do a selfie style video and like tell their own story uh and have that be shared. There’s also um I also think that people are willing to not everybody wants to talk about candidates, but if you give people a variety of material to choose from, um you know, they’re happy to talk about, you know, difficult topics like abortion, like who they’re going to vote for, like why they’re concerned about this candidate, why they like this candidate, uh why they like another candidate, like I think um you know I don’t know having conversations about politics these days can be like very contentious uh and so I think there is this like perception that people kind of shy away from it and I think we found that a lot more people are comfortable with

Amanda Brink: it than we ever thought. Um, they care about the food that’s being put on their table or not being put on their table, how it’s hard to keep a roof over their head and gas in their tank, and uh, they’re willing to tell us about it. It’s It’s really kind of interesting.
Josh Klemons: Did y’all find that people were more comfortable talking about issues or candidates or there was no distinction?
Amanda Brink: For us, it was about a 50-50 split.
Josh Klemons: Is that true across the platform tutor or it’s hard to compare most of your um partner work to this project in particular?
Tudor Mihailescu: So I think it’s important to it’s important to drill down into the types of actions that are being shared, right? So we have a few different categories. Donations, right? So people sharing about donations. This is the people sharing usually get interest from people who already bought in, right? So they already believe in a cause and right. So that that’s a different interaction. Petitions is a little bit different because we usually see that uh people engage specifically on issues that they care about, not necessarily about the organization themselves.

Tudor Mihailescu: The people who when someone shares a post organically about the petition, the people who click on that are much more interested in the issue than they’re interested in a certain political party. Uh so that’s definitely the case for persuasion and going further it’s actually it really varies. For instance in the work we did with with empower uh we were looking at who engaged with the posts of the um of the trusted messengers and we then ended up giving them content based on who was engaging with that content.
Amanda Brink: Yeah.
Tudor Mihailescu: Our hypothesis there was actually much more focused on people trust people who look alike, right?
Amanda Brink: Mhm.
Tudor Mihailescu: And when we were seeing when when when Amanda’s team was seeing that when uh when a particular nano influencer was sharing content with their networks and they were seeing a certain type of people clicking on that content, then we would give them different a content that was specifically geared for that kind of audience.
Amanda Brink: Yeah. So Josh, to like make this like say this more plainly, like if I started to notice that your uh social media audience was very mobilization focused because you were a lefty, I would then give you more mobilization red meat uh content to post on social media.

Amanda Brink: And if my social media feed, if I started to notice that my own social media feed was more persuasion-y, uh, more like middle of the road on the partisanship score, I would start to give myself more persuasion content to post, uh, to like basically engage the persuadable voters in my in my audience.
Josh Klemons: And that analysis was being done based on what actions folks were taking. Like so I post something I post five or six times and y’all can track on the back end which of my posts were moving uh moving things or are you like connecting to the voter file to see like who’s moving along to the platform before they even share some wizardry.
Amanda Brink: Yeah, we connected basically like we did some I don’t know somebody somebody called it device uh gymnastics the other day.
Josh Klemons: Okay.
Amanda Brink: the device gymnastics of matching back to the voter file and we started looking at people’s um persuasion scores and people’s mobilization their turnout scores essentially and so started making inferences based off of that. the thing that you’re describing of like you know what do we give them to post and you know how far does that move people I think that’s the next tutor I don’t want to speak for you but like I think that’s the next iteration of like what we’re interested in looking at um but so far what we’ve been able to to dig in on seems really interesting and really promising so

Josh Klemons: So, I just want to clarify though, are you looking at my network based on who came back to the social platform or are you actually able to like figure out who follows me on social channels using some of this device wiz wizardry that you uh alluded to?
Tudor Mihailescu: So I I know for a very long time a lot of technologists in the progressive space have been have zeroed in on this idea that we can connect people’s social network account with the voter file. We’re not doing that. We’re taking a different approach. The approach we’re taking is whenever someone shares a post through social, we create a unique link for that share and we know that their intention has been to share on this platform. When someone clicks on that link, we can find out more information about the clicker and connect them to the sharer and to the content that was shared and on what social networks. So the information we actually gather about the clicker is that’s information that we can then use to resolve the identity of that person with varying levels of accuracy.

Tudor Mihailescu: This actually leads into the into one of the the the biggest uh uh uh uh challenges we’re finding which is what is the degree of accuracy that we can actually uh uh uh determine the identity of someone who actually clicks on a link.
Josh Klemons: Well, and can you talk more about So, like obviously two of the largest social platforms, Instagram and Tik Tok, literally don’t allow for links. So, like how do how do you handle that?
Tudor Mihailescu: I mean, so uh Instagram does and so remember these are regular folks, right? So regular people don’t post in their feeds unless they’re getting married uh or other really big moment life moments, right? Most people are actually using stories to share and Instagram actually is I would say even encouraging of folks sharing links in their stories. So we actually see a lot of clickthroughs when when people are sharing posts in their stories on Instagram. Uh so that’s an easy way to actually see okay who clicks on these links and we’ve even seen uh we’ve done even some work with organizations that have used bigger influencers to actually track that in in stories and it drives a fair amount of clicks.

Tudor Mihailescu: Uh Tik Tok indeed on Tik Tok it’s less likely.
Josh Klemons: Sure.
Tudor Mihailescu: I will say though that most of the sharing that happens on the web does not happen happen on public platforms. It happens in private platforms.
Amanda Brink: Mhm.
Tudor Mihailescu: Discord, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp uh uh where people are sharing in small groups and those platforms are encourage people to share links. So yeah, that’s that’s how we can actually also understand who’s connected to who uh much better.
Josh Klemons: of these like massive amounts of engagement that y’all got throughout this project, like what percentage of the content was shared into public groups versus private? Is that was that something you were able to track? Like Slacks and WhatsApps and um
Amanda Brink: I don’t know. Tutor, do you know? I That’s not something I was looking at.
Tudor Mihailescu: uh for that project specific I don’t have the numbers on it now but in general so I can share that so uh I’m only I’m looking actually on the social platform right now over the last 90 days um and the WhatsApp is the most the platform that was used the most?

Josh Klemons: Interesting. For this project in particular or across the platform globally.
Tudor Mihailescu: No. For across across Yep.
Amanda Brink: across.
Josh Klemons: Wow.
Tudor Mihailescu: Yep.
Josh Klemons: Um, and is that vast majority US based content or are you working with international partners as well?
Tudor Mihailescu: We also work with Europeans and Canadians.
Amanda Brink: Yeah, they do.
Tudor Mihailescu: Uh, yep.
Josh Klemons: But even within America like you’re finding that the vast majority or not the vast but the majority of content is being shared in WhatsApp over Instagram, Twitter or anything else
Tudor Mihailescu: in certain organizations. So unfortunately we see a really interesting shift here. So a lot of organizations that are engaging with immigrant communities or first generation Americans, they know that those communities are spending a lot of time on WhatsApp, but very few of them actually have a strategy for engaging on WhatsApp. Uh so the the the US organizations that have a strategy for WhatsApp organizing are seeing great traction. Unfortunately, it’s a minority.
Josh Klemons: of organizations that are thinking about it.
Tudor Mihailescu: Um yes, exactly.

Josh Klemons: So, let’s give those the rest of them some advice. What how how would you recommend thinking about a WhatsApp strategy for an organization that very likely has a bunch of leaders who don’t use WhatsApp themselves?
Tudor Mihailescu: Yeah. So what we see is that WhatsApp is has the highest click-through rate of all social networks. How we measure that is per every share that happens on social, how many clicks are happening on that link. And the WhatsApp clickthrough rate is actually double that of uh of Facebook, of X, of threads and so on.
Amanda Brink: That’s fascinating.
Josh Klemons: That is fascinating.
Tudor Mihailescu: And so what I’ll say here is think of it as a way whenever first of all it’s a matter of allowing people to share on that right so encouraging people to share petitions or donations with their close friends it may not mean just WhatsApp but it may signal to discord iMessage right so people are sharing a lot of content on these messages on these messaging platforms but organizing ing programs have not caught up with the fact

Josh Klemons: Right.
Tudor Mihailescu: that they can be a massive source of clickthrough especially in an environment where everyone is bemoning whoa people don’t click on websites anymore because of generative AI search right clicks are not happening well they’re happening it’s just they’re
Amanda Brink: Yeah.
Tudor Mihailescu: happening in different media and organizing programs need to catch up to
Josh Klemons: No, that’s super interesting.
Amanda Brink: Okay.
Josh Klemons: So, it sounds like it’s less about like you don’t an organization doesn’t necessarily need a WhatsApp strategy so so much as they need like a closed walls walled garden strategy. Like how are you going to get your people to talk to their people in their spaces?
Tudor Mihailescu: That’s great.
Josh Klemons: Um Amanda, I’d love to hear if y’all is that something that y’all have worked out like how do you do that?
Amanda Brink: It’s I don’t know that it’s something that I have like solved for. We have so uh we have started asking people to post on multiple platforms like when we were just asking people to post on one thing they would go to Instagram or or Twitter or Facebook like whatever their favorite was but now that we’re actually see we’re asking people to post on five or six different platforms we’re actually getting more of a a variety and seeing more what’s up in there.

Amanda Brink: A lot of our I wouldn’t say half of our community mobilizers are black. Um and so like we have a we have like a fairly diverse um like set of community mobilizers. Twothirds of them tend to be women. Um, but I don’t know that they’re necessarily like into like doing a deep dive on some of the walled garden like platforms that they could be. But that’s something that we’re trying to figure out is like, you know, I don’t want to force them to artificially build a following that they don’t necessarily have. But I do want to incentivize people who have more of a following on various platforms, including, you know, WhatsApp.
Josh Klemons: Yeah, it’s super interesting. Um, what role I mean relational organizing is all about stories, right? Like what role did personal stories play in this project versus like because I know with social you can like pre-write content or you can create spaces for people to create their own content. So, I’m curious how much of this was giving people the tools to tell their own story versus sharing the story that like so many so many digital organizers, they’re like, “Here’s a toolkit.

Josh Klemons: got seven things. Please copy and paste this into Twitter.” Like, how much of it was that versus like giving them the space to tell their own version of why it mattered?
Amanda Brink: So, I find that like giving the community mobilizers a variety of tasks is like key to key to success here. And like if they don’t do one of the tasks, that’s okay. and no one’s mad, but we have people who are comfortable like being quote unquote creators and we have people who are just comfortable comfortable being amplifiers and that’s okay. Um, and you know they they get to choose their own adventure a little bit. Do I always want more creators? But I also think that the amplifiers play a like a really important role as well.
Josh Klemons: And were you changing content based on what you were seeing or you all just started with huge buckets of like opportunities of content and like put it out there and kind of watched how it grew?
Amanda Brink: We start with like sort of pre-made content and then as we’re getting more UGC it starts to like fill in the funnel if that makes sense because frankly like we can’t we can’t make enough content to like keep

Josh Klemons: Sure.
Amanda Brink: this keep this thing moving. We have to use a lot of the like userenerated content.
Josh Klemons: And on both user generated and you know the content that you were giving them to quote unquote amplify like refining that video was outperforming graphics or it didn’t really matter. It was based on, you know, the the story versus the the medium.
Amanda Brink: I think it’s based off of honestly just like what so one of the things that we asked social to build for us is like a randomizer because we found that people were just like choosing some of the like top five things that were in the tool were in the toolkit and they were sharing the top five items.
Josh Klemons: Interesting.
Amanda Brink: Uh and now that we have a randomizer we’re actually starting to see and I think get a bit better picture of like what people are actually willing to share. It’s pretty cool.
Josh Klemons: Interesting. And so photos versus videos versus graphics, like is it too soon to say or like Okay, cool. I’d be curious to hear

Amanda Brink: Yeah.
Tudor Mihailescu: One thing, one thing. So when we look at successive content, we usually we look at it from multiple perspectives. One of it is what content is is much more likely to get shared, right?
Amanda Brink: Mhm.
Tudor Mihailescu: So if a if a community mobilizer goes to a toolkit, what is the content that they’re likely to share first? Whereas but then we’re also looking at once that content is shared with their networks, what content performs best, right?
Amanda Brink: best.
Tudor Mihailescu: And there can be multiple things. It can perform best in terms of clickthroughs. it can perform best in terms of engagements on that post and so on. So from this perspective I can actually demystify this a bit. So uh what will I’ll say is I mean it it’s not rocket science. So the the easiest post to share, not your rocket sense though.
Josh Klemons: says the guy with a PhD Goodness. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah.
Tudor Mihailescu: Um the the the easiest posts to share are posts that folks can share in a click, right?
Tudor Mihailescu: So these are usually links with texts, right? They’re easy to they’re easy to share, right? Asking a user to do a v to record their own video is a much higher bar. So obviously those posts get shared less than the than the easy ones. In terms of engagement, it also depends on what you’re aiming for. If the objective is to drive clicks on links, then posts with just links and an image perform very well. Right? If your your your objective is much more reach and engagement, encouraging your community members to create their own videos or to post reals that are already created, those perform much better for engagement, right? But it’s just it’s a matter of what the organization is trying to achieve.
Josh Klemons: Uh any surprises from this campaign? Anything that you went in with a hypothesis that was absolutely not correct?
Amanda Brink: I always thought that like social media, right? Like I’m a field human camea came came to the table with like an organizing background and so um I think the amount that we’re able to like track and was surprising to me.
Amanda Brink: um maybe tutor knew all along but uh so that was interesting to me. I always thought of digital as this like black box essentially and I don’t think it is anymore. I also feel like um after the 2024 election more people are interested in um like bridging sort of the organizing slash uh digital divide, right? Like normally those are two, you know, in a standard campaign you have a field human, you have a comm’s human, and we you have a fundraising human. They don’t always talk to each other, right? And I think those silos are like breaking down pretty quickly at a much faster rate than I thought that they would. And so that’s been interesting to me.
Josh Klemons: Um, you’re both building tools that help other people organize essentially, right? Like you’re helping organizations go out there and talk to people. Um, and we’ve sort of already answered this question, but I’m going to ask it again because I think there’s a lot to like think about here. Like the digital landscape is changing so rapidly.

Josh Klemons: Like literally two years ago or certainly four years ago when I was working a campaign, there was three social channels that matter. Today I’m regularly posting to at least eight for some of my clients. I mean it is like overwhelming. Um so I guess I’m just curious how have you like again you’ve sort of answered this but like how would you recommend things folks think about digital especially in relation to that last comment you just made Amanda that like digital is so intertwined with other things. How would you recommend someone who’s like new to this space or trying to like keep up think about digital in relation to the rest of the uh the infrastructure of a campaign.
Amanda Brink: I think that volume and in an attention economy, volume matters more than saying the perfect words. That’s my like hot take advice.
Josh Klemons: I will second that a hund times over for sure.
Tudor Mihailescu: For me, it’s I think the the the old way of doing social media was I’m an organization and I build an account and I invest a lot of money in building that account, which was totally fine when the social networks were, as you said, there were a finite number of social networks that everyone was on.

Tudor Mihailescu: We live in a in a time where social networks change super fast. So, thinking much more in terms of being where your supporters are and arming your supporters with the right content to share wherever they want is much more important. Like we we’ve seen some wild shifts. For instance, uh most of 2024, the most used platform on social was X. That has now dropped to being the fifth most used and blue sky has grown into the top three really fast.
Amanda Brink: Mhm.
Josh Klemons: interesting.
Tudor Mihailescu: But this is these may may change more. I think we’re seeing a commodification of social networks, right? where people understand that they use so different social networks for different purposes. We don’t have just one tool that everyone is using anymore. So thinking much more of following your supporters where they are. And I would also say the most effective way to distribute toolkits remains email. So thinking of a way to actually find a place where you as an organization own your list and have a way to engage with your supporters regardless of the changes in in social networks algorithms and who owns them is probably super important.

Josh Klemons: Uh, I mean on that front, how much of social, like I know you’ve brought up email acquisition a couple times, like what percentage of the work happening on social is actually about list acquisition for most of your clients,
Tudor Mihailescu: I so we’ve done a some educational work here that I think is going into the right direction.
Josh Klemons: partners.
Tudor Mihailescu: When we started organizations were only thinking of toolkits as stuff that they give other coalition partners to share. Then we moved into you can use toolkits for your own supporters just to make noise which was code name for impressions right our next stage was well organic social can actually reliably drive conversions so this was the work we did 2023 and 2024 and I would say most of the large organizations we’re working with right now are using social for for acquisition now the next phase of our work and the work we did with with empower was uh uh was pioneering is making organizations understand that organic can help them discover new audiences that can then make their paid ads much more powerful and we can speak about that and what what the disconnect is there but yes so in terms of proportion uh most of the large organizations we’re working with at the moment are using social for acquisition but they also use it for other reasons Um

Josh Klemons: Right. Oh, go ahead.
Amanda Brink: We’re like we’re like a different kind of I feel like tutor where you’re like odd client, right?
Josh Klemons: Sure.
Amanda Brink: Where we’re like not using it for email acquisition at all or not using it for fundraising at all.
Josh Klemons: Again, it’s why I asked about the platform in general because I assume based on my knowledge of empower project that that was not your top goal.
Amanda Brink: And I feel like sometimes we’re the like I don’t know your weird random friend.
Tudor Mihailescu: I so
Josh Klemons: Your goal is just to like bring in a yeah to bring together a community.
Amanda Brink: Yeah. Organizing.
Josh Klemons: So, but I am curious about like like globally how folks are using it. So,
Amanda Brink: Yeah.
Tudor Mihailescu: So I wouldn’t the one of the really cool things about social is that it’s actually quite versatile. So we encourage organization to use it for multiple purposes. Everything from rapid response to even recruiting staff members. Right? you have a job application, you put it out there, your staff members are sharing them and you get that in. Obviously, when when when it’s campaign season, the the primary use cases get out the vote, right?

Tudor Mihailescu: Um, so it really varies, I would say, with seasons. Uh, so I would definitely I wouldn’t say that Empire is the odd uh use case. It’s actually it’s we persuasion, right? It’s persuasion and mobilization, right? in campaign season. Those are the core objectives of social sharing programs. So, so I would say we’re experimenting with this right now.
Amanda Brink: Yeah.
Josh Klemons: You mentioned that SOA is helping folks see better returns on their ads. Like, can you talk I I would I’m sure folks listening would like to know more about that.
Tudor Mihailescu: I I cannot yet come to you with numbers to prove it. I can more tell you in terms of the theory behind it because there’s also technological challenges that we’re now working to to to to overcome through what we’re building. But the the pitch sounds something like this, right? The one of the problems we’ve seen progressive have progressives have is that they’re failing to reach out to new audiences, right? And uh we’ve seen numbers even from the DNC, right?

Amanda Brink: Yep.
Tudor Mihailescu: that the contact rates for certain demographic segments are almost zero, like 5%, 7%. One of the problems with those is that how ads usually work is lookalike audiences are being built based on existing email lists. So you basically look at who you’ve already convinced to convert and you base you build your audiences based on that data.
Amanda Brink: Mhm.
Tudor Mihailescu: What we’re what we’re encouraging folks to think about is to think of organizing as the place where you discover new audiences and take those insights and use them to build better ad programs. Because one of the best things that organizing does is discovering new audiences, discovering new messages, not in the lab, but in the field. and digital organizing’s promise was to bridge the world of organizing and data to actually produce the insights can that can make scalable programs. I don’t think it’s met that promise. Our solution is I can give you an example, right? So someone shares a post with their networks. You see who clicked on that link, you understand what demographics elements, who they are and then if that is an audience that you want to reach to, you already have insights into what engages them.

Tudor Mihailescu: Uh so that you can use that data and then build better lookalike audiences at scale.
Amanda Brink: And this is like some of the things that I think are most interesting about our work together is I feel like, you know, what I want to be doing is identifying more persuasion audiences um and identifying more persuasion persuasion targets uh through the work through the organizing work that we do together. Now, we’re not in the run advertisement business uh but it doesn’t mean that we don’t partner with people who aren’t in that business. And so, uh, I’m hoping that we can help them build better like lookalike audiences in the way that tutor’s talking about.
Josh Klemons: Yeah, super cool. Uh, what’s what’s something y’all wish more campaigns understood about relational work?
Amanda Brink: Yeah. Oh, just the power of it and the like exponential growth. Like precoid, I used to have to explain what exponential growth is, but you know, the pandemic fixed that problem. But still, our programs grow really rapidly and can scale pretty rapidly um in a way that I don’t think other programs can can scale to the equivalent.

Amanda Brink: And I think people get like too bought up or too wrapped up in like how how much they take to like launch um and don’t really realize like how impactful it could be and how the contact rates are higher. Like yes, everybody knows what a canvas looks like. It is easier to go out and launch a canvas because you’ve been to one, you’ve seen one, you know what you’re doing there. For a lot of people, they haven’t done relational organizing programs at scale. And so it’s like this like kind of scary thing and so they’re afraid to like try it if that makes sense. But like the reach that we’ve been able to like just just has exploded. Like every time we launch a program now it seems like we’re doing more to contain it than we are to grow it so we don’t blow through all of our budget. Um and so yeah, I don’t know. That’s the part that I wish that like you know people understood is just like we have an army of we have an army of community mobilizers and they can be leveraged to do all kinds of different things and uh um for some folks it feels like a fairly large missed opportunity.

Amanda Brink: So,
Josh Klemons: Uh, you both been doing this work in different ways for a very long time. What is inspiring you right now in these extremely dark times? Maybe nothing. And that’s okay, too. Or maybe the answer you just gave uh could be something that you could uh look at as inspiring. the fact that folks are so excited to to join you.
Amanda Brink: I mean, I’m like a perpetual tinkerer. Like, I like to try new things constantly. Um, and I’m excited by folks like Tutor who are not scared of me. Um, uh, the programs we run are pretty big and sometimes I go and I talk to someone and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t I don’t I don’t know if we can if we can do that.”
Josh Klemons: Cool.
Amanda Brink: Um, and that but tutor was came from I feel like day one. So,
Tudor Mihailescu: I’m very excited about I was actually the about the culture of experimentation that I’m seeing in the space right now. Uh I personally think that this is the best way to actually come up with the winning strategy.

Josh Klemons: Heat.
Tudor Mihailescu: Like I I I’ve seen I’ve attended multiple large events over the last six months and people are arguing with passion about this is the right track. This is the right direction. This is what we should be doing. It’s influencers. No, it’s ads. It’s this. It’s this. I think that’s amazing, right? This is because the this is the only way you can actually like by actually going out there and trying different things and then showing what works and what doesn’t. so that hopefully the the progressives can actually just see by the beginning of 2026 what’s actually working and then scale what works. I really love that. Uh and I think that’s what can lead to to victory in the future. Um, so I I’m not conf I know there’s a lot of things going wrong with the world and uh there’s a lot of things that they’re going wrong in DC, but I actually and in times like this, people
Amanda Brink: Yeah.
Tudor Mihailescu: feel the need to have one direction and stick to this.

Tudor Mihailescu: Maybe I’m an optimist, but I actually think that this kind of experimentation that feels aimless because there’s not just one direction is actually the right the right track. Uh, and asking hard questions and showing data of what works and what doesn’t. I I actually this is something I’m really inspired by actually.
Josh Klemons: Uh, how can folks stay in touch uh with the two of y’all moving forward?
Amanda Brink: Uh, I’m Amanda at Empower Project US. Um, yeah.
Josh Klemons: If folks want to get involved with relational organizing, should they reach out or you’re full?
Amanda Brink: Yeah, they should. I have a a whole host of uh we’re like a pretty big team. We’re like 20 people. Uh, and so we uh have a whole host of people who can help. We’re also currently uh running program in Virginia and Pennsylvania. And so if people are interested in getting involved with that, they should feel free to reach out.
Josh Klemons: Nice.
Tudor Mihailescu: and I’m tutor at social.ai. SOA as in social sharing, S O S H A. So, uh yeah, and uh we’re we’re really excited to help works understand that their existing community is an untapped potential and we we want to help them uh make the most of that.
Josh Klemons: Cool. Well, thank you all so much for coming on the pod and uh talking about the work you’ve been doing.
Amanda Brink: Happy to be here.
Tudor Mihailescu: Thank
Amanda Brink: Thank you.