New-Media Strategy

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Executive Summary

To Advance Real Progress, We Must Organize the Internet.

Right now, the progressive new-media landscape is underfunded, underdeveloped, and unorganized. In 2025-2026, MVP intends to change this by investing at least $5-10 million in five key areas:

  1. Digital Power at the State Level: Working with state-based organizing groups to build digital infrastructure to shift local policy agendas and national narratives from the ground up.
  2. Youth Movements: Funding youth organizations and digital-native young leaders to create new online spaces to inspire the next generation toward a more just, inclusive, sustainable future.
  3. Identity and Cultural Organizing: Scaling the impact of Black-led digital organizing by investing in culture-first online strategies that combat disinformation and shape worldviews.
  4. Digital Voter Engagement: Using creative digital engagement to reach voters where they are and turn nonpartisan election mobilization into catalytic moments that can transform culture.
  5. Amplification Networks: Creating a bigger, louder, more unified “narrative ecosystem” to counter disinformation, amplify effective messages, shape the agenda, and shift public opinion.

Grantmaking Principles: Building a Movement, Not a Megaphone

  1. Fund New Media as Organizing Infrastructure: We treat digital space as year-round field offices, supporting the development of permanent organizing capacity vs. one-off campaigns.
  2. Bet on Decentralization: Invest in bottom-up networks that spread power to the local level.
  3. Close the Anti-Establishment Gap: Fund credible, authentic messengers who can build trust.
  4. Own Narrative Warfare: Invest in messages and messengers that can shape public narratives.
  5. View “Online” as “In Real Life”: Treat digital spaces as organizing spaces in and of themselves.
  6. Invest in Digital Communities: Invest in building resilient, self-sustaining digital communities.
  7. Support Platform Diversification: Build digital strategies that are adaptable across platforms.
  8. Fund Experiments: Make big bets on bold, strategic experiments in new-media organizing.
  9. Measure Impact vs. Clicks: Evaluate projects’ ability to shape narratives and shift discourse.

Support this work: Contribute online, contact your MVP liaison, or email advisor@movement.vote.

 

Introduction

To defeat autocracy and shift the trajectory of our country, we need to win hearts and minds en masse by pairing local organizing with new-media engagement. In short, we must organize the internet.

This strategy memo lays out how MVP will blend our commitment to deep local and state organizing with the power and scalability of new-media and digital engagement. 

What Is “New Media” and Why Does It Matter?

New media is defined as: Means of mass communication using digital technologies such as the internet. For our purposes, “new media” is not the opposite of “legacy media” (The New York Times, CNN, etc.), but rather the distributed systems that move information from those and other channels to people’s “For You pages” (FYPs) on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, Twitch, and more.

While legacy media outlets still play a key role in our media ecosystem, increasingly more people are engaging cultural and political narratives in the fluid, complex, algorithm-driven world of new media. 

For organizing and movement-building groups — as well as those who fund and support them — new media represents an urgent opportunity to engage the public, without relying on traditional media to carry the message. However, seizing this opportunity will require new modes of thinking and investing.

Problem: Progressive New Media is Unorganized and Underfunded.

The age of legacy media is ending. Up until now, movements for progress have struggled to adapt to the new, fragmented, algorithm-first digital landscape.

  • Loss of a unified digital counterculture: The internet’s shift from shared viral moments to hyper-personalized algorithmic feeds (e.g., TikTok’s “FYP”) has eroded connective tissue online.
  • Failure to learn from insurgent digital tactics: While right-wing movements have faced (and harnessed) disruptions like the Tea Party and culture-first podcasts, movements for progress lag in adopting decentralized, tech-savvy organizing strategies.
  • Algorithmic isolation stifles mass mobilization: Platforms now silo users into opaque, atomized experiences, making cross-platform organizing harder yet more important than ever.
  • Untapped anti-establishment energy: We haven’t fully embraced digital-native movements that forcefully challenge the status quo, leaving movements out of sync with online discourse.

Solution: Treat Digital Space Like Organizing Space.

The right currently dominates digital culture by treating online platforms as core organizing terrain — meeting places, not just megaphones. To compete, we must set aside a “digital as an add-on” mindset and build infrastructure that meets voters where they truly are: in algorithm-driven, decentralized communities where media consumption is often passive, rather than active.

MVP Strategy: Organize the Internet

We are focusing on five pillars to transform digital spaces into organizing spaces:

  1. State-Level Digital Power: Shaping the Story, Setting the Agenda
  2. Youth Movements: Fueling the Next Wave of Change
  3. Identity & Cultural Organizing: Boosting Black Digital Organizing
  4. Digital Voter Engagement: Electoral Messengers as Cultural Catalysts
  5. Amplification Networks: Growing a Unified “Narrative Ecosystem”

 

Our Investment Strategy

We intend to move at least $5-10 million to new-media strategies in 2025-2026, through existing on-the-ground partnerships as well as partners across the progressive new-media ecosystem.

Investment Lenses: Five Key Areas for Catalytic Funding

Rather than relying on siloed approaches, we believe in integrating new-media partners and strategies that will elevate, complement, and amplify the impact of existing on-the-ground organizing efforts.

One Pennsylvania

Photo: One Pennsylvania

1. State-Level Digital Power: Shaping the Story, Setting the Agenda

States have become critical battlegrounds of digital information warfare – from disinformation on the Texas floods to the political assassinations in Minnesota. MVP State Advisors are already pioneering investments in new-media initiatives that strengthen partner collaboration and build rapid-response amplification networks. Using models like the Narrative Justice League in Minnesota, and by strategically elevating state-focused stories with national potential, we will invest in infrastructure (coalitions that include members, media, content creators, strategists, and organizational leads) that shift both local politics and the broader national conversation — scaling impact from the ground up.

Example Organizations: One Pennsylvania, Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance, Distill Social (MI)

Graphic: Gen-Z for Change

2. Youth Movements: Fueling the Next Wave of Change

The fight for the future will always start with the next generation. As Turning Point USA and PragerU indoctrinate grade-school children into right-wing authoritarianism, we must create spaces for alignment and opportunities that inspire younger generations toward an inclusive, equitable future. We will do this by scouting, seeding, and scaling progressive alternatives to Turning Point and PragerU, and partnering with youth organizations empowering young people en masse to push for a better world.

Example Organizations: Voters of Tomorrow, Gen-Z For Change

Photo: 1Hood Power

3. Identity & Cultural Organizing: Boosting Black Digital Organizing

From Black Lives Matter to today’s fight against Project 2025, Black-led organizing has consistently shaped our national consciousness. Groups like Onyx Impact are already leading the charge against misinformation, while building collective power across media ecosystems. Now, we will scale their impact by investing and creating partnerships in culture-first digital organizing, through organizations like the American Experiment Project and Watering Hole Media. Our investments will help Black-led organizations combat disinformation both on the ground and in broader cultural spaces online.

Example Organizations: Onyx Impact, Watering Hole Media, Project 68 / American Experiment Project

Photo: Wisconsin Working Families Power

4. Digital Voter Engagement: Elections as Cultural Inflection Points

Elections are not just a mechanism for selecting government officials; when leveraged strategically, they can shape our public discourse and collective worldviews in lasting ways. By partnering with bold, movement-aligned organizations, we can use creative digital strategies (e.g., viral memes, organizing on Facebook Community Groups, posting on Subreddits) to meet and engage voters where they are — transforming electoral messengers into cultural catalysts, rather than just political voices speaking to other political players. By cultivating online activist networks to support these efforts, we can test and identify winning messages on the digital battlefield, while amplifying our voter turnout programs.

Example Organizations: Working Families Power, Progressive Caucus Action Fund, Local Progress

5. Amplification Networks: Growing a Unified Narrative Ecosystem

None of the strategies above can stand alone. While they all are critical, their real power comes from a unified narrative ecosystem — one that amplifies messages across platforms and personalities, scaling local wins into national stories and countering right-wing disinformation at every turn. To achieve this, we’ll convene key strategists — media figures, movement leaders, communication experts, and content creators — to build a rapid-response network. Together, we’ll establish a shared rubric for setting priorities, crafting effective narratives, and coordinating amplification strategies.

 

Grantmaking Principles: Building a Bigger Movement, Not Just a Louder Megaphone

While the right has weaponized platforms, algorithms, and anti-establishment energy, our side remains stuck in outdated “online-to-offline” models that treat the internet as a top-down megaphone rather than organizing terrain. To reverse this, we can’t just fund “more” — we have to fund differently.

MVP intends to reshape the progressive new-media landscape by:

  • Treating digital space as real organizing infrastructure — not a one-sided broadcast tool.
  • Embracing decentralized, insurgent tactics that tailor their message to the medium.
  • Prioritizing social listening and measuring success by our level of engagement and relevance.

From funding meme warfare to building digital community, our grantmaking principles align with how online power truly functions. Our goal isn’t to replicate cynical, propagandistic, right-wing approaches, but instead to leverage our strengths as a broad-based movement for dignity and opportunity for all.

1. Fund New Media as Organizing Infrastructure

“Treat Digital Space Like Field Offices.” Prioritize grants that build permanent digital organizing capacity (e.g., creator networks, meme labs) over one-off campaigns.

2. Bet on Decentralization

“Empower Swarms.” Favor distributed models (micro-influencers, local meme pages) over top-down media — mirroring and co-opting right-wing “flood the zone” tactics.

3. Close the Anti-Establishment Gap

“Back Insurgents.” Support creators/candidates who channel anti-system energy (e.g., unpolished live streams, meme-native messaging) to counter MAGA’s edge.

4. Own Narrative Warfare

“Flood the Feeds.” Invest in rapid-response meme factories and “pre-bunking” campaigns to inoculate against disinformation before it takes hold — especially for targeted groups like Black and Latino men.

5. View “Online” as “In Real Life”

“DMs (Direct Messages) Are as Valuable as Door Knocks.” Today, some of our most promising leaders and change agents are spending hours online every day. As a result, we need to treat digital spaces as inherently useful organizing spaces, not just merely a way to create “online-to-offline” engagement. 

6. Invest in Digital Communities

“500-Person Online Parties Over 5-Person Events.” Fund deep, ongoing organizing that harnesses the power and potential of online forums, groups, and chats where trust is built — not just public platforms where algorithms interfere or offline spaces where there are often physical scalability limits.

7. Support Platform Diversification

“No Single-Point Failures.” Avoid over-reliance on one platform; support organizations that are working across a diversified portfolio of digital arenas: Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, and emerging spaces.

8. Fund Experiments

“$10k to 10 ‘Wild’ Ideas is Better Than $100k to One ‘Safe’ Bet.” Allocate 20-30% of grants to high-risk, high-reward pilots (e.g., AI-generated hyper-local content; infiltrating gaming communities).

9. Measure Impact vs. Clicks

“Track Meme Shares, Not Just Impressions.” Ignore the false allure of useless vanity metrics, and instead evaluate projects’ ability to shape narratives and shift the discourse. Redefine KPIs to include:

  • Narrative adoption: Are our frames being reinforced by supporters and opponents alike?
  • Algorithmic co-optation: Does our content get boosted organically? Do we get earned media?
  • Cross-platform spillover: Does a TikTok trend jump get picked up by the New York Times?

 

Vetting Criteria 

We will identify and assess potential grantee partners according to three core criteria:

1. Collaborative Mindset

  • Actively seeks partnerships and coordination within a broader ecosystem
  • Values strategic interoperability with others, rather than being a “one-stop shop”
  • Recognizes that limited initial funding requires symbiotic relationships

2. Designed for Virality

  • Requires content built with platform-native sharing mechanisms
  • Measures success through organic spread and cultural adoption
  • Tests multiple formats to discover what breaks through algorithmically

3. Win Hearts and Minds

  • Tracks shifts in audience perceptions and media consumption habits
  • Focuses on filling information voids before attempting to mobilize
  • Creates measurable narrative change that enables future organizing

This framework ensures we fund partners who understand modern digital dynamics — where cultural change precedes, informs, and enables political action.

 

Our Unique Role: MVP as Capacity Builder and Connector

MVP is uniquely positioned to be a leading force in this digital evolution. 

For years, we have redefined grassroots power by channeling resources to the most effective local organizers and movement builders. Now, we are taking that same proven model to the digital frontier — not as a pivot away from deep organizing and base building, but as an expansion of that work.

How Is MVP’s New-Media Strategy Different?

  1. Trust is our infrastructure: Thanks to our deep relationships with hundreds of local, state, and national organizing groups, we can bridge digital innovation and on-the-ground power like no other funding intermediary. When we invest in meme labs or creator networks, they are accountable to movements — not just to their own virality.
  2. Scale meets specificity: Just as we’ve matched donors to hyper-local organizers since 2016, we will now connect them to digital practitioners who are natives to online space. We identify projects that don’t look and feel like every other nonprofit — they have to show their online bona fides, proven track record, and untapped potential.
  3. Organizing-first digital strategy: This is about taking the relational organizing we already fund (door knocks, protests, mutual aid) and giving it digital superpowers:

Door knocks → DM (Direct Message) threads.
Rally signs → Templates for viral social media posts.
Local leaders → Online creators.

We are already doing the hard work of movement building. Now we’ll ensure it is seen, memed, and amplified across the fragmented spaces where culture foments, forms, and flourishes. This is how we meet this moment — not by changing who we are or what we do, but by expanding where we fight.

 

Metrics & Evaluation

What Does Success Look Like?

  • Strong, Networked Partnerships: For our collective new-media ecosystem to flourish, we all need to work together – and not always claim credit for successes. The more we see organic partnerships forming and uplifting each other’s work, the more we will know we’ve succeeded.
  • Content that Spreads Organically: We are looking for the content we help generate to make its way into spaces we did not expect to have reach, be picked up by legacy media, and infiltrate the broader public discourse from the ground up.
  • Shifts in Beliefs & Narratives: Our narrative work will shift from reactive to proactive — countering right-wing disinformation before it takes root, and advancing frames and messages that enroll more and more people into a vision of the equitable society we want to see.
  • Scalable Cultural Impact: Our partners’ content will shift the broader discourse — finding its way into mainstream media, being referenced by policymakers, and shaping the cultural conversation and policy agenda.

How Will We Measure Progress?

To capture the scope of our impact, we will aggregate outcomes from both national and state-level pilots, synthesizing data into a cohesive narrative of growth and cultural shift. This approach will allow us to track how localized experiments scale — or inspire adaptations — across networks and movements, highlighting patterns such as:

  • Which content formats travel fastest, and
  • How collaborative campaigns amplify reach beyond individual efforts.

By tying these insights to concrete metrics (e.g., narrative-shift polling, cross-partner referrals, and opponent reactions), we can demonstrate how tactical innovation fuels strategic wins across the ecosystem — proving the value of funding interconnected, viral-ready strategies attached to amplification networks, rather than isolated projects and one-off campaigns.

 

Appendix: Landscape Analysis

Overview

Our digital dominance collapsed because the internet and our ability to reach people online have changed dramatically. To regain the upper hand, we must stop treating the internet as a second thought, and start organizing on its terms — partnering with digital-native organizations, training our local-organizing partners, and building infrastructure that thrives in fractured attention economies.

The Problem

We can’t understand what went wrong online without examining the shifts around how we use digital tools and online spaces. Two key developments upended our digital dominance:

  1. The emergence of digitally-native right-wing counterculture, and
  2. The atomization of the online experience.

Key Development #1: Digitally-Native Right-Wing Counterculture

In 2011-2012, Ron Paul’s insurgent presidential campaign disrupted the Republican primary process through a savvy understanding of caucus rules, mass mobilization, and digital coordination — mirroring, in a different political area, the energy of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Both movements were early digital experiments in subverting entrenched power: decentralized, chaotic, and deeply online.

These groups of activists — both left- and right-leaning — shared a disenchantment with mainstream politics and a fluency with emerging digital tools. Kakao Talk (a Korean social media platform adopted by the right), forums, memes, livestreams, and Facebook groups became both megaphones, amplifiers, and organizing hubs. While they did not achieve their immediate goals, they seeded a digitally-native counterculture that would eventually help power Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to prominence.

Key Development #2: Atomization of the Online Experience

Until 2020, the internet was still somewhat of a shared cultural space. Virality created common cultural reference points — whether via Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, what broke through somewhere often broke through everywhere. That is no longer the case.

TikTok’s “For You Page” (FYP) introduced a new model: hyper-individualized, opaque, and isolating feeds made specifically for individual users. Like YouTube before it, but even more advanced, TikTok trained users to expect an algorithmic experience tailored to their exact preferences — while hiding everything else behind the black box of the algorithm.

This shift has dramatically atomized and fragmented the online experience. We no longer see what our friends see. We cannot easily cultivate a shared feed or resist the logic of the algorithm. Mass virality is rarer, and cross-cultural resonance is harder to engineer. Add the rise of AI, and we’re facing a reality where organizing at scale requires creative solutions to being seen and going viral.

With this in mind, we can see that the successful recent insurgencies among right-wing movements were only made possible with advanced online organizing tactics, countercultural relevance, investments in technology, and the embrace of organic, anti-establishment cultural forces. 

In light of this, our new-media strategies and investments must seek to push the boundaries of our engagement and align with new-media partners who natively understand digital media, culture, technology, and political insurgency.

The Anatomy of Virality

To see how ideas go viral in today’s new-media environment, let’s look at the Texas floods of July 2025.

On July 4th, 2025, thousands of residents in Central Texas were overwhelmed by deadly floods. Local governments hadn’t purchased the necessary alarm system to warn vulnerable populations to get to higher ground, and budget cuts at the federal level to FEMA led to a three-day delay in disaster relief, with thousands of missed calls from residents in need. 

The story of these floods in the following week after the disaster should have been a story about budget cuts and bureaucratic failures. But within three days, the focus was hijacked by the right-wing new-media apparatus. Instead of talking about the need to invest in effective public-safety infrastructure, the conversation moved to bogus, conspiratorial claims of geo-engineering.

How does this happen?

In short, we have a fractured media system. It is no longer possible to rely on a media of “shared experiences”, where the public is tuning into the same nightly news by a single anchor. 

Our media is tailored and fed to us based on an algorithmic “black box” designed by Silicon Valley tech moguls. Algorithms are influenced, at least in part, by our likes, screen time, and engagement, but they are also pulling in our unique online fingerprints. Without regulation, the data they use can include an unknowable range of factors — everything from our zip code to our purchasing habits, gender, intimate conversations with partners, and the physical proximity of our phones to another person.

This means we have to approach how we share information very differently.

The right solved this by aligning themselves with viral content creators on platforms from 4Chan to YouTube and even, in some cases, using the talking points they found on social media. These bi-directional relationships and investments paid off as the parasocial relationships developed by online creators transferred to media personalities, both fringe and establishment, across the right-wing ecosystem.

The Solution

To address these challenges, we must take a truly holistic view of new media and its uses. The old “online-to-offline” strategy should be retired in favor of organizing systems that treat digital spaces as a vital arena for winning hearts and minds.

This will require investing in new platforms as well as resourcing proven organizations that excel at organizing (as many of our partners do), but also have an interest in expanding their reach online — even if they haven’t yet seen digital media as core terrain for their work. 

What We Can Get

For decades, the right wing has goaded us into a losing strategy — forcing us to defend our positions with painstaking research and logic while they push memetic policies and baseless claims that spread effortlessly online.

But by partnering with digital natives, training our partner organizations, and investing in shared amplification strategies, we can turn the internet into our testing ground — iterating on what works and discarding what doesn’t — to craft messaging that doesn’t just go viral once, but sustains organic adoption.

With stronger narrative control and a reinforced network of amplifiers, we can move beyond top-down media strategies that only succeed in focus groups but actually win in the battle of public opinion online. This is how we shift the organizing terrain — and win back our politics.

The New-Media Landscape

The creator space is massive, with estimates of 2-5 million professional full-time content creators in the United States alone. However, the number of groups organizing the new-media space is still relatively small. Fundraising requests from these organizations can range from $2 million to $75 million, with many overlapping priorities and frames. The following is a partial list of key players across the new-media landscape.

Funders

Non-Profit Programs

For-Profits / New-Media Outlets

  • COURIER: Repackages progressive talking points strategically
  • Futuro Media: Latino-targeted digital news platform
  • More Perfect Union: Viral news platform with strong issue discipline
  • NowThis: Progressive media network with massive reach
  • Social Currant: Connects creators with sustainable opportunities
  • TaskForce: High-production entertainment-style political content
  • Vocal: Runs research-backed creator campaigns

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