In our last post, Strong Campaign Numbers Can Hide Who We Are Not Reaching, we argued that a campaign’s base was not the problem. The mistake was treating it as a destination rather than a channel and never checking how far a message can go. Brazil’s presidential election gave us the large-scale example of what treating a base as a channel can look like. In three weeks, millions of supporters went from receiving the campaign’s messages to carrying them into their own families, friends and communities. That is what it looks like when supporters are given a role. Most cause-driven organisations still measure digital communication as if the audience’s role ends with receiving something: Views. Likes. Shares. Perhaps a click. These numbers show how much attention a message captured, but they do not tell us whether anyone did anything with it.

What Changed Between the Two Rounds

Lula lost the first round and won the runoff three weeks later. A lot of other issues mattered in between including everyday issues such as cost of living, social programmes and higher turnout, and no single tactic won the election. But one change in the campaign’s communication stands out. A WhatsApp channel called “Lula’s Army,” run by André Janones, an allied congressman and influencer, grew from 50,000 subscribers on 5 October to more than ten million by election night. The size of the channel mattered less than what the campaign did with it. It identified the people it still needed to reach, adapted its communication to the platforms and relationships through which they could be reached, and gave supporters a role in turning attention into participation. Young communicators produced short, often funny videos for WhatsApp and Instagram, designed to travel beyond the existing base. The communication adapted to each platform, and the audience was not asked to like the campaign. They were asked to carry it.

This was coordinated mobilisation. Lula’s Army distributed ready-made content and specific instructions. What matters for organisations is that supporters were not treated as passive recipients: they were given clear actions and carried the material into their own circles. As Gabriella Zutrau, senior advisor for digital strategy on Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign, put it on our Political Communication Vienna panel: “Preach to the choir, because they will sing to the congregation.” What makes it work is that they sing in their own voice.

A distributed network also makes communication less dependent on the reach of a single institutional account.

What Organisations Can Do Now

Give the audience a role

Most cause-driven organisations will never have ten million people in a WhatsApp channel, and they do not need to. The same mechanism works with twenty volunteers, a partner network or a handful of creators. “Read this,” “watch this” and “share this” are not much of a participation strategy. The question is what role your audience is being given. Decide what people should be able to do after encountering the message: start a conversation, invite someone, add local context or help another person participate.

Build for relationships, not only reach

An institutional account can reach many people at once without earning their trust.Before launch, trusted voices such as creators, partners and staff need an argument rather than a script, so they can carry the core meaning in language that fits their own communities. This is how messages travel through trust: the argument stays intact while its framing adapts to different audiences.

Make participation easy to carry

Ultimately what matters is how easy it is for someone to pick up our content and use it.Break long reports or interviews into one-sentence arguments, evidence, short clips and a specific next action, such as starting a conversation with someone for whom the issue is relevant or testing the message with someone outside your team. If they can explain and adapt the core message without losing or distorting the meaning the message is more likely to travel.

Measure the movement, not only the media

Likes and shares show attention, not movement. Decide in advance what movement would look like: distinct links for partners or communities, a “how did you hear about us?” question at sign-up, participation from outside the existing base, or a count of actions completed. Attribution will never be perfect. The aim is to gather enough evidence to tell whether the message travelled and produced action.

None of this can guarantee reach, trust takes time to build.But Brazil showed that the audience is not the end of the distribution chain. It can become the beginning when people are given a role.The useful question after a campaign is not only who it reached. It is who it enabled to carry the work further.