Action Playbook:

Drop Links on Social Media

The Goal: Get others to take political climate action by commenting on social media posts.

➡️ Action Overview

  1. Learn about the elections and candidates

  2. Pick your platform

  3. Search climate and political hashtags

  4. Comment on a post with your link

  5. Repeat, but don’t spam!

In this action, you’ll spread awareness about either a type of upcoming election (e.g. congressional midterms, state legislature) or a specific climate candidate, with a link to take electoral action.

Why bother? We can’t fight climate change with bold public policy unless we elect pro-climate candidates, and those candidates need our support. Today’s action brings the importance of upcoming elections to a broad public audience. But rather than reaching voters themselves, this action primarily helps increase political engagement and recruit more volunteers to take action with us. That makes this tactic unique in its multiplier effect.

Let’s take action.

Learn about the elections and candidates

There are important midterm elections for Congress this year, in which all 435 U.S. House seats and 33 of the 100 U.S. Senate seats are up for reelection. We need as many people as possible to understand what’s at stake in these elections and move them to help organize for climate candidates. The slide deck below provides an overview of those stakes to help you communicate more effectively.

If you’d like more information about particular candidates, head over to our Candidate Briefings page to see our slate of priority U.S. House candidates. On our Electoral Advocacy page, you can find an interactive version of the map shown in the deck.

If you’re more interested in down-ballot elections, check out the Climate Cabinet down-ballot slate.

Step 1

Step 2

Pick your platform

Choose the social media platform you’re most comfortable navigating, as long as it has a search function and comment feature. Any comments section is fair game.

This action works particularly well on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, but savvy users can also make it work on Youtube, Reddit, Discord, and other platforms. You can even link drop in the comments section of news articles and blog posts!

Step 3

Search relevant hashtags

Now it’s time to find some posts to comment on! If you already follow a lot of climate and political accounts, you can start by looking through your own feed.

When you’ve exhausted your feed, try searching for relevant hashtags. You can keep it really broad, like #ClimateActionNow, #ActOnClimate, #BuildBackBetter, or #2022Midterms. Or you can get more specific if there’s a particular climate lens or candidate you’re interested in (searching by region/geotag for the latter if they don’t have a hashtag).

Another tactic that works is searching for posts about other policy priorities that draw a similar demographic as the climate-concerned. These tend to be progressive causes, like abortion, immigration, or social justice. When you find people who are already fired up about other issues, you have a good chance of moving them to act on climate.

Step 4

Like and comment

First, like the post you’re going to comment on so you can track its performance later. Then, write a short reply in your authentic voice, using anything about the upcoming elections or climate candidates as a hook. It doesn’t have to be in-depth—in fact, if it’s too long, people might not read it!

As a default, you can share this link to join an upcoming Hour of Action: https://climatechangemakers.org/events. If you’re feeling creative, you can share links to specific resources, our candidate fundraising pages, etc.

Feel free to react to the specific content of the post, or keep it more generic by talking about how you personally feel productive when you organize for climate candidates, or how you’re feeling the urgency of the 2022 midterms. Have fun and use emojis, slang—however you usually talk online!

➡️ Example response to a sassy TikTok about the absurdity of political corruption:

Bestie, I can’t even handle this BS from congress anymore 🙅🏽‍♀️ that’s why i started volunteering with Climate Changemakers every week to try to get some actual real ones into office ✨ https://climatechangemakers.org/events

➡️ Example response to a serious Facebook post about heat deaths:

I’m honestly afraid for our future here in Nevada, and for a long time I didn’t know what to do about it. Working on election organizing with Climate Changemakers is one of the only things that’s been making me feel empowered to actually make an impact and get some different folks in office who will take this problem seriously. https://climatechangemakers.org/events

Repeat (but don’t spam)

Follow Step 4 a bunch more times, or mix it up by trying a different platform. If you stay on the same platform, just make sure to vary the wording of your comments a bit so you don’t get “shadow banned” by the platform for spamming.

Step 5

Thank you for taking action!

Questions? Comments? Email info@climatechangemakers.org