The new year begins in three short weeks. Our country – and much of the globe – will be facing dramatically new political realities. And all of it will take place in a rapidly shifting landscape when it comes to how people receive and process information.

Those are three good reasons to closely examine your group or party’s organizational positioning. How clear are you about where your group stands in relation to other organizations? And how well do you fit into the lives of people you’re seeking to engage, organize and persuade?

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can test and sharpen your organizational positioning at this critical juncture.

Maybe naming the category you belong to is easy. Maybe not. But it’s one of the first ways people make sense of groups seeking to interact with them. Are you a political party or a social movement? A broad environmental group or a climate organization? Are you built around an idea or a constituency?

Category helps people locate your organization. As we will discuss more in a moment, a wide range of groups can populate the same category. But knowing which category a group belongs to still gives people guidance about how a group moves through the world, what it works on, and what it values.

Some think it’s a liberating advantage not to fit neatly into any category. But that’s not really true. Without the aid of category, a group has to work even harder to make itself understood.

Greenpeace and The Nature Conservancy are both environmental groups. The ASPCA and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) are both animal protection groups. But, in both categories, no one is likely to confuse one group with the other.

Why? Because the stance they take, the attitude they move through the world with, in so markedly different. One way to tell the difference is to ask what adjectives fit each group. For example, “feisty” is an easy fit for Greenpeace and PETA, not so for the others.

Groups with the clearest positioning are easily matched with certain adjectives. The ACLU is “bold, relentless, uncompromising.” Doctors Without Borders is “daring, brave, and committed.” 

Do the adjectives that define your group’s stance and attitude come easily to mind? What are they?  

We can play the adjective game in reverse as well. Which words don’t fit your organization even though they work fine for others in your category? If you can’t come up with any, then maybe you have too generic an identity within your category.

You can’t be all things to all people. So, who have you chosen not to be? What voice and spirit have you decided just doesn’t match the way your group carries itself?

Emotions are – or should be – at the heart of how our organizations communicate. Over and over in these memos, I call out the vital importance of leading with emotion. But it’s not an any old emotion will do situation. To be effective, the emotions we lean into have to match both the moment we’re in and – more pertinent to this conversation – the voice and stance of your organization.

The clearer you are about your group’s emotional profile, the stronger your messaging will be.

In all my years of focus groups research, this question proved really helpful. Asking people to name a personality who best captures the spirit of an organization provides an interesting mirror into how they perceive the group.

Asking yourself the same question might prove revelatory. Are there names that really fit for your leadership and staff? Are there other names that everyone agrees aren’t a match? Are there wildly different perspectives on these questions within your organization?  

For progressive advocacy groups, a clear dynamic during the first Trump presidency was “anti-Trump” becoming the dominant way that groups defined and presented themselves. Often that caused other aspects of a group’s identity to fade into the background. 

It’s a trap we should try to avoid the second time around. Will opposing Trump actions and attacks be a big part of what many advocacy groups do in 2025 and beyond? Yes.

Will we let that define our organizations and blur out all the other elements of who we are and what world we’re working to create? Hopefully not.

We will all be entering  a new landscape and confronting new challenges. Hopefully, these thoughts about clarifying your organizational positioning will help you message more persuasively in the year ahead.