Every movement is an ecosystem — the movements that understand theirs are the movements that win

See the whole field. Then act on it.

INTEL.NGO is a resource hub for social movement organizations that want to build movement intelligence: the systematic practice of understanding the ecosystem in which they operate — the actors, relationships, resources, narratives, opposition, and operating environment that together determine what any single organization can achieve — and translating that understanding into better strategy, coordination, and collective impact.

No organization changes the world alone. Every campaign runs through an ecosystem of organizations, funders, grassroots formations, allies, opponents, and political conditions — and yet most organizations navigate that ecosystem with a picture assembled from fragments. The results are visible in every movement: duplicated programs, unserved gaps, coalitions built on familiarity rather than complementarity, and fields blindsided by opposition that had been visible, and growing, for years. These are not failures of commitment. They are failures of perception at the level of the field — and they are fixable.

Our guides are written for practitioners, not academics. They combine the best available research with field-tested frameworks, real case vignettes, and actionable tools. Everything we publish is free to download, share, and adapt.

What You'll Find Here

  • Points to Guide 1: Understanding Movement Intelligence.
    What is movement intelligence, why is ecosystem-level understanding a strategic necessity, and how do I honestly assess my organization's current capacity for it?​
  • Points to Guide 2: Mapping the Movement.
    How do I actually map a movement ecosystem — its actors, networks, power structures, resource flows, narratives, and opposition — and turn the data into insight the field can act on?
  • Points to Guide 3: Movement Intelligence in Action.
    How do we use intelligence for positioning and coordination, build shared intelligence infrastructure across a field, and govern it all with the ethics and security that keep a movement safe?

Our Values

We believe that seeing clearly is a form of care for the movement — that the commitment to an accurate picture of the field, including its gaps, its conflicts, and its opposition, is inseparable from the commitment to serve it well. We believe that the field is the unit of analysis: the most consequential strategic questions cannot be answered from inside any single organization, and the practice of answering them together is itself a form of movement building. We believe that intelligence must serve the movement and never surveil it — that movement intelligence is bounded by hard ethical lines: no covert monitoring of activists, no deception, public sources only for opposition research, and data governance as duty of care. And we believe that knowledge belongs to the field that produces it: findings return to contributors first, grassroots knowledge counts, and everything we publish is free to access, download, and use.

GUIDES

Guide 1 — Understanding Movement Intelligence: Seeing the Ecosystem You Work Within
The conceptual foundations: what movement intelligence is (and how it differs from organizational environmental scanning), the seven components of a movement ecosystem, the social movement research that explains how fields behave — resource mobilization, political opportunity, framing, field theory, and movement ecology — the six strategic payoffs of ecosystem-level understanding, an honest account of limits and risks, and a five-dimension movement intelligence capacity assessment. With case vignettes on a coalition that discovered its own duplication and gaps, and a field blindsided by a countermovement no one had been assigned to watch. Read More
The practitioner’s handbook: defining your ecosystem boundary and priority intelligence questions, building the actor map, mapping relationships and network structure, power mapping, resource-flow analysis from public data, narrative and public opinion intelligence, ethical opposition monitoring, field surveys and listening tours, and synthesizing it all into decision-ready briefs. Full templates: Ecosystem Boundary Canvas, Actor Mapping Matrix, Relational Survey, Movement Power Map, Resource-Flow Worksheet, Frame Inventory, Opposition Monitoring Protocol, Field Survey Design Checklist, and Ecosystem Synthesis Brief. Read More
Closing the loop: using ecosystem intelligence for organizational positioning and coalition strategy, informing funders without ceding movement control, building shared intelligence infrastructure — field catalysts, research intermediaries, federated networks — and governing it all with an Intelligence-Sharing Charter, data minimization, security culture, and equity commitments. Includes a movement health dashboard and field-level after-action review practice. With case vignettes on a shared dashboard that held a coalition together and an extractive field scan — and the two-year repair that followed. Read More

Start Here

New to movement intelligence?
Begin with Guide 1 for the foundations: what a movement ecosystem is, why it matters strategically, and where your organization stands today.

Ready to map your field?
Jump to Guide 2 for step-by-step methods — actor mapping, network analysis, power mapping, resource flows — with full templates.

Building shared infrastructure?
Guide 3 covers field-level intelligence systems, data governance, security culture, and the ethics that keep it all legitimate.

All INTEL.NGO guides are published under a Creative Commons Attribution license — share freely, adapt openly, and credit the source.