MoveOn Reviews

My rating: 2/10. My personal recommendation is work for MoveOn only if you're deeply financially desperate and then leave as soon as you can to minimize the taint. Have you ever worked for an incompetent, disreputable, and fading organization whose senior executives, policies, and work responsibilities make you miserable, then brands you a bad "poor fit" employee for being unhappy about that and for not quietly putting up with workplace abuse like racist pay? That was working for this employer. I've had progressive and Democratic elders warn me not to work for MoveOn if I ever wanted to be taken seriously later in my career, and they were right about how much it'd take to overcome the taint. I would also personally warn people of color not to work for MoveOn. Very high staff turnover. In my personal opinion, MoveOn does not make long term commitments to progressive goals either. Instead it seems to flail around and chase after whatever shiny object gets them the most fundraising dollars and press attention. I personally consider MoveOn in general to be a politically incompetent and morally hypocritical organization, although many outsiders with superficial knowledge of this group won't believe it. Its incessant emails, leeching off other organizations' organizing efforts, delusional self-promotion, and diversion of progressive donations from better causes & smarter groups are controversial, if not a cancer on the progressive movement. Once in a while MoveOn does good things for progressives (a broken clock…), but all too often it wastes its members' money on insipid, unhelpful, or irrelevant projects that have zero or even detrimental impact. Increasingly fading and irrelevant, although according to its narcissistic self-portrayals, it's somehow still the most important progressive grassroots organization out there. MoveOn does still however raise enough money from its members to try to throw its weight around. Its naive understanding of how politics works also allows it to take credit for developments in which it had a marginal role (if any). MoveOn also tends to swoop in on ongoing progressive campaigns in seemingly well-meaning but actually empty and purely selfish gestures and take credit for others' achievements. Alliances are common and good, but the way MoveOn does it generates more resentment than it realizes. In terms of working conditions, I was lucky to have a few great coworkers, but overall, I saw a lot of mediocrity and incompetence. At this organization, you have to put up with too much false forced intimacy in the workplace and thoughtless, self-righteous crusading. MoveOn was also extremely disrespectful of staffers' time, forcing ridiculously long working hours and requiring dumb meetings that are irrelevant, unnecessary, and sometimes invasive of personal privacy. You will be forced into handling most technical and programming tasks yourself – even if you're an academic, prepare to learn SQL and spend hours fixing bugs– which they justify as an egalitarian policy but instead is a money-saving, inconsistently enforced HR disaster that squanders everyone's time and energy and creates other problems. (Do they not understand basic staffing principles and Economics 101?) How I will always remember senior management is how much they lied, misled, and betrayed. They also loved to talk about "work life balance" to put on a show about caring, but I've found their actual responses in practice to be disastrously incompetent, inhumane, racist, and tone-deaf. To some outsiders and its funding recipients, MoveOn probably still maintains a positive image, but I've had plenty of similar conversations with former employees of this organization. The common theme is that they're relieved to have left. Maybe the internal situation there has changed recently, but I still think the frustrations and professional taint of working for this employer aren't worth it. After writing your 100th email imploring members to sign this petition or pitch in $3 for that vanity campaign you know will have no impact, you wonder what are you doing with your life, wasting your career and education like that. Dealing with the group's most active grassroots members also made me want to set my hair on fire (think customer service); some are wonderful, but many many are awful. My experience with MoveOn proved for me that long hours on pointless and ineffective projects in that kind of churn-and-burn, high turnover, stressful work environment is destructive for personal and professional well-being. I felt a lot of anxiety and despair while I was there.