I have never built a social movement. But here's a guy named Rich Yeselson who is presented by Ezra Klein as 'a skilled organizer and a thoughtful historian of social movements in America and Europe'. Yeselson says that there are four conditions for the Wall Street protest movement to thrive. The third of them is:
whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters...
I feel sort of vindicated by this. Only sort of, since the point was pretty obvious.
Yeselson expands on it:
There's a better chance they will keep showing up if they think that the movement connects directly to their everyday lives, that if it succeeds, those lives will be changed in an obvious and better way. In the United States, as the great historian Edmund Morgan pointed out years ago, social justice movements have always reworked that now awkward phrase from the Declaration that says "all men are created equal" to provide a justification for people seeking to expand the promise of America to include those left out and left behind: men and women, black and white, workers and employers, gay and straight.
And there's more.