When PayPal announced it would stop processing payments for white nationalist groups after the August 2017 Charlottesville rally, the decision appeared to be a spontaneous corporate response to public outrage. In reality, it was the result of years of pressure on these corporations led by Rashad Robinson. Corporate payment processors PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa had spent months before the violence conducting private negotiations with credit card executives, preparing detailed policy proposals, and building internal coalitions within the companies—all orchestrated by Rashad Robinson’s coalition.
“Ninety-five percent of the time, we reach out to them before going public,” Robinson explained to Fast Company about their methodology. “What we want to make clear is that we didn’t just see what happened in Charlottesville and decide to attack credit card companies. No one at Mastercard should have been surprised when it happened. In fact, Mastercard should have said, ‘Oh crap, we’ve been talking with them since February.'”
The Charlottesville response revealed Robinson’s four-phase methodology that begins with private relationship-building rather than public confrontation. PayPal banned at least 34 organizations, including Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute and Jason Kessler’s Unity and Security for America, after receiving specific evidence of policy violations.
Eight years later, speaking at the 2025 ESSENCE Festival about civil rights rollbacks and systematic threats, Robinson’s definition has evolved while retaining its core emphasis on systems over spectacle. Now operating through Rashad Robinson Advisors Robinson and his team of experienced strategists apply the same methodological thinking to a broader range of institutional challenges, from foundation strategy to corporate accountability across multiple sectors.
From Targeted Campaigns to Comprehensive Strategy
The juxtaposition of the 2017 Charlottesville campaign and Robinson’s approach he described at the 2025 ESSENCE Festival illustrates how tactical victories become strategic templates. Charlottesville represented a focused intervention with clear targets and measurable outcomes—removing funding from specific hate groups while establishing precedent for future corporate accountability campaigns.
“Like many organizations, Color of Change put out a statement about Charlottesville,” Robinson explained to Fast Company. “But our most powerful statement was giving people watching the events something clear and strategic to do. To say, ‘Hey, you are outraged, you are saddened, you are frustrated. And here is something that you can actually do.'”
Where the #NoBloodMoney campaign provided people watching traumatic events with clear, strategic actions rather than just emotional responses, Robinson’s team has since developed this reactive-to-proactive model into a comprehensive approach. The $7 billion #StopHateForProfit coalition that Robinson helped lead against Facebook required coordinating over 1,000 businesses under a shared framework—far more complex than the targeted Charlottesville campaign but built on identical foundations.
Speaking at the 2025 ESSENCE Festival, Robinson warned about unprecedented threats: “We are heading into an authoritarian period that will look like no other most of us have ever experienced.” Rather than addressing individual corporate policies, his advisory practice through Rashad Robinson Advisors now positions him as what he describes as an “outsourced chief strategy officer” for organizations needing expertise in coordinating culture change, community engagement, corporate policy, and public policy.
“We need integrated strategies,” Robinson stated during the ESSENCE Festival panel. “We have to have a strategy of forcing institutions to be accountable while working to also build our own.” Contemporary challenges involve federal civil rights rollbacks that require coordinated responses across multiple institutions simultaneously—scaling the Charlottesville methodology from targeted campaigns to comprehensive resistance frameworks.
Changing Systems, Not Just Policies
Robinson’s methodology distinguishes between temporary visibility and sustained institutional change. Consider the difference between protest mobilization and power building through this lens. Event-driven activism generates media attention and public sympathy, but energy dissipates once coverage shifts elsewhere. Corporate diversity initiatives launch with fanfare but fail to address underlying structural barriers. Political campaigns mobilize voters during election cycles but neglect the long-term relationship-building necessary for sustained policy influence.
Robinson’s methodology targets what he calls the underlying incentive structures rather than individual corporate decisions. “Making change inside of big institutions is hard,” Robinson told Fast Company about their ALEC campaign, which compelled over 100 corporations to abandon the American Legislative Exchange Council. “But we’ve learned if you can build up enough energy, make it important to enough people, and create the right narrative, that folks will figure out how to make the change that you’re asking for.”
PayPal’s Charlottesville policy changes created frameworks that other payment processors adopted, altering industry-wide approaches to extremist content. When coalitions Robinson helped create won net neutrality protections by positioning internet access as a civil rights issue, the victory required the same preparation that characterized Charlottesville—but applied across regulatory, corporate, and advocacy domains.
Both campaigns emphasize changing the rules that produce problematic outcomes rather than addressing individual manifestations of problems. Robinson’s current work operates on the same rule-changing principle but at greater scale and complexity, helping organizations develop capacity for altering institutional rules across multiple sectors rather than focusing on individual corporate policies.
His approach addresses what Robinson identifies as the fundamental weakness of activism without strategic channels: emotional energy produces temporary visibility rather than sustained institutional change. Organizations that mistake visibility for power often find themselves repeatedly mobilizing around the same issues without building cumulative influence.
Beyond Visibility: Sustained Influence
“We’re going to need each other. We’re going to need to be aligned, and we’re going to need to build in new ways,” Robinson explained during his BOSSIP interview at the 2025 ESSENCE Festival—not as abstract aspiration, but as urgent practical necessity in an era of unprecedented political polarization.
The evolution from Charlottesville to ESSENCE Festival reflects Robinson’s transition from organizational leadership to independent advisory work, but the fundamental approach remains consistent: building power over generating presence. Whether pressuring credit card companies to stop serving hate groups or helping communities develop comprehensive resistance strategies, Robinson’s methodology prioritizes sustainable institutional change over temporary visibility.
Robinson’s advisory work demonstrates how tactical victories adapt to changing contexts while maintaining core principles. The private negotiations that preceded Charlottesville’s public campaign mirror the foundation work, corporate advising, and movement advising that Robinson now emphasizes for long-term institutional change through Rashad Robinson Advisors.
The methodology scales from targeted corporate campaigns to coordinated responses while maintaining the same core: building relationships, providing detailed proposals, and creating organizational incentives for supporting progressive change. Robinson’s transition to independent advisory work has created opportunities for influence that transcend traditional movement boundaries.
His forthcoming book on power and how to make change will likely provide additional frameworks for this approach, positioning Robinson’s methodology for the next decade of strategic coalition building and results-driven work. Where Charlottesville demonstrated the power of converting crisis moments into strategic opportunities, Robinson’s messaging suggests that the same principles can address comprehensive threats through coordinated, multi-sector responses that build long-term capacity rather than temporary visibility, alone.
The challenge ahead involves scaling relationship-based methodology to match the scope of federal rollbacks while maintaining the precision that made individual corporate campaigns successful—requiring unprecedented coordination across institutions that historically operate independently.
