The inspirational director of Migrant Voice, Nazek Ramadan, recently encouraged me to reflect on what had been the key learning from my professional practice promoting campaigning across 2025.

I thought that this was a great challenge, and it really made me think. After some reflection, I thought that my two pivotal assignments last year had been my work for Together with Refugees and supporting refugee community leaders at the Refugee Council.

At Together with Refugees, we were looking rapidly to develop a nationwide network of local campaign organisers to inspire and encourage campaigning activity promoting refugee rights. Ideally, I would have liked two days, or possibly just one day, to take these new campaign organisers through the 12 key questions that I think you need to be able to answer to do effective campaigning. There was a need for speed and frankly we just didn’t have this time.

So, I began to develop a much pithier training approach, which included the top three tools that I think are essential as you begin to campaign and then an overarching approach to bring everything together. And I saw that I could deliver this training comfortably within one hour if necessary.

What then were these top tools? For people who have been aware of my approach in the past, my first tool might be not too surprising! Firstly, I think you need clarity of message and believe that the most important campaign tool to do that is by developing an effective elevator pitch – those 15 to 30 seconds when you can convey the essence of your campaign message.

Secondly, you need to think about who you are targeting and who could be your potential messengers to convey your message to influence your target, and here I think explaining the concept of an influence tree can be so helpful. This tool if done well and imaginatively can be the roadmap for your campaign.

Thirdly, and this is where reality comes crashing into proceedings, you need to think about your opponents’ key arguments – what are the opposing messages to your campaign? And here I think the opposition matrix is an incredibly helpful tool to reflect both on those opposing messages but also to consider your most effective responses.

These three tools are all very good, but then you need to be able to pull them together, and here I think explaining the incredibly simple yet powerful concept of developing your future story – the story that you are going to make happen as a result of your campaigning activity. And conscious that no battleplan ever survives the first contact with the enemy, you must be willing to keep your future story under regular review.

Setting out this truncated training, I was energised by the response from the campaign organisers – people seemed to like the simplicity and could begin to see how they could apply these tools. However, our approach was hampered by two fundamental flaws. Firstly, at the time we were not yet focused on just one issue; it is always so much more powerful when you are sharing practical campaigning tools to be able to apply it to a real life issue – it suddenly makes the training become real. (With hindsight, I wished I had just taken one issue as our working example as I’ve done before). And secondly, we were not quite ready to offer people one-to-one support, whereby they could begin to talk through the tools and their own reflections on how they might be able to use them. Learning is important, but so is the practical implementation of that learning.

With this learning behind me, I then set out to work with some amazing refugee community leaders helping them to campaign for the change that they wanted to see in their communities. Once again, I was so energised by their reaction to the training, but it all felt so much more real because we were pulling it back to one common issue; we are able to show how the tools could be used in a real practical sense to drive forward one campaign message.

And then shortly after that training, we offered these leaders a one-to-one session where they could focus on any aspect of the training and have an open conversation about how they might use it, how they might tackle any potential obstacles and how they might take things forward. I just loved how every single conversation took a different direction and had a different focus because each conversation was based on the individual needs of that campaigner.

So, as I go into 2026, I am more energised than ever after 20 years of trying to help people campaign around the world. And more than ever, I am seeing that there is something here which is basic and simple, and which can unlock people’s campaigning energy with a process to help them begin to use it in a way that makes sense to them. I am so grateful to Nazek for her challenge in encouraging me to reflect on this past year .

If any of this learning captures your imagination and interest, then I would love to hear from you!

To find out more about Jonathan’s work, do visit his website:  https://jonathanelliscampaigns.com