Author Archives: Jonathan Dearth

1. Campaigning in Somalia

   21st December 2011 11:32 am Leave a Comment

   One of my recurrent themes for this blog over the years has been my fascination and amazement at the fact that the language of campaigning is truly international.

   I recently put that theory to the test again by undertaking an assignment for Saferworld in Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland.

   Over a five day period I ran a two day advocacy course followed by a three day train the trainers’ course so that the participants could take the training out to their communities and inspire advocacy action.

   The audience was representatives from the three non-state actor platforms in Somaliland (SONSAF), Puntland (PUNSAA) and South and Central Somalia (SONSCENSA). These platforms consisted of member organisations ranging
   from community groups to business associations.

   On my trip out to Somaliland via Nairobi I did feel somewhat apprehensive. This was one of the most challenging environments for advocacy campaigning – would my messages resonate with them?

   But my feelings of apprehension were soon swept away as a focus on problem and solution, evidence, messaging, allies, influence trees, using opposition and a theory of change seemed to work with them.

   Even the elevator pitch – 15-30 seconds to convey your key campaign message – seemed to work although we struggled for a while with the Somali translation for elevator pitch.

   Then the train the trainers section proved to be inspiring to me as the platforms began to construct their own training in their own words so that they could take the training out themselves.

   But above all I was left with an overriding impression of passionate and committed people driven to promote the role of civil society in making a difference to people’s lives and futures and committed to using advocacy methods to achieve this change.

   Advocacy campaigning really is an international language.

2. Holding out for a hero with The Right Ethos

   1st December 2011 3:14 pm Leave a Comment

   Earlier this week I tweeted:

   “Help for Heroes is non-political and non-critical, we simply want to help” – that’s suitable, but means that they don’t have the right ethos

   Help for Heroes have just recently won an award for being the Most Admired Charity and this comment about being “non-political and non-critical” struck me and realised that with that attitude they will never be a client of The Right Ethos.

   All of the organisations we work with are critical. And most of them get involved in the  political debate to a greater or lesser extent. Personally, I’m glad they do. Because the aspirations of our client organisations are, I believe, higher. They work to change our world or our society for the better. They campaign for justice.

   There’s certainly a place for charities who simply want to help out. And I wouldn’t be sniffy about them. They can provide a valuable safety net. Or provide activities that you wouldn’t expect to be paid for out of our taxes.

   My award for Most Admired Charity 2011 would go to one that campaigns and is critical and often supports political behaviour to gain permanent change.

   To show that we don’t wish any bad will, many of the Christmas cards sent out by The Right Ethos this year are in aid of Help for Heroes.

   Season’s Greetings

3. Evie Papada

   17th November 2011 10:23 pm Leave a Comment

   

   Whilst Campaign Coordinator at Amnesty International

   Who is the campaigner you admire the most?
   The campaigner I admire the most is Sarah Duthie. She is a campaigner at Greenpeace.

   Apart from your current organisation which other organisation that campaigns do you currently admire?
   ‘War on Want’- They seem to campaign on very topical issues and they have the most updated campaign calendar: the messages they send through are original and it urges you to take action.

   What advice would you give to someone starting their career in campaign today?
   I would urge them to remind themselves that we campaign in order to foster change and not just to raise awareness on issues – i would also advice them to spend enough time planning their campaign strategies and always evaluate the work at different stages of the campaign development.

   What 3 things make a good campaigner?

   Good preparation and planning of the campaign strategy.
   Creativity and boldness in decision making.
   Ability to deliver the campaign message in such a way that it is simple, catchy, using as few words as possible.

   Which of these three things do campaigners have most of?

   Campaigners have all of the above things to a lesser or greater extent – campaigning is both an art and a science, so campaigners tend to be creative and also good at creating thorough plans and effective strategies.

   Which of the 3 is missing the most…

   Most campaigners are not paying enough attention to the preparation and planning process – as they tend to apply strategies that have proved successful in previous campaigns but they don’t necessarily work for all campaigns.

   Are organisations getting better at campaigning….

   There are more campaigning tools out there now and new information tech has helped those organisation that know how to use them effectively to become better at campaigning.

   If you weren’t a campaigner what would you be?

   I would be a painter or a musician – I would find another way to channel my artistic abilities.

    

4. Lizzie Jeans

   10th November 2011 10:16 pm Leave a Comment

   

   Whilst Campaigns Consultant at End Child Poverty

   Lizzie is freelance campaigner. She was previously Campaigns Manager at Help the Aged and has worked for the Methodist Church, People & Planet and Christian Aid.
   Apart from your current organisation which other organisations that campaign do you admire?
   Shelter, Christian Aid, RNID and YWCA.

   Who is the campaigner you most admire?
   Guy Hughes of Crisis Action and People & Planet. Guy was a fantastic campaigner who was tragically killed in an accident in 2006. I worked with Guy at People & Planet and he was a huge influence on my development as a campaigner – especially the need to think about levers of power and influence. The Sheila McKechnie Foundation has a award for young campaigners in his memory.

   Is there a campaigning organisation that you would like to see the back of?
   The BNP

   What advice would you give someone starting their career in campaigning today?
   Being someone who’s easy to get on with and who delivers goes a long way. Make as many contacts as you can and keep in touch with people. Think of opportunities for collaborative working.

   What three things make a good campaigner?
   Drive and tenacity, strategic thinking and strong networking skills.

   Which of these three do you have most of?
   I can be a good networker and enjoy spotting opportunities to work with others.

   Which of these three do you think is missing most out of people who campaign or want to?
   The ability to always be thinking strategically at where you want to achieve change and looking at the balance of power, appropriately targeting your chosen audience at key times, where you can have most impact. Campaigners, including myself, often have so many demands, you can lose sight of your key objectives.

   Generally are organisations getting better at campaigning since you began your career? If so, what’s changed?
   More organisations are campaigning and there is a more crowded market. The public has a greater understanding of campaigning but is also more savvy about campaigning techniques. However, despite the increasing number of organisations who have campaign supporters, it is the same few organisations who are are able to genuinely mobilise large numbers of people to demonstrate.

   If you weren’t a campaigner, what would you be?
   A journalist.

5. Meeting Wangari Maathai – environmental and social activist

   25th October 2011 3:14 pm Leave a Comment

   The death of Wangari Maathai on 25th September 2011, took me back to the day I was fortunate to meet her. It was the same day as Live 8 Day in 2005.

   At the time, I was the Mayor of Islington and for my year in office, I had a theme – a small campaign to try and affect public attitude in the borough. I called it “International In Islington”, where we celebrated different countries and regions linked with Islington – through our residents and the work done in the borough.

   And to take the fact that we are international positively, instead of the negative outlook that some newspapers had and still have today.

   That day I had three events to attend under my international theme. The first one was to celebrate Africa In Islington. The 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Professor Wangari Maathai attended the African Diaspora and Development Day, held by the charity AFFORD on Holloway Road.

   Professor Maathai was a member of the Kenyan government and was internationally recognised for her persistent struggle for democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. She had just became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

   The Honourable Professor Wangari Maathai was the Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources in Kenya. She was also the Founder and former co-ordinator of the Green Belt Movement.

   I managed to spend some time talking to her in the “green room” before the event. For me, as someone who had spent 2 months in Kenya & had just finished working for the World Development Movement, meeting WangariMaathai on Live 8 Day at an African disapora event was tremendously special.

   Like all the best campaigners I’ve ever met, she was utterly optimistic, she once said:
   “I have always believed that, no matter how dark the cloud, there is always a thin, silver lining, and that is what we must look for us.”

   If you care about campaigning, I can recommend her biography – but if at least Google or Wiki her and find out more about this important woman.

6. So what next?

   9th September 2011 11:32 am Leave a Comment

   I recently returned from Germany where I led an advocacy capacity building session for an NGO, and as I have often remarked in the past in a room full of different nationalities, there really is a common international language of advocacy campaigns.

   I was also struck at how the big challenges in this work are also common. For me in my day job at the Refugee Council I am forever boring my colleagues about the importance of momentum in successful campaigning. Getting a sense of momentum and progress with a campaign is just so important but also so hard sometimes to achieve.

   During the session in Germany, we talked about the huge internal effort that can sometimes go into producing a report, developing key messages and then maybe holding a press conference. Once that has been achieved and a few press headlines garnered, it is tempting just to collapse with all of the energy used up.

   But this is just the start of something in advocacy terms – how is the report, messages and press coverage going to be used to energise the broader campaign for the impact you are seeking?

   I have been heavily influenced, as I have written before, about the importance of a theory of change in advocacy campaigning. Now this sounds really complex but it can be as simple as developing a road map for how you want to see your issue take off. And you can be helped by those two little words ‘so’ and ‘that’.

   So I found towards the end of the session that people were talking about an advocacy activity like a press release or a lobbying meeting, then pausing before linking up the sentence with a ‘so that’ and going on to list future advocacy activities.

   I know it all sounds so simple. So simple that I know myself from my own practice that we don’t always get around to doing so.

   At the Refugee Council we have identified our four key advocacy priorities for action (and in case you’re interested they are: destitution, detention, housing and legal support to asylum seekers.) And we are now beginning to develop our theories of change for each issue, fuelled by some research and beginning to map out how we want these issues to take off.

   So next time you find yourself talking about an advocacy activity don’t just stop there – pause, say ‘so that’ and then continue with your aspirations. I am convinced that one enemy of effective advocacy campaigning is a lack of momentum – but a persistent use of ‘so that’ can be a very powerful remedy. What do you think?

7. Building capacity for advocacy campaigning

   12th May 2011 11:33 am Leave a Comment

   What is the best way to help train campaigners? Is it a week long course? A day course at regular intervals? Mentoring support? A peer group?

   There is clearly no one answer but it is one question that has been much on my mind recently. A year ago at the Refugee Council, we ran a campaign training course for refugee leaders in London. We got good feedback for our training but despite this feedback, the course participants then found it hard to develop their campaigns. We offered mentoring support focussing on the individual organisation and the campaigning activity took off.

   Our reflection on our learning was that while our training had been ok, it had been offered at an abstract level and had not been rooted in the daily experiences of the organisations. We are about to engage in year 2 of this project and this time around we will be focussing both on developing the capacity of the organisations as well as developing their campaigning skills.

   Campaign training cannot exist in a vacuum – it has to be applied to the reality of the campaigning environment, both internal and external, which is facing the organisation.

   It did make me reflect that as an activist learner, I was far more focussed on running campaigns and delivering campaign training than on the practical day to day realities for the organisation. But when I paused for thought it has always been the internal dynamics that have presented the biggest challenges to my campaigning.

   So when I had the chance to hear Chris Stalker talk about his new praxis paper for INTRAC on capacity building for advocacy, I knew after my recent experiences that I had to be there to hear his conclusions. His presentation was very helpful to my thinking and his paper has just been published – see Intrac

   Do make sure that you have a look at this paper; it contains plenty of food for thought and has helped me to think about this issue.

   And a few months ago when I ran the advocacy and policy influencing course for INTRAC to an audience of NGO staff from across the globe, I was keen for Chris to come along as a guest speaker. I was interested to see how his message went down so well with such a diverse audience. From their positive feedback this is clearly an issue whose time has come.

   How are you approaching capacity building for your advocacy work?

8. Charities should challenge politicians’ view of them

   3rd May 2011 3:16 pm Leave a Comment

   The article “Donors Will Reject Charities” refers to comments form a Canadian charity law expert. He spoke at a European-wide conference stating that donors in 10 years time will question whether charities are worth funding as they don’t solve social problems, but simply make things more tolerable.

   I think we need to note that his comments may not be directly applicable for the UK. He spoke at a European event and he is from Canada. But in the UK, particularly over the last 12 years, charities are tackling the root causes of social problems – ever increasingly so.

   Charities are campaigning more, working on public affairs better & increasing their engagement on the parliamentary level. And the general public, including donors, are more and more open to campaigning as the most effective way to change our society & our world for the better.

   Those of us who care about the campaigning sector just need to counter those politicians – often the target of our campaigning – who wish to see charities as inoffensive, cuddly organisations and even want to use charities to financially off-set some of the responsibilities of the state.

    

9. Don’t lose the fire in your eyes

   17th March 2011 11:33 am Leave a Comment

   A while ago I led an advocacy campaigns training course about how to work with the UK Government and Parliament. As part of that course, the group went across to Parliament and met with a Conservative MP to hear directly from him about the role of the MP.

   One of the questions that the group asked the MP was: what do you look for when some-one comes to see you? His reply was interesting. He said firstly he would look for a local connection to his constituency. Fair point. And then he said something that really surprised me. He said that he also looked for fire in some-one’s eyes. And if they had passion about their issue, he was more likely to engage with them and to take them seriously.

   Fascinating. A lesson there for all of us campaigners and certainly for me. I just know if you are working in a large bureaucratic organisation, it is sometimes easy to lose that passion and sink into the reality of working in a complex organisation. Yet there is an irony here because for all these large bureaucratic NGOs, they all started small with a burning desire to achieve change – that is why they were formed.

   So while we talk about the need to professionalise campaigning, and I have been very involved with many others in developing campaign training, one thing is central and should never to be lost: don’t lose your passion and the fire in your eyes. It is one element that makes me love working for the voluntary sector – that you can show your passion.

   I started my career in the NHS. And towards the end of my time there, I received an unsolicited piece of career feedback from my boss. He said to me if I was going to get on, I would need to leave my conscience at home. I decided I couldn’t do that and it led me to leave the NHS.

   But after all my years in the voluntary sector, bringing my conscience to work with me, this was a real reminder and a note to myself: don’t forget to keep the fire burning in your eyes!

10. Developing your theory of change

    23rd February 2011 11:34 am Leave a Comment

    A couple of months ago I was involved in running the residential weekend for the Sheila McKechnie Foundation award winners.

    We had gathered the award winners together and over the course of a long weekend attempted to cover some of the key points in campaigning – reflecting on both success and failure. I am always struck when doing these events at what things work with different groups.

    This time talk about developing a theory of change for a campaign seemed to resonate with people. This was nothing complicated but using the simple device of ‘so that’ to create a chain of events to demonstrate how you see your campaign unfolding. Those two little words ‘so’ and ‘that’ can help you link your campaign actions together and show how your issue can take off. Basically, it works in this way… we are going to do something so that something else happens so that etc. Simple, but effective. Try it on your issue.

    When I started off campaigning I think that I created a theory of change chain in my head; what I have come to realise is how important it is to write it down and then use your words to review progress and reflect on your learning. Indeed one of the most simple monitoring and evaluation approaches for campaigning is to spend time reviewing your theory of change:

    • What happened?
    • What was different to what you expected?
    • What have you learnt from this experience?
    • What will you do differently?

    And then a while later I was involved in an advocacy training course for INTRAC – the international NGO training and research centre. What I love about these courses is that INTRAC is able to pull together people from across the globe, who have a common interest in campaigning and seeking policy change. We had people from Thailand, Middle East, Timor Leste, Tanzania, Ethiopia to name just a few places. Again I was struck by how the theory of change model seemed to help people.

    We discussed how to pick the right issue to run with when you are developing an advocacy campaign, and our conclusion was that if you can develop a good theory of change chain of events, you stand a good chance of developing a real sense of momentum on a campaign. And campaigning is nothing if not developing real momentum.

    If you are interested in reading more about this issue, and many other things as well, you should take a look at Brian Lamb’s new ‘Guide to campaigning and influencing’. I should add that I am not on commission, but I did read this book recently – and it does pull together all the key elements of campaigning information very neatly. It’s well worth a look!