Author Archives: Jonathan Dearth

1. Building a movement

   15th September 2014 8:52 am Leave a Comment

   In recent years I have increasingly heard people talking about movements in the context of campaigning. Not content just with an organisation or individuals seeking to run a campaign, a wider more ambitious aspiration can emerge to build a movement pushing for change.

   Influenced no doubt by the experience across the Atlantic in the US where many funders have embraced the rhetoric of movement building, this language has crept into the UK. Although this may be an incorrect assessment – it may be better to say this language has re-emerged into the UK. What was the pressure to abolish slavery, form trade unions, get women the vote if they were not movements? Movements have surely played a crucial role in the history of the UK.

   In their article on How foundations can support movement building, Masters and Osborn look at social and political change and the role that movements can play in pushing for change. They argue that:

   “While there is no formula for a social movement, we know that successful ones share some things in common. First, people become mobilized around issues they hold dear; at some level they share a powerful vision about what is wrong with society and how it must be improved; and they engage in lots of diverse activities not under any one leader’s direct control resulting political motion and its effect lead to a change in attitudes, practices and public policy.”

   I am very attracted to this notion especially where you are looking for major political, social or economic change. A campaign can push for a specific policy or practice change, a movement, being more free flowing and diverse, can generate broader activity maybe harnessing different campaigns and approaches with the same over-arching goal.

   In the UK context I am struck by the number of people who have been talking about the need to build a movement in defence of asylum seekers and refugees. While there have been many campaigns run on specific issues, a feeling has developed, due to the prevailing political and media environment, that we need a broader movement to offer a positive counterpoint.

   For the past few years I have been involved in the City of Sanctuary movement. Starting in the great city of Sheffield in 2005, local people came together to provide welcome to asylum seekers arriving in their city. From this inspirational move, we now have over 40 cities and towns of sanctuary across the UK, we have schools and health services expressing support, more and more communities expressing solidarity and interest from across Europe.

   I have been fascinated by this development. In the face of such a negative political and media environment, the development of cities of sanctuary has been such a positive antidote. You just cannot ignore local people coming together motivated to do their bit to support asylum seekers and refugees.

   Yet this in itself is not enough to create a national environment for a culture of welcome across the UK. For this reason support has been building for a sanctuary summit from organisations like Refugee Council, Refugee Action, the Forum, Boaz Trust, STAR, Still Human and many more.

   On 15^th November 2014 people will gather in Birmingham from across the UK for the first Sanctuary Summit. The criteria for attendance will be simple: the power to represent a community and/ or the energy to campaign. Grounded in eight policy concerns, we hope to bring a diverse collection of people together to encourage their own local expressions within a loose national movement. We aspire to offer the space and structure to inspire activity but for it all to be linked up.

   We got a taste of what is possible in Parliament earlier in September when local groups from across the UK came to Westminster to meet their MP and talk about how they welcome asylum seekers in their community. The Sanctuary in Parliament was a great success.

   These are lofty aspirations to build a movement for sure but also exciting – will this Sanctuary Summit succeed in bringing people together united by a common vision, encouraging local and national actions all pushing to achieve the change for a culture of welcome in the UK?

    

    

    

    

2. What MPs want?

   1st September 2014 3:01 pm Leave a Comment

   I’ve just read a study on MPs’ views on charities’ actions by nfpSynergy.
   Given that it took 3 individuals to email 154 MPs how acceptable it was to for charities to undertake the 6 different activities listed below it left me a bit cold. Especially as the report was given such an ostentatious and grandiose title of “Charity Parliamentary Monitor” – phew, pretty impressive, eh?
   The 6 charity activities in the report that MPs had to say were acceptable or not were:

   1. “challenging government policy”
   2. “holding a parliamentary reception”
   3. “highlighting the effects of a policy on its beneficiaries”
   4. “challenging the policies of political parties”
   5. “a state-funded charity challenging government policy”

   A bit of analysis by one of the 3 “box-tick counters” or someone else from nfpSynergy would have been useful.

   I’m not sure what the point of the study is – what inference we’re supposed to take from these figures. Are charities supposed to turn around and say, “look only 42% of Tory MPs think its ok for us to challenge government policy -maybe we should think again about doing anything”

   Or 90% of MPs think it’s acceptable to hold a parliamentary reception so that perhaps charities should be holding one every fortnight.

   If someone is attacking you, your beneficiaries and what you believe is right and committed to campaigning about, shouldn’t you consider perhaps doing more of what they say they don’t like rather than trying to please them?

   And is it that important what MPs say on what’s acceptable? Isn’t it much more important to assess how MPs respond to the campaigning actions of charities, learn from this and adapt your actions for the future to gain more campaigning success?

3. Political Education

   12th August 2014 2:14 pm Leave a Comment

   Recently I ran Bond’s UK Corridors of Power course. I always enjoy this course as it combines a lot of theory around government and parliament in the UK with meetings with MPs, officials and NGO staff. At the end of the last course, one of the delegates said to me that even with a degree in politics that they had struggled to understand how the British UK system worked and that this practical course had helped.

   This comment made me reflect on the importance of political education for campaigners. This is an issue I know that Titus Alexander at Democracy Matters has been pushing for a long time – see http://www.democracymatters.org.uk

   Where do campaigners get their knowledge of politics from? In my younger days I was very involved in party politics and learnt a lot by doing roles such as a constituency chair, council candidate and parliamentary candidate. It was a great way to learn about the realities of British politics by actually getting involved myself.

   Yet from all of the training that I do across the UK on campaigning, I am struck at the degree of dislocation that there is between NGO people and party political people. Twenty or so years ago there was I think a stronger cross over between NGOs and different parties, which does not seem to be the case so much now.

   I sense a great dissatisfaction with party politics. And I can sympathise with this feeling. But if you are not involved where do you get your political education from?

   I was hearing about a colleague recently working for an NGO who had been encouraging the NGO to lobby government and parliament on an issue. The response to this pitch was a somewhat frosty – ‘we lobby government…. we don’t lobby parliament.’ I thought this was a great response revealing a lack of knowledge that the UK does not have a rigid separation of powers’ doctrine between the legislature and executive. In the UK government is drawn from parliament. You cannot talk to a government minister without talking to a parliamentarian.

   But with the huge array of fascinating political biographies and diaries available, you do not need to engage with party politics, you can read all about it. Just starting with the superb diaries from Chris Mullin should be enough to really get you going.

   So as campaigners all of us should be questioning how we are continuing our learning as part of our political education to make us more effective campaigners and to play a vibrant part in our democratic structures.

4. Advocacy in Lithuania

   16th July 2014 12:24 pm Leave a Comment

   Just back from Lithuania where I ran an advocacy and policy influencing workshop for a children’s charity and their partners. They were all focussed on challenging the existing policy of residential care for children and promoting the need for community based alternatives.

   Some were comfortable with advocacy, while for others it was something totally new. We started with seeking to define the external political environment by posing the question where does power lie in Lithuania?

   We divided up into small groups, and as ever, I was surprised when they reported back with their different assessments. It does show, I think, the importance of making your assumptions on the external environment explicit in any advocacy work and being open to be challenged on these assumptions.

   After some discussion, we got some degree of clarity that in seeking to promote policy or practice change we should look at three levels of power: the national, the municipal and families/ communities.

   Having established these three levels, we then set out to construct three influence trees to show the different routes to seek influence on these three targets.

   Having established our influence trees, we then began to debate how we might make progress in each of these three areas. To do so we used the theory of change approach. I have written about this many times in the past but the idea is so simple – you do something so that something else happens. We tried to set out our ‘so that’ chain for each area of focus.

   I was energised by this training as we were able to both convey the basics of advocacy but also to begin to develop an advocacy strategy. People learnt some new skills but also began to apply their new learning on their issue of concern. At the end of the course, people took down their flip charts with all of their work on them – they now seemed ready to begin their advocacy work.

5. Enthusing me to vote

   2nd April 2014 3:02 pm Leave a Comment

   One of the drawbacks of having had a gap in my blogs is that I now find myself with a long list of things I have wanted to blog about – and this blog is one of them – maybe not too topical but just too interesting to ignore.

   Cast your mind back to 2012 and the elections for the police and crime commissioners. This was an initiative by the government to inject more democratic accountability into the strategic direction of local police services.

   What really got me going was the refusal by the government to allow a free delivery from the Royal Mail from each candidate to each address in the constituency. This was to be the first time that such posts had been elected, there was precious little media coverage, and all this made the refusal to grant a free delivery all the more hard to understand.

   I remember as a Parliamentary candidate, on the two occasions that I stood, that the free delivery from the Royal Mail was so important to allow candidates to make contact with every household in the constituency. Especially if you were operating on a tight budget, as I always seemed to be, this was such an important element in ensuring that voters knew about all of the candidates.

   But in this brand new election the government had refused to offer this to the candidates. How then were people going to make up their minds? Certainly in my local area, I received almost no information at all.

   So I decided for the first time, since I was able to vote, that I was going to abstain – this was a hard decision – I have always voted and think it is so important to do so. So many people have suffered and fought for us all to have the right to vote. Not only was I going to abstain, I was still going to the polling station to spoil my paper to show my disdain for this process. And I started agitating my friends and family to do likewise.

   Then on the eve of poll, I received an email from 38 Degrees. It was such a clever and well written email. Despite the late hour, it made me sit up and take notice.

   They focused on one issue: the privatisation of back-office police services. It highlighted that this was an issue (and had been earlier voted for by 38 Degrees supporters as a topic for action) but didn’t lecture me or tell what to do other than invite me to look at what the three candidates had said on this issue. I clicked through on the three links, was intrigued by their different opinions, and as I cared about this issue, I suddenly found myself motivated to vote in this election.

   Pretty impressive. Even now some 15 months on I am still impressed by this action. Despite my resolve to abstain, I was touched by this email, enthused by the need to vote and then I took action by voting. For me 38 Degrees were playing a vital part in re-energising democracy. They didn’t tell me how to vote but provided me with information that might encourage me to exercise my right to vote.

   As we enter the run-up to the European Parliament elections in May and then the General Election the year after, I am hopeful that we will see similar imaginative actions to energise people into casting their vote.

6. Keeping the Passion Alive

   5th March 2014 11:53 am Leave a Comment

   At the end of last year I ran a day of campaign training for the Sheila McKechnie Foundation’s residential weekend. In addition to their campaign award winners, there were also campaigners, who had applied to join this weekend training.

   What was remarkable about this group right from the outset, was their passion for change on their issue. They all had a story and were so clear on the change that they were seeking on their issue. And their hunger for learning was so strong. As a trainer it was superb to be in such an environment. As we covered each campaign tool, you could just sense them reviewing it, and seeing how they could use each tool to strengthen their campaign.

   I have written before about the danger, as campaigning becomes ever more professional, that the spark and passion for change is lost. There is a danger that campaigning just becomes another professional discipline.

   I have been reading the new book by Liam Barrington-Bush, Anarchists in the Boardroom – how social media and social movements can help your organisation to be more like people. See http://www.morelikepeople.org/the-book/

   Very early on in his book, I was very taken by a compelling point he makes: he expresses his surprise on joining a NGO, which was set up to campaign, but by the time that he joined it, the passion and spark had been lost and it had become just another large bureaucratic organisation. How does this happen? Is it inevitable?

   I know when I have been recruiting campaigners, looking for professional competence and experience is really important. I look for a track record of making things happen. But I also look for that spark and passion on the issue.

   In the past I have been rung by head hunters promoting a senior and often very well paid campaigning post, but I have had to deflect their approach as it was just on the wrong issue for me.

   I do think that we should place importance on passion and enthusiasm in our campaigning. Don’t just take it as read. Let’s see commitment and passion for the cause valued highly when we recruit campaigners and then let’s nurture and encourage that passion – it’s a very special thing.

7. Bangladesh

   6th February 2014 12:23 pm Leave a Comment

   After a period away from blogging last year, I am keen to kick-start this occasional blog reflecting on the realities of advocacy campaigning based on my own current experiences at the British Red Cross and from the training that I am able to lead for NGOs across the world. All of these blogs are my own personal views…..

   Recently I had the good fortune to be in Bangladesh running an advocacy and policy influencing training session for an international NGO. We had representatives present from across the region including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Vietnam and Laos.

   The first day we covered the basics of advocacy and began to present a framework for advocacy. Right from the word go, whilst there was interest in this framework, there was a much stronger interest in asserting the differences in the external contexts for advocacy across the countries represented on the training course.

   This interest was really welcome as on the second day, we invested a lot of time in focussing on the realities of the external environment for advocacy. Initially there was some resistance when we asked them to get into their country groups to define their external environment. There was a common view that they had done this before. But we persisted in our request. To add a bit of extra spice to the exercise, we asked them to present their analysis of their external environment on a flip chart page.

   Then the discussions started. While they may have thought that they had done it all before, I was interested to note some of the robust discussions in some of the country groups. Maybe they didn’t all have the same understanding after all? After some time, they started to portray their external environments on a flip chart page.

   One person said to me that the exercise had been useful because in their country office they had all assumed that they had the same understanding, but that this exercise had made them see that maybe they didn’t, and that they needed time to come to a consensus.

   Having got the flip charts ready, we then encouraged one member of each country team to stay by their flip chart, and the others then to do a tour of the room and explore the other flip charts. It was great to see the country representative trying to explain the realities of their external environment to people from other countries.

   For me this experience showed how important it is to base advocacy campaigning on the realities of the world outside, and that assumptions on these realities should be tested and made explicit.

   There is such a danger with advocacy campaigning that we are enthused to campaign on an issue, develop a strategy and then launch with little or no reference to the outside world. I do think that curiosity about power and how change happens should be a vital part of any campaigner’s approach.

   So I would say be curious about power, make your assumptions explicit, challenge yourself and others to develop a robust view of the external environment – and then build your advocacy strategy on that understanding. I know that sometimes we are just too busy to do this – but we omit at our peril.

8. Obstacles to effective campaigning with some answers

   11:31 am Leave a Comment

   Last time I wrote about my new area of interest in campaigning – the internal obstacles to effective campaigning. I have been struck how over the past few months running training courses in Berlin and Dublin as well as here in London
   about how often this issue crops up.

   So what are those obstacles? Why don’t more people and NGOs run campaigns? What do you think? On a long journey recently I tried to list the obstacles that I had either experienced or heard of – and then I tried to sketch out a possible answer.

   I think that I could have stumbled upon a big issue here and what I offer now is just work in progress – but what do you think?

   Have I missed any obstacles? I will recap on the obstacles from last time and
   now also try to suggest some possible answers.

   Lack of research

   I have seen this happen so many times – people say we would love to campaign but we need more research. Yes, research is vital for effective campaigning but it is also a major delaying tactic. Be wary of the call for more research? It can just push your energy into the long grass. I have launched campaigns with precious little evidence, just moral outrage. We then went back and got the evidence but it did not stop us speaking out, seizing the moment and developing campaigning momentum.

   Nervous leadership

   Here the campaigners are ready, but the organisation’s leadership is nervous and the campaign stalls. An explicit risk assessment can be a great tool to confront this nervousness and show how you are going to minimise any risks. Also Brian Lamb’s
   excellent NCVO campaigns guide for trustees is another great tool to minimise
   campaigning nervousness.

   Resources

   This is a classic. We would love to campaign but we need a full-time campaigns post. What rubbish! I say give me an hour a week and we can begin to make things happen. With a clear focus and plan, you can achieve so much with so little – if you have the will.

   Lack of shared values

   This is a sad one. The obstacle to campaigning comes down to a not having a shared value set. Again as with earlier obstacles, it can help to be explicit about these values and not to be base actions on assumptions. Are we really a campaigning organisation agitating for change? Or are we not? But initiate this conversation – do not assume that you are all on the same page.

   Lack of common understanding of advocacy

   This is another classic. With almost all of the advocacy campaigns consultancy work that I have done over the past 5 years or so this issue comes up. I find myself saying I really don’t mind what your definition of advocacy campaigning is but I wish you have a common one. A definition that the communications, research, policy, marketing, fundraising or supporter relations people all sign up to. Is that really so hard?

   Lack of a theory of change

   Have you seen this one? I know I have been guilty of this. So much effort goes into producing the research report and maybe getting some media coverage and then you just collapse exhausted with little idea of all this action happening so that something else happens. But without your theory of change at least sketched out, there is a good chance that your report will just be filed and all momentum lost. The answer is I think simple – write out your theory of change using the simple ‘so that’ formula. I am going to do something so that something else happens. And then review what should be no more than a couple of sides of paper on a regular basis. Simple but it does makes you think about momentum which is so vital on an effective campaign.

   Individual agendas taking over 

   Here campaigning is undermined because individuals have their own agendas and seek opportunities to develop their agendas. This will always be tricky when you are dealing with passionate campaigners but I think an astute organisation will try to work with those individual passions to energise the wider campaigning effort.

   Internal disharmony

   This is another sad one. Here the team or organisation is undermined by internal conflict. Sadly this can be a problem specially in small NGOs but it does undermine effective campaigning. Clearly this disharmony need to be tackled before the campaigning can take off. This disharmony just has to be tackled and not avoided. You just cannot build a successful campaign on such a platform, or if you are able to do so why you adding to your own stress and diverting energy from your campaign?

   Lack of a common goal

   What is the point of your campaigning? Is it policy change? To recruit new  supporters? To raise your profile? To raise money? What is your goal – effective campaigning needs focus and a clear goal. All good campaigns need a clear focus and goal. And this is time well worth spent to be clear about your answer to why you are campaigning. Don’t assume – be explicit.

   We are too busy to campaign

   Have I left the best until last? I see this so often – we are so busy delivering services meeting the need that we can’t make campaign. So that nothing ever changes so that you stay busy. I just get excited by those smaller NGOs who can both deliver services but also embed their campaigning into the soul of their organisation. They do both activities because they know they need to do both – but one fits seamlessly into the other – they see these actions as being on one continuum.

   If I have made overcoming all of these obstacles sound easy, then I apologise – I know that it is far from easy. After over 10 years’ experience of campaigning with NGOs plus my freelance work internationally I am convinced that these internal obstacles represent some of the biggest hurdles we campaigners face. If you disagree, then I am happy for you and get on enjoying your campaigning.

   But if you agree with me – what do you think about my answers? And do you have anything better to offer? It would be great to hear your views.

9. Influencing the faces of power

   11:31 am Leave a Comment

   A few months ago, I was in Haiti where I spent 5 days running an advocacy training course for community organisations from Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

   Despite the language barrier, with everything needed to be translated into Creole, I was really interested in how some of the core advocacy campaign techniques seemed to resonate in this challenging campaigning environment. Since the earthquake in January 2010, there has been a huge challenge to meet the need from this disaster and to ensure that all of the international aid effort is used in the most effective way for the local population.

   The community groups that I was working with were very interested to apply the advocacy campaign techniques in their own context to strengthen their advocacy work and ensure that community voices were heard in the policy debate.

   And this interest translated itself in some extremely interesting and challenging questions. My favourite question must have been asking how using an influence tree works with a power analysis where you look for the three faces of power: public, hidden and the insidious. The public face being possibly the government minister in charge of the issue; the hidden face being possibly the Treasury minister; and the insidious face being possibly cultural or religious influence in the country.

   I thought that this was a great question. When we cover the influence tree technique, we talk about the importance of identifying one target that has the power to make the change that you are seeking. In addition to the direct route to your target, you also identify the other possible channels that you can use to seek to influence your target.

   But how do you respond where there are different faces of power? How does an influence tree work then? Do you need to have three different influence trees to contend with the public, hidden and insidious faces of power? Or can you prioritise the different faces of power? For example if you identify from your power analysis that the most important face of power is the hidden face of say the Treasury Minister, then do you use the public face and the insidious faces of power as routes on the way to influence the hidden face?

   Such that you know that you need try to influence, or at least try to neutralise, the public and the insidious faces of power en route to influencing the hidden face of power.

   A great question – but what do you think is the answer?

10. The campaigning staircase

    11:30 am Leave a Comment

    I have written many times before about how important I think a theory of change is when you are developing your advocacy campaign. And while that may sound complex, it can be as simple as just developing a ‘so that’ chain of events. Using the words ‘so that’ to show how your actions are going to help your campaign take off, build momentum and deliver impact.

    When I am running training courses, I am also keen to use the ‘but why’ technique. Again this is an incredibly simple tool to get to the root cause of a problem.

    You start with your problem driving your campaign and ask ‘but why’ is this a problem? And you keep asking ‘but why’ until you get to the real cause of the problem. This simple tool, while it can be irritating, can be a great way to ensure that you avoid focussing on the superficial causes to your problem and that your campaign can tackle the real issues.

    I was running a training session for refugee supporting NGOs in South Africa a few months ago when a participant asked what you should do if the answer to one of our ‘but why’ questions was ‘maybe’. I thought that this was a great question. If your answer is maybe, then it shows that you do not really know and that you need more research and evidence before you can launch your campaign. The ‘but why’ technique can be a great way to check if you are ready to launch your campaign.

    And it is so much better to find out that you don’t really know the answer to ‘but why’  in private as I have found that politicians and journalists are very skilled in asking the ‘but why’ question. Time spent on this exercise is priceless as part of your initial campaign planning.

    It is also a great exercise to do with your campaign team and to repeat at regular intervals using any new campaign intelligence.

    But it was only when I was running a training course for Christian Aid in Haiti last month that I really began to see the connection between ‘so that’ and ‘but why’. Once we had covered these two tools, one participant offered the following insight: “these tools are like a campaigning staircase. You need to go down the staircase to find out why you are in this position and to do that you ask ‘but why’? But you also need to go up the staircase to find out where you are going with your campaign and to do that you repeat ‘so that’.

    I loved that insight – these two tools allow you to move up and down the campaigning staircase. Maybe something to think about next time you are doing some campaign planning?