Mike Hobday who leads on campaigns at MacMillan Cancer Support is right to say that “the role of campaigning will increase as spending cuts take effect”.
The most progressive organisations, and I’d count MacMillan Cancer Support firmly within this group, are realising that they need to get a better “bang for their buck” – a better return on their spending. And at this time of threatened cuts it brings to the fore that successful campaigning gives the better return than any other activity for an organisation which is concerned about the long term goals.
The less progressive organisations which perhaps don’t take campaigning for real change seriously, but see if as an add-on because other charities are doing it, may look to reduce their emphasis in this area. They will be doing their campaign and the beneficiaries of their campaign a severe disservice in the long term.
Mike referred to campaigning being important in order “to leverage the system to their advantage”. This is very true and it will be a measure of the charities and campaigns over the coming months to see how genuine they are about long term change, by increasing their investment in campaigning.
In the run-up to the General Election, it was hard not to hear about them. James Purnell resigned from the Cabinet to become one and they organised one of the most dynamic leadership hustings during the campaign.
I am of course referring to London Citizens. I was intrigued as to what they were all about, and they generously allowed me to participate in one of their organiser training sessions recently even though my employer is not yet a member of London Citizens.
I went on the training session slightly sceptical but became more and more interested as we worked through the concept of organising. Yet by lunchtime on the second day, I was yet to be totally convinced by it all.
And then one thing changed my mind – we did an activity. There must have been over 70 people on this training course and most of us stayed on for the Saturday afternoon for the promised activity.
It was all linked to their Living Wage campaign.
What I love about this campaign is that they have focussed on the core problems of their members – one of which was the difficulty of living in London on the national minimum wage – but developed a local solution: the living wage. This figure currently stands at £7.60 some £1.87 higher than the minimum wage.
And then instead of waiting for a national campaign to unfold, they targeted local employers, initially in the banking sector, to pay all their staff including contract staff the Living Wage.
And since its launch in 2001 an estimated £24m has been put back in the pockets of low wage workers. Remarkable – what impact!
On that Saturday afternoon, in the rain, they got us all to visit three shops on Oxford Street and ask to see the shop manager. With my three shops, I was amazed how easy it was to see the manager, to make my case about the Living Wage and to hand over a letter to their Chairman. And all of us did three shops and we covered the length of Oxford Street from Oxford Circus to Bond Street.
I just loved this idea of using activists on a training course to do some real activism. It is a lesson to all of us involved in running campaign training – are we missing a trick by not getting the participants involved in some real action?
I just could not ignore the power and energy behind this training and this action – Citizens are clearly offering a very powerful methodology to civil society in this country. If you don’t know about them and you are interested in campaigning, you really do need to get to know them.
But despite my increasing personal enthusiasm for London Citizens, I was left wondering where they fit in with other approaches to campaigning.
Who inspires you in your campaigning? Who do you look up to? Who motivates your campaigning?
I may have struggled to answer that question until recently when I attended the Sheila McKechnie Foundation campaigners’ conference and heard Kumi Naidoo speak about campaigning. Kumi was recently appointed the executive director of Greenpeace International and has an awesome campaigning background
He gave the key note speech at the SMK event and I could have listened to him all day. If you do one thing this year as part of your development I urge you either to hear him speak or read his writing.
There was so much to take from his speech. I was taken by him saying that the core principles of campaigning are still valid. He appealed to a sense of history for our current campaigning. History tells us that decent people must stand up and put their life on the line. In saying that, he added that he felt that campaigners put too much emphasis on the insider track. Food for thought.
He spoke of two tribes in campaigning – one internally focussed and one externally focussed – but his key message that struck a chord with me was that these two tribes need to work together. He pointed to the success of the landmine campaign that led to the Ottowa treaty, where the insider and outside campaign strategies had worked together.
He also said that the struggle was a marathon, not a sprint, and that we need to offer a lifetime of commitment. Maybe this is a message that we could take to our funders?
But above all his passion and his commitment shone through for me from his words. In all of our talk about professionalising campaigning, we must never lose sight of why we campaign. We must never lose sight of the injustice and the change we seek in our world. Yes, we should be professional – but professional with passion and spark – without that we will never achieve our goals in our lifetimes of struggle.
Last month I did a session on INTRAC’s advocacy and policy influencing training course. I do enjoy getting involved with these sessions as they attract NGO delegates from across the world and you get a real sense that campaigning is a truly international language.
I had been asked to say a few words about running a campaign in terms of both success and failure, and I am always interested in how different groups will pick up and explore different elements from my presentation.
This time the group was keen to explore and discuss the issue of failure in campaigning. Maybe in an environment of tight finances and funders ever more focussed on impact, there isn’t any room for failure and we just have to, as campaigners, get it right first time? Or is there still room to try things and fail?
I was struck by an email that I received from one of the delegates once he had returned to his home continent. He quoted me as saying:
‘Campaigning is all about failure, learning from the failure and building on the learning from the failure’.
Now I am not entirely sure that I used those words because campaigning is not all about failure – as success is also important, but campaigning is certainly about learning from that failure. As campaigners we need to have both the courage and space to try things, assess how they go, learn from this activity and try again.
For me campaigning has always been an art and not a science. Yes, you can attend training sessions and read books and case studies, but campaigning for me is all about an instinctive desire for change rooted in a curiosity, leading to an understanding, about the external environment.
Despite the internal and external pressures at the moment, do not be wary of trying new things. The advent of a new Parliament in the UK with a large number of new MPs after 6th May gives us as campaigners a great opportunity to try new things, reflect from that activity and keep moving forwards.
So do cherish failure in campaigning. When I have done research on campaigning in the past, I have found that people were very happy to talk about their successes but less so their failures. But we have all made mistakes, I certainly have, and I think that we should cherish this failure (unless we keep on making the same mistakes!). But do you cherish your failure in campaigning?
In my last blog I described a technique to utilise the opposition arguments against your campaign.
Let’s take an example of this method being used in practice. I used to campaign against the scandal of empty homes at the Empty Homes Agency. And a few years ago we were campaigning for new powers to tackle empty homes.
The key arguments against such new powers on empty homes were that owners should be free to do what-ever they wanted with their property, that these powers would undermine this freedom and that there was not a problem with homes being empty.
Historically our key campaign message had been around tackling empty homes as a solution to tackling homelessness. That was the campaign message that motivated me. But it didn’t resonate with the owners of empty homes who we were trying to get on board.
So we used the opposition matrix technique described in my last blog. And we began to change our campaign message having reflected on the opposition to our campaign. We began to address the concerns by talking about the impact that empty homes can have on neighbouring occupied property. A survey from Hometrack (June 2003) found that empty homes can devalue neighbouring property by as much as 18%.
We also talked about empty homes attracting crime and vandalism in an area; the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) had referred to empty homes as being ‘honey pots for crime’. These were reasons to support our campaign on empty homes and specifically to address the concerns against our campaign. We found that these new messages resonated much more with our target audience and helped to us to attract new media coverage.
This method was useful for us to think about our opponents’ concerns and use public messages that would address those concerns, as opposed to using our normal messages about the need to bring these homes back into use to help homeless people.
I had learned a useful campaign lesson – it is often more important to use the campaign messages that resonate with your target audience than the messages that motivate you. This was hard for my ego but good for the campaign.
In my last blog I wrote about the importance of taking time to collect the arguments that are used against your campaign, and I suggested in your campaign planning team to list all of the arguments that you have heard used against your campaign.
So you list, on the left hand side of a page, all of the possible concerns that may be expressed about your campaign. What might be said by others about your campaign? And then list, on the other side of the page, the key reasons in support of your campaign. (See chart below)
The next step is to see whether at least one of the reasons for supporting your campaign provides an answer to each of the concerns – is there a reason to address each concern. Or are there outstanding concerns that your reasons do not address?
Concern about the campaign
Reason to support the campaign
As your campaign develops you should be able to identify which of the concerns feature highest with your target or your wider target audience. With that knowledge, you then need to ensure that your campaign message addresses that concern. In many respects this is a statement of the blindingly obvious, but as campaigners we are often guilty of just running with the messages that motivate us. I know that this is true for me!
We are already motivated by our campaign as are, hopefully, our supporters. This technique is all about building wider support.
In my next blog I will explain how I sought to use this technique in one of my campaigns ….
A few weeks ago I was running a session for some community organisations on developing a campaign message. We had covered the key ground of highlighting the problem and the solution, as well as spending some time testing the message using the elevator test.
I have found this test to go down really well in campaign training – you act as though you have just stepped into an elevator and meet the person that you have spent weeks trying to speak to as part of your campaign – and you have 12-15 seconds to make your campaign pitch. It’s a bit of fun but also a great way to hone your campaign message).
Anyway we had covered some of the basics and the session seemed to be going well, when one of the participants lobbed in a question – “this was all well and good,” he said, “but how should you use what your opponents say about your issue? Or should you just ignore it?”
Good question – and it opened a good debate amongst the group. Opinion was split as to whether opposition should just be ignored and that you need to stay focussed on your campaign ask, or whether you should analyse any opposition and seek to use it in your campaign planning.
I must add that I used to be firmly in the former camp. When I started out campaigning, I had very little interest in what opposition there was to my campaigns. I knew what I was trying to achieve and put all of my energy into trying to build an alliance to achieve this campaign goal. I had little time for thinking about any opposition to the campaign.
Then a few years ago, I went on a media course and as part of this course we were asked to brainstorm all of the arguments that we had heard used against your campaign.
Have you ever done this exercise? It is a great thing to do in your campaign planning group – just spend a bit of time listing all of the arguments against your campaign. And if you do it in a group you will find that you will come up with a longer list of arguments as different people will have picked up on different points against your campaign
In my next blog I will describe how we were encouraged to use this list of arguments to help us strengthen our campaign message….
Recently, I was on the Forum for Change’s Discussion board and someone asked:
“We’re looking at PPCs and who is the most likely to get in at the next election so we can try and make contact ahead of May. Do you know if there is an easy way to bring up a list of people from each party who have a small majority?”
I don’t gamble myself, as I like to keep my money rather than fritter it away, but I am intrigued by the market that betting creates. How it uses knowledge and gives it numerical and financial values.
That’s why I replied to this question as follows:
“There are probably ways of finding or collating such lists. However, they give you little information on what’s happening beyond what happened 5 years ago in the poll.
I think you need to be cannier to identify the real marginals. This is a report released earlier in October looking at 238 marginals and polling voter intentions:
politicshome.com
But, I would also look at the political betting markets to get an indication of potential change. You need to understand your odds and it’s probably worth having the results of the 2005 polls with you as you look.
Try – Political betting
The bookies are never 100% right – if they were no-one would bet, but they may well be 80% correct – so great information, based on real knowledge which can inform campaigning.”
I was at an event today when I heard something that nearly made me fall off my chair. Not in surprise because I know it was not an uncommon view being expressed, but not one that I thought someone was daft enough to state to the audience gathered.
The person, who was responsible for brand for a charity – very forward, very 2012 thinking, having a role just looking at charity brand and nothing else. This person said:
“Yes I’m very interested in campaigning. It’s vital towards supporting our brand.”
Readers of this who are not aware of anything wrong with this statement, please put yourself in The Wrong Ethos category. For those who didn’t know, campaigning was not invented to create brand awareness. It’s not there to give some colour to the “donor’s journey”.
Pretty sure that the suffragettes didn’t have the following thought process:
“Feel a bit uneasy about the throwing one of us in front of the king’s horse idea – I think it doesn’t fit in within our current branding guidelines.
Or the Anti-Apartheid Movement consider that demonstrating outside the South African embassy may conflict with the branding work that they’ve done and so affect the face-to-face fundraisers in nearby Leicester Square.
We campaign to change our society and the world we live in. To achieve change. Not to support an everlasting circle of marketing and brand re-positioning. The ultimate aim for a campaign is to be so successful that there is no need for it to exist.
Oh the apathy of youth! I well remember when I was a student and my generation was slammed for being apathetic and I hear similar calls today. Any maybe it has always been this way? Each generation despairing of the next generation.
But it was rubbish when I was a student and it is clearly rubbish today. There is a huge amount of energy and creativity among young people. This fact was powerfully re-enforced to me when I was invited to speak at a session being held by the UpRising programme at the Young Foundation.
If you haven’t come across this programme it is well worth a look:
“UpRising is a new leadership programme being developed by the Young Foundation to support and train a new generation of public leaders. UpRising identifies, recruits, develops and supports 19 to 25 year olds to enable them to play a greater role in politics and public decision-making.
The aim is to create a pool of talented young leaders from a range of backgrounds who can transform their communities for the better and take up positions of power in public institutions. UpRising was launched in 2008 and is being piloted in the East London boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, Newham and Tower Hamlets. It will then spread across London and into other major cities across the UK. The programme has cross-party support with Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg serving as its patrons.”
In reality this is true and so much more! I was so impressed by the uprisers that I met. What marked them all out was their individual campaign that they were running and their sheer passion for changing the world. It was an incredibly energising evening just to be in their company.
I was fortunate enough to attend their last graduation event, and it was very evident that all of the course participants had gained so much from this programme and from each other.
The Young Foundation has started something very special with this UpRising programme, and I hope that they are successful in rolling it out beyond East London – I think our country would gain massively from an UpRising programme in every part of the UK. We need to encourage these passionate young leaders who want to change the world!
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