Advocacy in Lithuania
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. […]
Enthusing me to vote
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 […]
Keeping the Passion Alive
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 […]
Bangladesh
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 […]
Obstacles to effective campaigning with some answers
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 […]
Influencing the faces of power
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 […]
The campaigning staircase
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 […]
Informal influencing
A few months ago I was running an advocacy and policy influencing course in West Africa for a group of doctors who wanted to run a national campaign on maternal health in order to tackle the horribly high number of women who were dying when giving birth. The course seemed to be going well until […]
Getting the right balance
Over the past five years or so I have had the chance to do a regular session on NCVO’s certificate in campaigning. I always enjoy these sessions as NCVO attracts a diverse group and their questions are guaranteed to be good and do make me think. Last time there was a question about public campaigning […]
Bringing your theory of change to life
I’ve written before about the importance of developing a theory of change as part of your campaign planning. There has been a lot written about this approach to campaigning, but stripped to its most basic I think it centres around two words: so and that. You do something so that something else happens so that something […]