Campaign Totals – DEFRA

Total number of actions received between May 1st 2010 and May 1st 2011: 201,805
Number of postcards/letters: 92,310
Number of emails: 109,495
Biggest campaign: RSPB – Don’t cut the life from our countryside – 53,147
Breakdown by campaign:
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View the spreadsheet in google docs here. Information from Freedom of Information requested received on 10 May 2011, and is presented as received from DEFRA with one amendment (which was to link SustainWeb to the Jim’ll Fix It For Fish? campaign, the original information had this down as None). More about the ‘Campaigns Total’ project here.
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7 thoughts on “Campaign Totals – DEFRA”

  1. This is fantastic Tom, what a great idea. I’ll be watching with interest as further responses come back. Will be very interesting also to see how easily different departments are able to provide the information, as that will be informative in itself.
    Here are a couple of thoughts (wouldn’t quite call them analysis, but pulled from the raw figures):
    Still lots and lots of paper. Of over 200,000 ‘actions’, 46% were letters or postcards. The largest campaign was email only but the second (IFAW) was paper only and third (League Against Cruel Sports) overwhelmingly paper-based. Gives the lie to complaints about ‘overwhelmed inboxes’ – depts and politicians have always had large numbers of communications from the public – at least in a email folder they’re easier to filter and count!
    Of 21 tracked actions, 10 involved only emails, 7 only letter/postcard and 4 used both.
    Six actions had more than 15,000 logged ‘actions’, the rest all had fewer than 5,000. There’s nothing in the middle.
    Also – there are two ‘Ban Snares’ actions from League Against Cruel Sports (one email one paper) which are presumably the same action on and offline?

  2. Thanks Jess…..some excellent thoughts.
    I’m assuming that the two actions from League are the same, but for the sake of transparency I’ve present the date in the same way I’ve received it from DEFRA. As you suggest, this in itself is instructive as it raises the questions about how they present this internally to ministers.
    I’ve done this a few times before, but not in such a systematic way. It’s certainly the case that the departments respond to this request in very different ways. I expect those, like DFID and DEFRA that have the most interactions with campaigning NGOs to be the best at responding.

  3. Brilliant idea Tom! I wish I had of thought about it. Perhaps we can talk about how to widen this and systematise it as part of a cross-sector benchmarking and Jess and I can discuss how to complement this with impact information.
    Definitely a good candidate for open data 🙂

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