15 great reads for campaigners from 2015

Every year I collate a list of some of my favourite readings from the year. So settle in with a glass of mulled wine and enjoy…
Is Too Much Funding Going to Social Entrepreneurs—And Too Little to Social Movements? – This article totally hits the nail on the head about why we need to invest in advocacy, despite all the challenges.
Are Uber and Facebook Turning Users into Lobbyists? – Is the the new face of campaigning? More here.
How We Won Marriage: 10 Lessons Learned – A great playbook from one of the big campaign wins in 2015 in the US.
Why Nonprofit Leadership is so Darn Hard – because it is!
Taking a Cinderella issue to the ball: 11 lessons from a long campaign – I’m a huge fan of the work that Shelter have done to get housing up the political agenda. This is a great summary.
What are the implications of ‘doing development differently’ for NGO Campaigns and Advocacy? – Duncan Green at his challenging best.
2015 really was the first digital general election: here are 7 lessons you should know – remember the election – lots of good learning about what the Conservatives did to win, see also Paul Abbott at ConHome and Jon Quinn.
Slacktivism is having a powerful real-world impact, new research shows – time to revisit the assumptions about the impact of slacktivism  – plus more here on why people protest.
Advocacy and Lobbying: What Can We Learn from the Bad Guys – we spend lots of time learning from our friends but what about those we target (clue – they often focus on obscure processes)
How the Mad Men lost the plot – Ian Leslie on how advertising is changing, but lots of application to campaigning and how we get our messages across.
Inside the war on coal – This week many have celebrated the successful conclusion of the climate negotiations in Paris, but the story of how groups like the Sierra Club have built momentum in the US is part of the untold story of how that deal could be reached.
Mobilising vs organising – This is a great summary of a cracking book. Looking forward to welcoming Hahrie Han to the UK next year.
Inside Invisible Children’s massive grassroots network – I could have selected dozens of articles from Mobilisation Lab but this is fascinating. If you’ve not already you need to sign up for there regular Dispatch mailing.
Charities shouldn’t campaign? History suggests otherwise… – 2015 has been a tough year when it comes to the space to campaign this reminds us our work is critical
Upwell – sad to see the end of this project to get people talking and advocating about oceans, but he blog lives on packed full of insight about how to get your issue into conversation on social media.
What have you read this year that you’ve enjoyed? Please use the comments below to post your favourite campaign reads from 2015.

Uber and the future of campaigning

It’s the big battle for London future. No, not the race for the Mayor of London, but between Uber and the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA) as they’ve battled out for control of the taxi market in the city.
I don’t have a side that I favour in this particular battle (unlike the Mayor of London where I’m firmly on the red side).
I appreciate the investment that cab drivers put into learning The Knowledge, but get frustrated that in 2015 you still find cabs that only take cash. Living outside central London I’ve benefited from the flexibility of Uber, but the traditionalist in me doesn’t want to see the end of the iconic Black Cab.
But I think the approaches that the two sides have taken provide some insights into what direction campaigning might be going.
1 – Welcome to “App-tivism” – corporates campaigning isn’t new, of course its been a feature of newspapers to include a cut out petition for years, but the approach that Uber is taking shows a level of sophistication that we’ve not seen before. They don’t simply ask you to sign the petition, they’re employing some of the best campaign strategists to develop campaign approaches you’d expect to see Greenpeace or 38 Degrees invite you to take.
In New York they’ve been encouraging users to phone decision makers or take advantage of a “DE BLASIO” (after the New York Mayor) to the menu of ride options seen by its New York City users to see what impact his proposed restrictions might have, while I got the email below after an Uber journey I took last week.
As this Harvard Business School article suggests ‘we’re entering a brave new world where the creators of technology platforms can activate billions of users to specific political action of their choosing’. And its not just Uber, this collection shows how Airbnb and others are using the same approach, see more on Apptivists here.
Uber email
2 – Old power needs to adapt – But Uber doesn’t have it all their own way, the influence of the London cabbie as we head towards Mayoral elections next May, means that they’re powerful. Any aspiring candidate for Mayor of London doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of the cabbies, the seen as as trusted messengers by many.
I’ve really enjoyed what Jeremy Heimans has written about old and new power. LTDA are shown that old power can still influence, but how long will that hold? Does LTDA need to adapt and change its approach if it wants to continue to compete with Uber?
3 – Incentives to get you to take action – Unlike most campaigning organisations, Uber has a big advantage to get you to take action, it can provide you with incentives – free journey credit in return for sending an email for example (they’ll already offer to take you to a demonstration for free).
Uber’s strategy to dominate the taxi market is well known, so the cost of a few free journeys in return for the market access they want is a minimal cost. Alex Evan’s has reflected elsewhere about the concept of ‘activism air miles’, but if Uber and others start offering ‘free’ incentives in return for your action will it change the way that others have to respond?
4 – Use the Courts – Uber knows that building political pressure is just one tactic it needs to use to win what it wants, which is why its also devoting its resource to winning rulings in the High Court.
I’ve reflected before that using legal routes is under utilised in campaigning here in the UK, a few organisations like Client Earth have shown how it can effective can be,  but the costs and complexity appear to rule it out for many. With the national political arithmetic unlikely to change in the next few years, exploring new routes like using the courts could be another option for campaigners.

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Why Craftivism matters to me

Being the romantic that I am, to celebrate our first anniversary of dating I took my now wife, Demelza, to the 2003 Stop the War march in London.
We got about a quarter of the way around before it turned out that Demelza didn’t really like marches, so we headed into a bookshop on the route to watch the rest of the crowds go past.
It made me appreciate that not everyone is into marches, or the approaches to activism that are often the first that we encourage people to take in campaigning.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve come to appreciate the Craftivism (Craft + Activism = Craftivism) led by inspiring people like Sarah Corbett, despite not being a natural candidate to get out my needle and thread out.
It’s easy to scoff at craftivism. What difference does it make? Wouldn’t our resources be better focused on organising another march or stunt?
For me there 3 reasons why even the non-craft minded campaigner should be grateful that craftivism exists.
1 – Perhaps less is more? Craftivism presents an opportunity to do something different. This collaboration between Share Action and the Craftivist Collective targeting M&S shows that craftivism probably won’t lead to bulging postbags, but it can still have an impact on the ‘target’. Indeed this research suggests that for some decision the greater the volume of constituent contact they get the more they may devalue those grassroots lobbying efforts.
2 – Use the whole brain – Even for a campaigner who thinks that they’re the most uncreative, craftivism provides an opportunity for creative escape.  It’s an opportunity to get creative, and reflect on how to solve problems using both right analytical and left creative sides of our brains.
3 – It’s good to slow down – As the Craftivist’s Manifesto says its all about slowing down and taking a ‘thoughtful approach to mindful activism’. In an environment where we spend so much time rushing from tactic to tactic, often fuelled by the excitement of social media we all need to find ways to practice mindfulness. Craftivism can help to provide that.
If you’re interested in learning more about Craftivism have a look at this training day that’s running on 10th December, and if you’re (already) stuck for ideas for Christmas, then Craftivism Collective’s shop is a good place to start.

6 campaign lessons from Obama's rejection of Keystone XL

Climate activists in the US secured a HUGE win last week, when President Obama rejected the building of the Keystone XL pipeline because of it’s impact on climate.
I’ve written before about the campaign and my admiration for 350.org, the organisations who have been behind so much of the campaigning. In the last few years, the pipeline has become a focal point for much climate activism in North America and beyond so the Presidents rejection last week is big win.
So what can other campaigns learn from this success? The first 3 lessons come from this brilliant video by 350.org co-founder and senior adviser Bill McKibben.

1 – Build a diverse coalition – the first people involved in the campaign were ranchers from Nebraska and First Nations communities in Canada, perhaps not your usual climate activists then came students, scientists and many others. The distributed organising model that 350.org uses for its work, which is brilliantly captured in this post, lends itself to involve many different groups building locally as well as in Washington.

2 – Put your body on the line – right from the start of the campaign those involved have used peaceful, non-violent direct action at the heart of their approach. Together thousands of people have risked arrest, creating headlines and helped built a movement. The first period of direct action was deliberately timed when Congress wasn’t sitting to create a story, but since then they’ve kept the issue in the headlines by mobilising groups like the Sierra Club, celebrities, faith leaders, scientists and many others to get involved in non-violent direct action for the first time.
3 – Be creative – From circling the White House with a giant pipeline, to a Cowboy Indian Alliance protest on the National Mall, to the use of Obama’s campaign imagery in its graphics, the campaign has put creativity at the centre, providing lots of memorable images and moments.
I’d add a couple of others;
4 – Provided an abstract issue with a rallying point – Climate campaigning can be complicated with many of the policy solutions hard to mobilise around, but as David Roberts writes Keystone XL provided ‘clear villains, unambiguous markers of success, and local impacts that help draw support from other affected communities and demographics’.
5 – Drew on other movements – Those involved in Stop Keystone XL have a strong sense of where they fit within wider social justice struggles, as a result they’ve encouraged Keystone activists to get involved in Black Lives Matter protests, and invited those involved in the campaign to repeal ‘”don’t ask, don’t tell” in the US military to advise them.
But the final lesson goes to McKibben.
6 – Never Give Up – Remember when the campaign started, many climate activists in the US were bruised by the simultaneous failure to get domestic climate legislation passed (well documented here) and the collapse of the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen, but the victory against odds is evidence that as Roberts writes ‘social change is nonlinear and devilishly hard to predict’ but yet ‘an important part of the most important fight in the world’.

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Speed, Sophistication, Structures and Space – 4 trends that will define the future of campaigning

In my role as Head of Campaigns and Engagement at Bond, I was ask to write about the trends that will impact the campaigning of members over the next 5 years, and what it means for our work to support members to campaign brilliantly. I came up with the following;
1 – Speed
The first campaign I was involved in was Jubilee 2000. I remember the record breaking petition, the sense of excitement as the latest Christian Aid News would come through the letterbox with an update, and the delighted when we heard we had succeeded in getting the G8 to cancel the unpayable debt.
It took the Jubilee 2000 campaign over 2 years to collect the 22 million signatures that formed the record breaking petition handed to G8 leaders. Anyone who collected those signatures will talk of the hours spent collecting petitions in churches, at street stalls and in student unions bars across the UK, winning the signatures one conversation at a time.
Fast forward to today, where it’s possible for a partnership between Guardian and Change.org to generate 250,000 signatures on FGM in 20 days, and many Bond members are able to generate tens of thousands of emails in a matter of days or weeks. Campaigning organisations able to launch a campaign in a matter of moments in respond to the latest event or news headline.
But while campaigning is getting faster, we’re also seeing a rise in slow activism? Organisations like the One Campaign and Tearfund are encouraging supporters to write handwritten letters to MPs around the recent legislation on 0.7% or All We Can encouraging supporters to stitch mini-protest banners ahead of London Fashion Week, part of creative ‘craftavist’ movement, which encourages reflective action that seeks to change the participant as much as it does the world. I think we need both within our movement, and a willingness to learn from both approaches.
2 – Sophistication
We know more about our supporters than we ever have, what actions the like to take, what topics they’re interested in, if and when they’ll open their emails from us, and as a result we can target our campaigns in more and more sophisticated ways. A recent report suggested “neuro-campaigning” following politics and advertising to use a better understanding of how our own brains work to persuade people to take action. With all this evidence, as campaigners we need to continue to invest more and more in testing of our messages and tactics before we share them.
A focus on what tactics to use, shouldn’t mean we overlook the importance of theories of change at the heart of our campaigning, including challenge ourselves to ask if we’re too focused on targeting our campaigning towards MPs, Government Ministers and UN bodies, or if we should follow Action Aid focusing on local councillors, or corporate divestment championed by Share Action and 350.org, or local media like RESULTS.

TTIP

3 – Structures
As much as we need to build campaigning structures that are fit for a digital era, we shouldn’t overlook the importance of investing in an active and vibrant grassroots network. For me it’s always been the hallmark of our movement, the local activists that collect names on petitions and meet with their MPs.
I want to learn from groups like 38 Degrees, about how they mobilised 10,000+ volunteers as part of the Days of Action on TTIP, or Toys will be Toys, an entirely volunteer led campaign about how they’re successfully joining up offline and online actions.
A focus on structures should not only be about how campaigns are organised, but also about challenging the very structures that perpetuate inequality and poverty. While we should take advantage of opportunities like the recent Private Members Bill on 0.7%, but the danger in focusing on ‘the little big thing’ is that we risk not building public understanding about the root causes of poverty that should be central to our campaigning.
4 – Space
The Lobbying Act or comments by the former Charities Minister that we should ‘stick to knitting’ reinforce to me that we’re seeing a narrowing of the political space campaigning organisations have to advocate. I believe we should feel proud as a sector of the positive impact our campaigning has had on the lives of the communities we work with. We should all fight to protect it.
Before starting at Bond, I helped to found Campaign Bootcamp, a training programme for those looking to start a career in campaigning. We were overwhelmed by the generosity and enthusiasm we found to help us. That experience has shown me the strength of the community we have, committed to work together to share and help each other.
This is an edited version of an article first published in The Networker available here.

How campaigners can help ensure crisis equals opportunity..

This evening, I’m off to spend some time with former colleagues from Tearfund thinking about the work they’re doing on the Restorative Economy (find out more here). We’ve been set some homework in preparation for our evening together and one of the questions is about how can advocates respond to crisis.
It’s an appropriate question given the headlines on the current refugee crisis, and the opportunities for advocacy and influence that it appears to be providing for many groups who’ve toiled on these critical issues for years.
So how do we, as campaigners prepare for those crisis, that cause a set of fundamental assumptions or rules to be challenge in such dramatic way.
It’s all to easy to see crisis as something to be avoided, but as this excellent article on the missed opportunities for progressives from the 2008 financial crisis suggests ‘crisis equals opportunity, for those who are ready to use it’.
1. Take time to prepare – We can’t anticipate every crisis, but how much time do we spend preparing what we might do.? Look around at those who’s job it is to respond to unexpected crisis, from the security forces, who play our scenarios often on a grand scale, to the staff in the humanitarian response departments of many large NGOs. They role play. It means in the unlikely event of those situations happening they know how to react most effectively.
Can campaigners learn a thing from this? One of the things I enjoy most about Campaign Bootcamp that I helped to set up is the way we use a scenario to bring the campaigning that we’re teaching too life. I’m struck by how little we actual play out how we’d respond to different scenarios. How many team away days are dedicated to exploring what we’d do if.
2. Have a set of asks on the shelf – The father of free market economics, Milton Freedman is often quoted ‘When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable’ so campaigners for change’.
Do we have the same for the issues that we’re campaigning on? It doesn’t need to be long document, but something that could be dusted down. It might be seen as an indulgence, but I’m struck how the 2008 financial crisis came and many of those working on economic issue didn’t have a set of responses ready to go. There were opportunities to push for significant change but we didn’t have those asks to hand..
3. Look for the signs –  Predicting crisis isn’t easy but taking time to learn the skills of those who effectively predict what might happen is a useful skill to add to a campaigners toolkit. What is that they were looking out for that helped, what was the evidence that they saw that led them to a different conclusion to the mainstream?
In the Pathways to Change: 10 Theories to Inform Advocacy and Policy Change Efforts, the authors talk about the ‘Large Leaps’ theory of change, suggesting that change can happen in sudden, large bursts that represent a significant departure from the past.  The theory holds that conditions for large-scale change are ripe when the following occur:

– an issue is defined differently or new dimensions of the issue gain attention (typically a fundamental questioning of current approaches);
– new actors get involved in an issue;
– the issue becomes more salient and receives heightened media and broader public attention.

As campaigners are we looking out for those signs?
4. Hold your nerve, but don’t cry wolf – There’s a risk that anyone who focuses on looking for a crisis can cry wolf. Spotting what they perceive to be a crisis, but isn’t actually one. Do this too often and your credibility can take a hit. The skill for any campaigner is to hold steady, seeking the evidence that the crisis is real and calling out the opportunities. One of the things that we’re going to be discussing with Tearfund colleagues is the difference between the opportunities presented by the climate and financial crisis. Perhaps the different here is the climate crises feels like its a long-term challenge, while the financial crisis was a much more sudden shock that we didn’t anticipate.
5. Present a positive vision – Crisis are unsettling, things we thought in the past were true are no longer, and at that moment its easy for campaigners to revert to the ‘told you so’ high ground, but as George Lakey suggests “when crisis comes, who is ready with what vision?”. In this article he argues that the both Occupy and 1968 French Student protest failed in part because they  didn’t have  positive vision that gripped the mainstream. He suggests that ‘in addition to campaigning, I would add another building block: Try empowering the visionaries you know to do homework. We’ll need their vision work — in concert with wide discussion — for the next crisis’.

Lessons from the Field – my reflections on 5 years organising for the Labour Party

Last month I shared a few thoughts about what issue campaigner can learn from party political campaigning.
A few people encouraged me to do the opposite post, but as I started writing I discovered this isn’t really lessons for political parties from campaigning organisations, it’s more my reflections from 5 years as a volunteer campaign organiser within the Labour Party.
Some caveats to start with. My experience is perhaps an isolated one, I’ve been focused on working in support of one party in a few constituencies in SW London, and I can’t say that I’ve managed to address everything I’ve written in the constituency I was involved in, but they’re a few observations, which feel timely as the Labour Party considers its future direction.
I’ve tried to avoid too much of a focus on the idea that too many party members are focused on the minutes of the last meeting, that we send too many emails (which we do!) or we only visit at election time (which we don’t).
Why? Yes, it’s sometimes true we do all those thing but it’s also an unfair parody. Many of those I’ve worked alongside have been committed, dedicated individuals who put in hours of volunteer time determined to make a difference in their community. Instead I’ve chosen to reflect on the following.
1. Don’t forget to evaluate – I’ve been through a number of election campaigns now, they’re all different, but in all of them I’ve spotted things I’d do the same or do differently. It’s surprised me that the political parties don’t have a instinctive or systematic approach to sitting down, evaluating the evidence and learning what’s worked and what hasn’t.
Perhaps its because politics is always moving along, win and you’re into governing. Lose and the last thing you want to do is reflect on what you did wrong, but it’s a practice that needs to be encouraged at all levels of the party. Personally, despite feeling numb from the result of the election in May, I’m glad the Labour Party has committed to do a full review of what worked and didn’t work, and it’s great to see some of the candidates do the same. That needs to become the norm not the exception, and the findings need to be distributed widely.
2. Test, trial and try new – Elections are in many ways won (or lost) using the same formula that parties have been using for years. Yes, there are a few examples of doing differently (Birmingham Edgbaston is the example that was rightly praised in 2010 and Ilford North in 2015) but outside a few campaigns committed to pioneering , and the work of the Labour digital team who I think awesome, new approaches seem to be to too often few are far between and not mainstreamed quickly.
Innovation is hard when the risk of it not working is losing an election, and not all campaigning organisations get this right either. But I’d love to see the party embrace a culture of testing different approaches to see what has the biggest impact, trailing something new, building an evidence base based on experimentation.
It doesn’t mean throwing the old playbook out (there is much to be said for the approach of going door to door and being routed in a community) but the playbook needs to have some (evidence-based) chapters added to it.The experience of Arnie Graf and the suspicion with which his community organising approach was viewed is a lesson in how hard this can be.
3. Share learning – In the overall scheme of things I was a fairly unimportant volunteer. But with a (unhealthy) passion for campaigning that took me to the US to learn how Obama did it in 2012, I was amazed at how little learning and good practice is proactively shared amongst other volunteer campaign organisers. I’m sure there is loads I could learn from others across the UK, but I found more ideas from reading books and blogs about what was happening in the US than I did others in the UK.
The Labour Party would do well to emulate a model similar to that of the Analyst Institute in the US and build a closed community committed to share evidence and best practice for paid staff and key volunteers (like me). But learning shouldn’t be limited from within the Party, since the election its been more interesting reading learning from Conservative activists, like any good campaign the party needs to be open to collecting ideas for a range of sources.
4. Remember the pyramid of engagement – A graph like the one below should go up in every Labour Party office. Sure some really skilled professional people just love to deliver leaflets (I’m one of them now – it’s good exercise) but too often that’s all we ask them to do, just knock on doors or deliver leaflets.
Ladder-of-engagement
The pyramid of engagement is a tool well know to campaigners, all about how you help you develop a plan to recruit individuals and engage individuals. Some constituencies do this really well, but sadly most don’t meaning talent is wasted or under-utilised.
5. Invest in your people – The Labour Party relies on a small army of organisers in many of its constituencies, most are recent graduates paid too little, and asked to make huge sacrifices of time in the run up to an election. Some are stick around for year, but most drift away after an election or two. That’s valuable institutional knowledge walking, and a huge cost in training new staff.
We don’t have the culture in the UK of a professionalised political campaign staff, but as a result there a few incentives for the most effective organisers to stick around, the training they get seems to be patchy and the support/supervision from more experienced staff limited. Building a clear career pathway that rewards the most effective rather than those who have the most stamina, and effectively scales to provide the right level of support and supervision is needed if we’re to build a cadre of brilliant campaign managers.
6. Build a culture of accountability – At times, asking how another constituency how many contacts it’s made is similar to asking someone else how much they get paid. It’s shared with reluctance and is probably over or under inflated! Work needs to be done to ensure the metrics are more sophisticated than simply the number of contact made, although that’s still an important benchmark of activity, to ensure they’re capturing volunteer engagement and much more.
But those figures need to be shared and scrutinised. To my mind it’s unacceptable that we don’t have a culture where one constituency can benchmark itself against another and those who aren’t performing, including where we have longstanding MPs, are called out by the National Executive Committee or another representative body.
So a few lessons from me.  As I was writing this I re-read parts of Refounding Labour. It’s a document full of practical recommendations. It would be easy for whomever becomes leader in September to bin it, as a holdover from the previous leadership, in my opinion that would be a mistake.
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Five for Friday – Winning the support needed

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few weeks about the importance of starting with the audiences you need to win, rather than the activists we already have.
So this Five For Friday is a collection of articles that have helped my thinking in the last few weeks;
1 – Kirsty McNeill on the difference between ‘people power’ and ‘activist power’ and the importance of understanding that difference.
2 – How the Equal Marriage campaigners in the US realised they needed to change the framing of the message (and the 10 lessons from the campaign)
3 – I’ve shared this before, but Roger Harding on how Shelter moved housing up the agenda is a must read for all campaigners.
4 – 10 years on from Make Poverty History, here are some reflections from the lessons of a campaign that got 90% brand recognition from Kirsty (again!) and my colleague Alice Delemare.
5 – More insight from how the Conservatives did this so well in the last election by ruthlessly focus on the people who matter.

10 years later – some personal reflections on Make Poverty History

2005 was a good year, I got engaged, England finally beat the Aussies to win the Ashes, and I got to work on the Make Poverty History campaign.
Make Poverty History was the first big campaign that I’d be paid to work on. It was a huge movement that mobilised 100,000s of people to take action on debt, aid and trade as the UK government hosted both the G7 and the EU Presidency.
This week, its a decade since the biggest moment of the campaign, a huge 250,000 person march in the centre of Edinburgh, accompanied by the Live 8 concerts on the eve of G7 leaders meeting in Scotland.
10 years later, and it’s still the campaign that I mention when I try to explain what I do to my second aunt.
While lots has been written about the impact of the campaign, being the first campaign that I was really involved in organising I’ve been reflecting on the campaigning lessons that Make Poverty History taught me. There are lessons that still apply today;
1. Unusual coalitions deliver change – at the time, I remember a friend who worked in a totally unrelated job at Number 10 talking about how the unexpected partnerships around the table the campaign was creating waves internally. Bringing together 500+ organisations meant that the campaign couldn’t be dismissed as just ‘the usual suspects’.
2. Be prepared for the second actI’ve written about this before, but the campaign ran for the whole of 2005, concluding in a Mass Lobby of Parliament in the rain on trade justice in November, but because the majority of the resources had been deployed to ensure the push towards the G7 moment was as successful as it needed to be, the campaign didn’t have the resources for the ‘second act’ causing a loss in momentum over the summer, and the impression by some that the campaign had come to an end.
3. Sometimes you need to let it go – I remember that it quickly became apparent that the campaign had captured the public imagination, individuals were calling up with , events being organised across the country, churches want to wrap their spire in WhiteBands (the symbol of the campaign) and much more.
Now we’ve become very used to the idea of more decentralised ‘bottom up’ campaigning, an approach pursued by groups like 38 Degrees, but at the time it was uncomfortable for organisations who’d been used to a more ‘command and control’ approach to managing their campaigns. If our campaigns are to come to life we have to be prepared to let the brand run a little wider than we’d immediately feel comfortable.
4. A good campaign has a halo effect on its targets – most of the MPs who were lobbied as part of the campaign probably can’t remember the details of the policy asks from the time, but the impact of the campaign have lasted well beyond 2005. Long after the campaign has come to an end politicians who were lobbied still mention Make Poverty History. As we get further away from 2005, that effect is definitely declining, but even today I think we’re getting wins on international development issues as a result of the campaign.
5. A campaign can benefit from a ‘radical flank’ – the tensions within the campaign, between organisations who had different political and policy analysis have been written about elsewhere, but the campaign was a excellent examples of the concept of the ‘radical flank’ when the positive or negative effects that radical activists for a cause have on more moderate activists for the same cause. Did those groups who took more ‘radical’ position help mean that the asks of the campaign were seen as more ‘moderate’ by the government and thus achieved?
6. The transaction costs of building coalitions are high – Make Poverty History was over a year in the making before it was launched in early 2005, it took many hours of meetings and discussions to reach agreement, a reminder that the start-up costs of forming coalitions are often significant. This work was helped by a tradition of working together that had come from previous campaigns on debt and trade by many of the key organisations, the need to keep this type of infrastructure in place is vital to build trust and bring individuals and organisations together.
7. Building public support is really hard – Make Poverty History had a brand recognition of 90%, but despite all the high profile media, celebrity involvement and grassroots chatter, the evidence suggests that it didn’t lead to a significant increase in the number of people ‘very concerned’ about global poverty issues. It’s a reminder that building public support requires sustained attention (and perhaps using the right frames).
8. Don’t be afraid to try something new – The campaign adopted this approach ‘“don’t be afraid to be the first to ‘crack’ a new platform, give trendy a try, and take a risk!”. In many ways Make Poverty History was the first internet campaign, albeit one with a campaign video where you had to select the speed of your dial up connection, comfortable trying out new approaches as we sought to understand the power of the web for campaigning.
Looking back, I’m incredibly proud of the small role I played in the Make Poverty History campaign, it wasn’t a perfect campaign (here is a secret – no campaign is) but one that taught me so much but more importantly delivered real results.
I’ll take the memories of Vicars walking to Downing Street, Nelson Mandela in Trafalgar Square, getting sunburnt in Edinburgh, staying up all night on Whitehall, and getting very wet outside Parliament wherever I go in my campaigning career. It was a very special year.

Who are the best messengers for our campaigns?

A study out recently suggested that people could be persuaded to change their attitudes to same-sex marriage as the result of a 22 minute conversation with a gay canvasser.
It’s the type of research any issue campaigner is fascinated by. How to win someone over to support your argument.
Sadly those particular research findings have been discredited, but it got me thinking what does the evidence say about who the most effective individuals we can use to persuade audiences to support our campaign.
Here are a few studies I’ve come across;

This is my short list of studies, but please do use the comments box below to add others you know about.