Innovation and trends from US Presidential election
The US Presidential election is less than 60 days away – and this post is (largely) a Trump-free zone. As the most expensive campaign in the world, with over $1bn spent in the months leading to election day, it’s always an interesting place to spot campaign innovation, with each election bringing forward new ideas and …
What’s changed? The post lockdown landscape for campaigners
For most of the last few months I’ve found it hard to sit down and write for the blog – but a combination of so much changing with trying to juggle ‘lockdown living’, has meant it’s felt like every time I’ve had a thought or an idea to write down it’s quickly been surpassed. …
in learning
Understanding Campaigning – 4-week learning and development syllabus.
For those on furlough at the moment, or anyone looking to sharpen their skills and knowledge, I’ve put together this Understanding Campaigning syllabus. It was inspired by wanting to provide some useful learning resources for colleagues on furlough The aim of the syllabus is to provide some recommendations of resources to help you understand more …
COVID-19, volunteering and learning for campaigners
What campaigners can learn from the different approaches to coordinating volunteering during the coronavirus lockdown.
in tools
How could the pandemic change our future approach to campaigning
The coronavirus pandemic is changing our lives, but what scenarios might we want to consider about how the pandemic will change our approach to campaigning? Using the 2×2 Scenarios approaches from Save the Children’s Strategic Foresight Toolkit: Making better decisions, I’ve had a go at creating four contrasting scenarios to help to debate how we might …
in coalitions, learning
Jubilee 2000 – five enduring lessons for campaigners
For the last few weeks, I’ve been spending some of my time as a debt campaigner. It’s been important work on a professional level, working with colleagues from across Save the Children and many beyond to push the World Bank and IMF to provide debt relief to the world’s poorest countries so they can spend …
Campaigning tactics in a time of social distancing
Lockdown and Social Distancing have meant that some campaign tactics and approaches aren’t now possible – but as campaigners our craft is always about looking at what else is in our tactics toolkit. Thinking about this challenge, I took to looking at legendary campaign strategist, Gene Sharp’s list of the 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action …
COVID-19 and Campaigning – a summary
Like everyone else, the last couple of weeks have been very different to what I expected or imagined, and blogging hasn’t been a priority. But one of the things that I’ve found myself continually grateful for is how so many individuals and organisations have been so generous in sharing their thoughts, ideas, advice, and help …
Do 50,000 signatures still make a big petition in the UK?
A new Parliament Petitions Committee has just been appointed, and the petition site will resume service again, so as it does that I’ve taken a revisit the analysis I did in the summer of 2018 on what makes a big petition (see original post here). Back then, I used the data from the 170 or …
in learning
New Year, New Job
I started a new job last week – still at Save the Children UK, still campaigning on issues that I’m passionate about, but now as Director of Campaigns and Organising. It’s a new role for Save the Children, that’s the outcome of a larger re-organisation we’ve gone through over the last few months to look …
mrtombaker
Director of Campaigns and Organising at Save the Children, previously worked for Bond, Tearfund and Christian Aid, co-founder Campaign Bootcamp, blog about campaigning because I'm passionate about seeing more campaigns win, election geek (and recovering Labour Party activist), interested in monitoring and evaluation, this blog is all my own views. Prone to bad spelling!