The Road Ahead for Campaigners

The annual NCVO Road Ahead report is a great resource – packed full of insight and predictions about the trends, drivers challenges, and opportunities that are going to shape the next year might look like for charities – it’s basically a ready-made PEST analysis for the charity sector.

The 2022 edition was launched earlier this week (this is a great summary from the report’s author Alex), and I thought I’d pull out 7 key trends that I think are particularly important for campaigners and change-makers, but I’d 100% encourage a read of the whole report as its packed full of useful insight, examples and case studies.

  1. A period of political stability – the authors might be regretting writing this given the political drama of the last 72 hours! But after the snap elections in 2017 and 2019, most predicted that we could be entering a a period of relative political stability, with an election most likely in 2024 (or 2023).

    It means campaigners should be starting to think now about how they plan their influencing activity – as I wrote ahead of the 2015 election, decisions about elections are made month or years in advance so start to plan now and not when the election is called. But I guess whatever happens with the Prime Minister in the next few weeks, shows the importance of being able to plan ahead, but also adapt to changing circumstances.

  2. The continuation of a culture war – or at the very least some who want to continue it, with the authors predicting that ‘Politicians are likely to continue to seek dividing lines where they feel there is political advantage in doing so, so we should expect that culture wars will be a part of our political environment in the years ahead‘. Although the polling suggest that the public is more split on the topic that the politicans might want, but as Bobby Duffy has written ‘the huge surge in media coverage of culture wars – in 2015, there were only 21 articles in mainstream UK newspapers that discussed a “culture war” in the UK – in 2020, there were 534’ shows that topic isn’t going away.

  3. Devolution – the continued growth in the profile and role of Metro Mayors (remembering that 41% of the UK population now have a Metro Mayors) and the continued promince of the devolved adminstrations that has come about beause of the pandemic (this is a great thread by Andy Glyde from CRUK about the important for national charities in how they approach devolution and how they should be influencing the devolved governments). As the report says ‘charities that aren’t considering the local and regional landscape, and the decision-makers within it, are likely to be missing opportunities to further their cause.’

  4. Restrictions in the space for campaigning – timely this week with the defeat in the Lords of part of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill, but expect some of the elements of that which seek to, amoungst other things, introduces new powers allowing police to decide where, when and how people can protest and increases penalties for those breaching police conditions on protest.

    It’s been great to see so many organisations come out against the Bill, but whatever your campaigning approach standing and challenging the Bill which the report says will limit what is ‘a fundamental tool for democratic expression and social transformation’ is going to be vital as it passes back to the House of Commons.

    Likewise the Elections Bill might not sound relevant to many campaigners, but as this briefing from Friends of the Earth notes it again has clauses that should concern all those involved in social change.

  5. Pressure on household finances – I think this economic driver is likely to be one of the political challenge of the year. It’s most pronounced now with the rise in fuel prices, and the latest figures on the cost of living (inflation), and as such its going to dominate the media and political agenda, as well as being a cause of concern for many in society.

    Savvy campaigners are going to need to think about how they can adjust their messaging and approach to adapt to this issue which is likely to repeatedly dominate politics.

  6. Changing volunteering patterns – the report finds that during the pandemic ‘those over 16 years old who volunteered at least once a month for a formal organisation fell to 17% from 23% in 2019/20, and those who volunteered at least once a year decreased to 30% from 37%’ but at the same time as Relationships Foundation has found we’ve seen new forms of community volunteering emerge during the pandemic, with 9 million people stepping forward to help.

    As we potentially return to some sense of normal how these volunteering trends unravel will be fascinating to follow for any campaigning charity that relies on volunteers to lead much of it local campaigning activity. At the same time, as the report finds the changing face of work, could present new opportunities with more people working flexibily or from home changing how they can engage.

  7. Increase in regulation of social media – the report suggest that ‘governments are starting to take the regulation of social media platforms more seriously. There are concerns about how platforms push and curate news to users and how this can spread fake news and malicious content with alarming speed’.

    While changes might not immeditely impact campaigners given the important role that social media can play for charities in desiminating messages, changes to how platforms operate can have significant consequences. Those campaigns that have a distributed approach to how they share their campaign content are more likely to be able to ride out any change (forced or planned) to the algorthms.

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