mrtombaker, Author at Thoughtful Campaigner

What we can learn from the Robin Hood Tax campaign

The Robin Hood Tax campaign has used a range of new and innovative tactics that other campaign coalitions could learn from.
I suspect that you’ll be hearing a lot about the Robin Hood Tax in the coming week. The campaign has a great opportunity to succeed when G20 leaders meeting in France at the start of November, while the ongoing #OccupyLSE protests have increased the level of debate about what’s stopping the UK government implementing the tax.
I’ve highlighted before that the campaign has produced some fantastic campaign videos, but a few other tactics that I’ve seen the campaign use stand out.
Innovation Day – Back in the summer, the organisers behind the campaign opened up the planning process to anyone who wanted to come along and attend its Innovation Day. The day was hosted in London and facilitated by a team involved in the campaign. It’s great to see a campaign ‘open-source’ its planning process in this way, inviting supporters to help to shape the direction and contribute their ideas. The day ended up producing two ‘concepts’ that supporters were invited to provide further feedback on and get involved in. I’m not sure what happened next, but it’d be good to see more invite committed supporters to get involved like this.
Fundraising for adverts – The campaign isn’t the first to invite supporters to make small contributions towards advertising or other campaign activities, but by using it the Robin Hood Tax campaign has highlighted a growing trend by campaigning organisations – asking for small donations for specific items of spending.
You can see the strengths in the idea with PayPal it’s easy for people to donate, and micro donations of £1-£3 don’t feel like an enormous cost to an individual. My only concern with this approach is that is doesn’t help to communicate the less visible costs of a campaign (producing a policy report, paying for staff, etc). We need to ensure that we’re encouraging people to commit to long-term support for campaigning organisations as well.
Gone after the vested interest – Often in campaigning I think we’re guilty of not spending enough time thinking about the forces and organisations who don’t want our campaigns to succeed. We campaign under a belief that if our arguments are ‘right’ then we’ll succeed. The RHT campaign was clearly aware this wouldn’t be the case when it came to heavy resistances from the financial sector, and it’s been good to see how the Robin Hood Tax hasn’t been afraid to highlight the ideological and financial links between the current government and the bankers.
Exemplary use of a experts – Bill Nighy has been an inspired choice as a spokesperson for the campaign. He’s been active in the campaign for the last year, appears on TV to talk about why we need a RHT, writes op-ed pieces and turns up at events. Unlike other celebrities he appears committed for the long-haul of the campaign.
It’s also been good to see how the campaign has used Economists, like getting over 1,000 to sign a letter ahead to G20 financial minister and more recently Jeffery Sachs writing to the UK Chancellor, to counter the financial voices that say that a FTT can’t work.
What else has impressed you about the Robin Hood Tax campaign? What hasn’t worked so well?

Video – How to plan highly effective campaigns

This video of a talk that Chris Rose gave at the last eCampaigning forum is fantastic. I’d recommend that you put aside 40 minutes in the coming week to watch it.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/28497758 w=400&h=225]
How to plan highly effective campaigns by Chris Rose from FairSay on Vimeo.
Originally found on the shiftlabs website.

Working in coalition – learning from the last 10 years

A new report provide some important lessons about what works when it comes to campaigning in coalition.
Make Poverty History, The Treatment Action Campaign, Jubilee 2000, The Global Campaign for Climate Action (GCCA). All campaign coalitions that have been active in the last 10 years or so, but what lessons can we draw from them for current and future coalition campaigning?
With funding from the Gates Foundation, Brendan Cox has written ‘Campaigning for International Justice – Learning Lessons (1991 – 2001)’ which attempt to do this. It’s a really excellent read and is based on conversations with hundreds of NGO staff, politicians and civil servants to draw out key lessons from coalition campaigning over the last 20 years.
The whole report is packed with useful reflections, some that you’ll agree with, others that you won’t, but as Cox quotes those who want to ‘repeat their successes must first learn from them’ so its worth reading.
For me, the most interesting section is ‘Identifying Themes’ where Cox tries to identify some core elements that have helped campaigns to succeed or fail. Here are the 10 or so that struck me the most.
1. Organisations are increasingly keen to demonstrate clear attribution of their impact, as such they become concerned that working in coalition can make it harder to attribute impact to one’s own organisation. This is pushing organisations to consider focusing on more and more niche areas where they can provide ‘impact’ but this overlooks the fact that the most important issues often need grand coalitions to achieve change.
2. INGOs are actually coalitions in themselves. That many of the largest organisations like Oxfam, Save the Children and Amnesty are made up of multiple national chapters and as such getting them to agree on a priority campaign can take a long time in itself, and as a result those INGOs are able to be as flexible as others would require them to be to help form effective coalitions.
3. Unusual coalitions still get noticed. The report cites the example of the Publish What You Pay (PWYP) campaign that got Shell on board which added more creadibility than the addition of many NGOs would have had. Cox also highlights the role that faith groups can have in helping to mobilise a more ‘mainstream’ public.
4. Coalition structures follow the ‘last worst experience’. Make Poverty History was set up without a high-profile secretariat to avoid the tensions that many had found in the Jubilee 2000 campaign that had one. Cox argues that the desire to avoid tension and compromise brand profile in a coaltition means that we’re forming a series of ‘lowest common denominator’ collaborations which are reducing their impact. We need to rethink our models of coaltition advocacy.
5. Trust matters. Cox points to the examples of the Treatment Action Campaign and PWYP which he describes as having ‘a close-knit group at the centre of thea campaign’ which meant high levels of trust. at the centre of the campaign. He contrasts this with the GCCA which started out with a small group, but over time saw that broken down as more staff came into the campaign and reduced its functionality.
6. The challenge of the ‘moment’. Cox highlights the challenge of a campaign focusing on a moment, a political opportunity where the campaign comes to a head, but argues that while they provide focus they can provide real challenges of keeping a campaigns momentum going beyond this.
7. Incrementalism can be a successful approach. Cox suggests that incrementalism in a campaign, the belief that a campaign should take a step-by-step approach to achieve its aims, is often the most successful approach. Suggesting that the evidence of the Internaitonal Camaign to Ban Landmines which successful focused on a targeted definition of landmines rather than going for a broader definition of cluster munitions, or the Jubilee 2000 campaign which focused on debt cancellation for specific countries rather than heading calls to focus on the cancellation of all debt.
8. The role for radicals. One of the main tensions in a coalition can be between those who want a incrementaal approach as opposed to a more radical approach. In practice this has often meant the formation of two coalitions but Cox suggests that utilising these differences can be helping to ‘shift the centre of gravity within a political space, and make the demands of the centerist group sound more resaonsable’.
9. Using celebrities. Another point of tension in many campaigns. Cox finds that those campaigns that have gone beyond a ‘photo call’ and invited celebrities to be involved in policy advocacy have often found that they’ve brought alot of strength to a campaign. He cites the use of George Clooney in the Save Darfur Coalition who has testified before Congress in the US as well as lend his ‘brand’ to the campaign.
10. Finding a common approach to evaluation. Their are lots of recommendations at the end of the report, but the one that caught my immagination the most, was a proposal to create a commonly reconised body responsible for high-quality evaluations which would help to improve future campaigns as well as providing reassurance to funders and supporters.
So what happens next? All in all a very useful report, but at the end of the report I’m left asking, what happens now? Brendon Cox makes many thoughtful recommendation and highlights some stark truths for the sector but my fear is that now the ink has dried on the report nothing else happens, especially as Cox has recently moved into a new role at Save the Children.

Charity meetings with Government Ministers

The release of details of thousands of meetings between government minister and lobbying groups has received lots of coverage in the press in the last few days. Although the headlines have been on the number of meetings that ministers have had with business groups, there is also lots in the whole data that campaigners can learn from.
The Guardian estimates that charities had around 800 meetings with ministers in the last 12 months, unfortunately they haven’t provided a break of the classification that they used, but a quick play with the information suggests that the following charities had the most meetings;
[googleapps domain=”docs” dir=”spreadsheet/pub” query=”hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0ArsF-z0r3hFfdDNBLXRsekppNGt5OV9KNGRXVjRtcHc&single=true&gid=0&output=html&widget=true” width=”500″ height=”550″ /]
*These figures currently just include individual meetings in the data that organisations have had. It may change when coalition or roundtable meetings are included.
What else? It looks like lots of the meetings that were held between charities and government were classed as ‘introductory meetings’ this is perhaps to be expected at the start of a new government, but it’ll be important to ensure that this changes in the next 12 months and that representatives are invited to be consulted on policy.
Also, charities and campaigning organisations have been involved in a significant number of meetings with other charities, I count over 80 meetings like this in the date, which is perhaps indicative of the way that we often work and campaign in coalition, but a different approach to that taken by business group.
I plan to spend more time looking at the information later in the week, but please do use the comment section below to share your reflections on what the data tells us about routes to influence.
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What makes a successful demonstration?

Ensuring you are clear about your objectives is vital if you plan to organise a successful public mobilisation event.
A late night drive back from Manchester after being involved in ‘Bearing Witness‘, a mobilisation which saw 1000+ supporters of Tearfund, Christian Aid and CAFOD march through the streets of the city ahead of the Conservative Party Conference, to call on the government to achieve its commitment to be the ‘greenest ever’ got me thinking about what makes a successful public mobilisation event.
For me, before embarking on organising a demonstration, rally or similar event that will see large numbers of supporters gathering in one place, you have to be confident that the event will achieve at least 2 of the following objective.
Political – The event will have a direct impact on presenting another policy position to those decision makers the campaign is trying to influence. This could be through a ‘mass lobby’ event where supporters meet face-to-face with MPs or other key decision makers, or a march/demonstration that is of such a size that it’ll get covered in the media or seen as it causes peaceful disruption in the area its targeting are working.
Personally, I’m sceptical about the impact that many marches that take places around Whitehall at a weekend have, because the majority of those who need to be influenced aren’t around and don’t get covered in the media. One way to overcome this is to invite politicians to speak to address those attending but negotiations to do this can be delicate to arrange to say the least!
Media – Too often the event and message from the event don’t get covered by the media. Sadly the majority of traditional marches go unnoticed by all but those attended, and even then those that attended can often feel unmotivated that the event didn’t get picked up. Bearing Witness was fortunate to get picked up by Sky News cameras looking for evidence of demonstrations happening around the Conservative Party Conference.
There are way of making a march more likely to get media coverage, for example involving high-profile individuals, but unless there is a threat of violence they don’t seem to get noticed. One way of to overcome this is to ensure that the event is linked to a political hook that the media will be wanting to cover because a march can provide good footage to demonstrate opposition, but the timings of this can often be difficult to predict.

Education – Events can be useful ways of bringing together dedicated supporters to a cause and equip them with further information about the issue and plans. At Bearing Witness, the agencies involved put on well attended training afternoons as a way of doing this, which allowed supporters to learn more about the climate change issue the campaign was focusing on and further actions that they could take. I’ve also seen this done well at Mass Lobby events where supporters spend time being briefed before going out to lobby their MPs.
Energising supporter – Marches can breathe life into campaigns and provide a focal point to mobilise lapsed and new supporters to get involved again. For example, the Make Poverty History march in Edinburgh back in 2005 helped to mobilise lots of new supporters who wanted to attend the event. Although it’s a high barrier to entry ask, if packaged right I think it can help to recruit new supporters (and energise lapsed supporters), as well as helping campaigners who might feel isolated that they’re part of a bigger movement.
What objectives would you select? Should we ever organise marches or demonstrations just for the sake of marching?

Five for Friday….14th October

Here is a new selection of articles that might be of interest to campaigners….
1. David Mills uses Freedom of Information to find out what Newspapers and Magazines government ministers are reading.
2. Red Pepper has suggestions for the apps that every activist should have. (h/t @LucyPearceOx)
3. The #OccupyWallStreet protests have sparked a new round in the Clicktivism debate. Here is Adbusters Micah White’s on the topic and the thoughts of James Sadri on his halfiranian blog.
4. Should charities campaigns? Tory MEP Daniel Hannan thinks we’ve got more influence than most of big business, while Third Sector reports on a fringe on the same topic at Conservative Party conference.
5. Finally, a use for Google +? Fairsay suggests you can use it to organise global press conferences at no cost. (h/t @day_jess)
What else have you been reading on campaigning that you’d recommend to others?

Review: Counterpower by Tim Gee

This book will make a bold claim: that a single idea helps to explain why social movements past and present have succeeded, partially succeeded, or failed.

So begins, Tim Gee’s new book Counterpower, released last week which asks the question. Why do some movements bring about transformational change while others fail?
It’s a question that many campaigners grapple with and the book provides much food for thought about what might be the key to success, looking back at the experiences of campaign movements from the last 100+ years.
For Tim, the answer is a clearly articulated theory of change that runs through the book, the idea of Counterpower. Tim argues that change happens when people use;

Idea Counterpower – challenging accepted truths, refusing to obey or finding new channels of communication.
Economic Counterpower – exercised through strikes, boycotts, democratic regulation and ethical consumption.
Physical Counterpower – which can mean both fighting back, or nonviolently placing our bodies in the way of injustice.

Tim suggesting that many of the most successful movements for transformational change have used all three kinds of Counterpower, while those that have fallen by the wayside have only used one or two.
It’s a sweeping statement and one that’s perhaps unfair, for example the anti-poverty movement in the UK has achieved much in the last 15 years, perhaps the most high-profile example being the Jubilee Debt Campaign that saw the cancellation of billions of dollars of debt, with most of its tactics focusing on Idea Counterpower, but his theory is well argued.
The book explores how to apply these Counterpower principles to a number of successful campaigns in the last century. Ghandi’s camapign against British rule in India, the Anti-Apartheid campaign in South Africa, Universal suffrage in the UK and most recently the Arab Spring in Egypt. Each of the case studies are well researched, approaching the information from a new angle and helping to provide fresh insight to even the most well told of campaign examples.
I would have liked to have seen the book make an attempt to apply the principles of Counterpower to some less obvious contemporary movements, perhaps struggle for gay equality in the last 30 years or the anti-roads protests of the 80s or even some smaller scale campaign for justice at a local level.
I’d also like to have seen some analysis of why other campaigns have ‘failed’ because they haven’t made enough of Counterpower. One movement that comes to mind that would be fascinating to explore would be those working for climate justice, where has it failed to make use of Counterpower? I’d also have welcomed to some more reflection on what impact that current trend for ‘clicktavism’ might have on the use of physical Counterpower.
Tim presents a challenge to those campaigning organisations that focus on idea counterpower or perhaps dabble with economic counterpower by encouraging boycotts to consider if ‘stronger’ tactics need to be applied for change to be achieved. However I wonder at times if he’s too dismissive of the role that these organisations can play in helping to bring about change, overlooking the fact that many campaigns are ‘won’ by coalitions of organisations who employ different tactics, although as Tim points out in the introduction these ‘traditional’ organisations have often found ways to support more , citing the example of WWF helping to pay for the first Rainbow Warrior. But even with that the book lays down a challenge to these organisations to consider if the current suite of tactics they are using are working.
The other thing that I really enjoyed about the book is that its written by someone who’s a campaigner. It means that this isn’t an academic text, but you sense a living account of a campaigner grappling with ‘how change happens’.
In summary, I’d highly recommend this book. It’s a great read, well written, excellently researched and provides much food for thought for all campaigners, not simply those who would consider themselves ‘radical’.
With the birth of UK Uncut in the last year, events in the Middle East & North Africa and the #OccupyWallStreet demonstrations, Counterpower provides a timely and fresh look at how change can happen when we reexamine our understanding of power.
Counterpower: Making Change Happen can be purchased here. The author, Tim Gee, is currently on a speaking tour around the UK, dates available here.

Lobbying the Lords….

A review of two excellent campaign tools focused on influencing members of the House of Lords.
Unlike their counterparts in the House of Commons, members of the House of Lords can be notoriously hard to campaign towards. There are over 800 of them, with some as regular attenders, while others who rarely turn up. Some are independent spirits, while others are still loyal to the parties that bestowed the peerage on the them.
But with the Health and Social Care Bill coming before the House of Lords later in the week, it’s been interesting to see how campaign organisations have been trying to target them. A couple of excellent tools have been launched to target Lords.

38 Degrees have developed a‘Contact a Lord’ tool with donations from members. It’s a tool that provides you, on production of your postcode and email address, with the contact details of a Lord to send a message to. I think it’s based on a similar function on the writetothem website and it’s a simple and user-friendly way of taking action, and I’m certain it’s providing a fuller inbox for Lords who aren’t traditionally used to receiving bulging postbags!
For me a couple of improvements could enhance its effectiveness in the future;
1. Be more specific and target those Lords who are likely to be wavering about how they might vote. I’ve used the system twice and ended up with former Chairmen of the Conservative Party, Lord Patten, who I’d imagine is unlikely not to vote the way that he’s being asked to. With greater political intelligence you could build a database to target the 50 or so most likely to be wavering and target them.
2. Make use of the Lords geographical loyalties. Although Lords don’t represent a geographical area, because of our ancient political system they’re all enobled to be ‘Lord of this place of that’. Often this is linked to a place that they have some link to, a former area they represented in Parliament, a place of birth, etc. It could be interesting if one production of your postcode you’d get the opportunity to message a Lord linked to where you live.
Some of the groups behind the #BlocktheBridge protests yesterday have also launched ‘Peer Pressure’ website. It provides a list of all Crossbench and Lib Dem MPs and their contact details. You’re encouraged to get in touch with them, although no tool do to this is provided, and then report back on if they’re likely to oppose the bill, using a ranking system.

Some excellent new tools have been launched to campaign towards the House of Lords

The site is trying to provide a more detailed picture of which Lords are likely to block the bill but the site doesn’t have much information yet, just 19 Lords (out of over 270) have been reported on, so it’s perhaps not reached enough people as yet. Perhaps a tie up with 38 Degrees would help with this?
Overall, both organisations are to be congratulated for developing such innovative tools to address a tricky campaigning problem. With the Lords becoming a popular target to modify bills coming from the Tory-led Coalition, I’m expecting that we’ll see more campaign tools like this in the coming year, and organisations would do well to learn from these examples.
What other campaigning towards the House of Lords has impressed you?

Fish Fight – an unlikely example of using emotional connections in campaigning

How the campaign to reform the Common Fisheries Policy used emotional connection to bring a ‘complex’ campaign issue to the attention of the public across Europe.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall to thank for helping to demystify to relatives and friends what a campaigner does all day!
His latest series, Fish Fight, which was shown earlier in the year but returned with an update show in August, focused on the need to reform the Common Fisheries Policy, and deployed many of the campaign tactics that I’ve used in my work for the last few years. We had petitions, stunts, celebrity involvement, policy research and direct lobbying.
One of the tactics that Hugh tried to employ in the series was the ‘exposure visit’ when he invited Richard Benyon, the relevant Government Minister to go out with fishermen to see first hand the waste caused by discards of fish.
He wasn’t able to get the minister to go onto a boat in the end, but the rationale seemed to be that if he could confront the Minister with the reality of the situation then he would be compelled to put his support behind action to reform the CFP.
I’ve heard of stories of other ministers and officials who’ve had their view changed on a subject or seen the importance of acting on a previous unconsidered issue, as the result of first hand exposure visit like this. A high-risk, high-reward tactic.
But with some targets that personal engagement isn’t going to be possible, and that’s why I really like this case study about Angela Merkel’s Fish Hut from Chris Rose (and I highly recommend you subscribe to his monthly newsletters).
Faced with the same campaign issue at Fearnley Whittingstall, but with the need to mobilise public option in Germany, based on the critical role that Germany would have in the CFP negotiations but will little public support for action at present.
Now, it’s probably not possible to create a new emotional engagement with the issue for the German Chancellor, but thorough research showed a previous narrative that they could draw upon to help raise awareness to the German public.
Rose explains, ‘I asked our team if they could find an emotional connection between Merkel and fish. They came back with The Hut, which turns out to have played an iconic role in her political career, indeed without which she might never have been elected, and re-elected, and re-elected… ‘
It turns out that ‘The Hut’ was somewhere that Merkel had met with five fishermen in their hut at Lobbe, a small village on the island of Rugen, in her constituency in her first election campaign. The image was captured in a photograph that has over time gained a certain iconic status. So much so that she’s returned to the Hut and the fishermen she met back in 1990 on a number of occasions since.
So the campaign decided to create a replica hut and Rose explains ‘Rostock is its first stop, and then we hope to move on to Berlin. This way Mrs Merkel won’t have to travel back to her constituency to get in touch with the state of the fishing industry, it can come to her.’
Rose reflected ‘most NGO campaigns deal with the significant but a major difficulty in ‘selling’ their stories within a newspaper, is that many are not seen as very ‘interesting’. The CFP reform process has this problem to the max‘.
Going on to suggest that The Hut might overcome that ‘We hope that people, even the media, will find The Hut interesting. It has a story: about real people, about their hopes and fears and their relationship with power. You don’t need to be an expert to understand that the fate of fish and fishermen are inter-dependent‘.
A good lesson in the opportunity that finding an emotional connection between your campaign target and issue.

Author: mrtombaker