Category Archive For "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 …
Learning from successful movements – some recommended reads for campaigners
Between the election, a busy period at work, and family life, blogging has slowed down towards the end of 2019 – that’s something I’ll be aiming to fix in 2020. To be honest, I didn’t find 2019 to be a classic for books for changemakers, and many of the books I’ve most enjoyed have been …
How to use the law for social change
The Sheila McKechnie Foundation, with support from the Baring Foundation, put together a brilliant conference on using the law for social change last Thursday – it was a fantastic day, in a room full of campaigners and advocates buzzing with ideas and questions. Before attending, I’ll be honest in saying that I’d not spent a …
Another Election = another opportunity to spot campaign trends, tactics, and approaches
So another General Election campaign has started, and to be honest I’ve not got anything more to add to previous blogs about how campaigners can use them most effectively (you can read them here, here and here). But I do think that elections are great opportunities to be looking out for trends, tactics and approaches …
A toolkit for playing defensive advocacy
A new Prime Minister, a possible General Election and Brexit continues to rumble on. In our current, politically uncertain times do we need to start to reconsider what campaign success looks like? That’s why I really enjoyed the latest paper from the team at the Centre for Evaluation Innovation which looks at how to define …
What does it mean to be movement generous?
“Think of any campaign success you’ve seen or been involved in. I would wager good money – that it wasn’t achieved by one actor alone: it was collective action that brought about change” I couldn’t agree more than with Nick Martlew in this excellent Mobilisation Lab post on what makes for effective collaboration in campaigning. …
What can campaigners learn from start-ups?
I’ve finally got around to reading ‘The Lean Startup’ by Eric Reis. It’s one of those books that has come across my radar from time to time, and I ended up buying it after an impromptu book buying visit to my nearby book shop. I can’t say I found it the easiest book to read …
5 campaigns that I’ve learnt from in 2018…
Today’s my last day in the office, and I can’t wait for the Christmas break to come, but as another year of campaigning comes to an end I wanted to add to some of the great blogs already written – see this from Pete Moorey on some campaigns from the UK, and this masterpiece from …
Lessons in doing campaign strategy
We’ve just finished a process to sharpen some of our campaign strategies at work – so it’s got me thinking about some of the lessons that I’ve learned about what makes a good advocacy strategy process. There are lots of articles written about what needs to go into a good campaign strategy and the approaches …
What my friend Sam taught me…
My friend and former Tearfund colleague, Sam Barker passed away last month, after a short but brave battle with bowel cancer. You can read more about Sam in this obituary here. For the last few weeks, and at his funeral last Friday, I’ve been carrying around with many many thoughts about Sam; about what he …
mrtombaker
Head of Mobilisation at Save the Children, was Head of Campaigns at Bond, co-founder Campaign Bootcamp, blog about campaigning because I'm passionate about seeing more campaigns win, election geek (and former Labour Party activist), interested in monitoring and evaluation, blog is all my own views. Prone to bad spelling!