Category: learning

Over the last few months some have suggested that charities in the UK shouldn’t be involved in campaigning and influencing.
Charities have a proud role in mobilising public pressure for a good society and a safe planet.
Charities have successfully campaigned to protect public health from smoking; to protect the UK’s finest wildlife; to maintain liberties and freedoms; to achieving greater equality for women, and for lesbian and gay people; to enabling the UK to show global leadership on issues such as climate change or tackling disease, and so much more.
Many charities have a long histories of campaigning for change, but while the stories and examples of successful change brought about campaigning are passed down within organisations they aren’t collated together in one place.
Changed by Campaigning aims to change that. 
Working with campaigning colleagues from across the environment and development sector I’m trying to collect together in one places a list of issues that have been Changed by Campaigning over the last 100 years.
Can you help by adding any examples from your organisation or work of issues that have been Changed by Campaigning here?
It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to complete the form – and we’ll use the examples to help make the case for why charities should continue to have the freedom and space to campaign.
We’re aiming to get a first list of what’s been Change by Campaigning in the UK together by early June, and I’ll try to make the material available to those who read the blog.

Since the new year my Saturday morning routine has changed – it’s no longer reading the paper over a cup of coffee.
Instead you’ll find me standing outside in the cold at 8.55 with at least another 100 people ready to run 5km. I’ve officially become obsessed with parkrun. In fact I wouldn’t be exaggerating to say I’ve fallen for the concept.
parkrun for those who haven’t come across it is a free, weekly, 5km timed runs around a local park. They are open to everyone, free, and run by a team of volunteers.
Around the world there are over 700 parkrun’s – all of which have started in the last 10 years – with almost 1,000,000 having taken part in a parkrun in the UK alone. As a result the founders are getting lots of interest from government about how they’ve been so effective at increasing participation.
Now part of the reason I’ve fallen into parkrun is the result of campaigning. For over the last 18 months we’ve been campaigning to get our local council to allow us to run around Tooting Common, but that’s a story for another time.
But I think Park Run has already taught me a few lessons for campaigner about how to successfully engage people and build community.
1. Make the barriers to entry really low – getting involved in parkrun is easy, really easy. All the information you need is on the website and the only thing you need to do is register and print off your bar code which you use to get your time. All the information you need is on the website and there isn’t any pressure about having to to turn up in the right gear or in the latest trainers. The message is come and join us at 9am.
2. Encourage participation not performance – The motto of parkrun is that it’s just that a run not a race. Many people who might not see themselves as runners come along and get involved. The emphasis is not on how fast you run and the first and last runner get exactly the same experience. Although your encouraged to improve your personal best it’s always about participation – not expectation to become the next Mo Farah or Paula Radcliffe.
3. Provide incentives and quick feedback – Within an hour or so you get your run time emailed to you, it’s quick feedback on how you did. In the same vain, the weekly run report is a key volunteer task to help people feel that they’re part of a community. And built on the emphasis on participation not performance each run you do gets you one step closer to joining different ‘clubs’ which celebrate different milestones. It really helps to increase participation.
4. Build leadership – Each parkrun relies on a volunteer team to make it happen. From marshalling to report writing there are a whole number of roles that need to be filled. This isn’t about being elected onto a leadership team but about an ethos that encourages people to get involved. Somehow I’ve gone from being a ParkRun to making my debut as the Race Director in a few weeks’ time – I think my experience of running campaign events probably helps here – but the principle still stands, Park Run actively builds leadership – and encourages people to get involved in helping to lead there parkrun.
5. Encourage community – Parkrun might start out as standing in a park but it always finishes in a cafe. Community is very much encouraged and actively built. Even though I’ve only been involved for a few months I’ve started to see it in action. Last week, we had NAME join us to celebrate doing 250 run – but that wasn’t a solitary achievement, friends that NAME had met across the parkrun community joined her to run.
6. Make it easy to replicate – Parkrun hasn’t grown as the result of a central team of paid staff setting up them up one run at a time, instead the small parkrun core team make a whole host of resources available to local groups of volunteers looking to set up a run. They play an enabling role – recognising again the need to build leadership, and as a result new runs are starting all the time.
While many of the principles above aren’t new to those who’ve been experienced at building activists groups – watching how parkrun has grown so quickly, especially drawing in so many new people should provide new insight for building activist communities.
Finally, If you want to understand what all the fuss is about, watch this little film about why so many people #loveparkrun.

 

I get hugely excited about the US elections – and now we’re 2 months into the primaries – it’s a good opportunity to look at some of the different innovations, tactics and approaches that the campaigns have been using.
So here is some Easter reading from the campaign trail – and don’t worry it doesn’t mention Trump once!
1 – Bernie Sanders is building a whole new approach to organising – Lots has been written about the Obama organising model, but reading about the Sanders campaign it looks like he’s building ‘Organising 3.0’, with a focus on local empowerment and leadership coupled with technological innovation. This from Paul Hilder who is inside the campaign is good as is the always excellent Sasha Issenberg.
2 – Everyone is using persuasion – I’ve long been fascinated by how social pressure techniques can get individuals to take action. It’s a growing area of academic research mainly in elections – for example helping someone make a plan for voting on election day can increase turnout by up to 4% – this is a good primer of some of the approaches used in the Iowa Primary.
3 – It’s getting harder to reach people on the phone – but text is where it’s at – Phone banking had long been a key element of reaching voters but its getting less and less effective – in one week in January, the Sanders campaign had to make 250,000 calls to have just 11,000 phone conversations, but all the campaigns are actively trying to build SMS lists (and the Sanders campaign is also using some cool tools to engage volunteers via text)
4 –  Digital innovation – From Hilary Clinton on Snapchat, Ted Cruz’s campaign mining information from Facebook profiles, John Kasich looking at networks built from offline sources of information and the use of Facebook Live lots of campaigns are doing interesting digital innovation. Lots more here.
5 – You probably can’t win without getting the basics right – While it’s easy to get excited about the new tools and approaches, campaigns still need to be won by getting people out to vote,  and that needs a well targeted ground game something that Ted Cruz’s campaign used to led him to victory in the Iowa primary. While on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders team have build a app that allows anyone to start canvassing for him.
I’m sure in the next 6 month we’ll see lots more interesting innovation and learnings from the US campaign trail. Watch this space.
 
 

I had the pleasure and privilege today of hosting an amazing set of campaigners at a session on ‘Secrets of Winning Movements’ which was part of the Bond Conference.
Over 90 minutes, a wonderful line up of speakers shared top learnings from movements as diverse as the campaign to win equal marriage in Ireland, to Mumsnet and it’s wonderful member generated campaigns, to 350.org and a focus on divestment, to the inspiring stories from those at the heart of the Tunisian revolution to community organising in the UK to welcome more Syrian refugees.
Trying to chair and live tweet it was hard to take lots of notes, but briefly, and before I forget them all, here are some of my key learnings;

• Movements are messy – they require you to experiment with what’s working and not working. To iterate and innovate. To change tactics.
• Ensure there are strong relationships at the heart of your movement – take time to build trust with those involved.
• Leadership is about the relationships you have to get people to take action.
• Help prevent burnout – Don’t forget to provide space for those leading your campaigns to take the time they need to sustain there activism.

• Focus your message – Grainne Healey shared about the importance of finding a messages that worked for the ‘middle million’ in the Yes Equality referendum campaign. That meant taking what focus groups were saying seriously.
• A movement need a clear slogan – but ensure that resonates with those you need to engage not simply your ‘base’
• The messenger who delivers your message is as important – make sure they work with those you’re trying to reach.
• Humour, satire, parody and ridicule all have a role in campaigning – find creative ways of getting the message out.
• Use social media effectively – Aya Chebbi from Tunisia shared about how those leading the revolution would use it to get the news they wanted out first.

• Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it – Jonathan Cox from Citizens UK shared about how they’d focused on Bristol Mayor George Ferguson to agree to welcome more refugees through a relentless focus on him.
• Give people a sense that they can make a difference – Payal Parekh from 350.org shared about how the divestment movement success has been built on the experience of local campaigners making a local dent on a global problem.

• Training is critical for equipping your movement and sharing the vision.
• Be movement generous – many of those you train and equip will go on to work on other issues. Celebrate that.
• Learn from others – Grainne shared about how the Yes Equality campaign had benefitted from the insight of US marriage equality campaigners.

• Build unusual and diverse coalitions – not just the usual suspects.
• But sometimes its as important to decide who not to include can be as important as who is involve. Rowan Davies from Mumsnet talked about who didn’t get involved in a coalition they built on libel reform
• Be clear about the role your organisation is playing. For many NGOs its about supporting the existing movement.

If you were in the session, please feel free to add your key lessons and learnings in the comments below. 

One of the best books that I read last year was ‘How Organizations Develop Activist‘. It’s very relevant to the work of campaigners (if you can get over the use of z rather than s!), so I’m really excited to say the books author, US academic and activist Hahrie Han will be heading over to join us in London in late March.
Working with colleagues at Action Aid, Friends of the Earth and Christian Aid we’ve been able to arrange for Hahrie to give a lecture at the University of Westminster at 5.30pm on Thursday 31st March, and an already sold-out day long skill share.
The lecture is open to anyone that’s interested in – and I’d strongly recommend it to any campaigner, community organiser or political strategist. Click here to register.
The lessons will be as relevant if you’re trying to get a Councillor elected in a by-election as if you’re trying to get governments to sign up to an international agreement on child survival.
But if you need more convincing here are some reasons why you should plan to join us, and a bit of background if you’ve not had the opportunity to hear from me in person about my enthusiasm for this work.
1. It’s based on real evidence of what works – Hahrie has turned her research lens on how charities approach organise their organising. The work in the book is based on a comparative study of two US organisations, one working on health and on the other environment. While their are differences between the UK and the US there are huge amounts of shared insight to take from it.
Central to the book is the ideas that groups can be categorised into Lone Wolves, Activists and Organisers. Lone Wolves are those who chose to ‘to build power by leveraging information — through legal briefs, public comments, and other forms of research advocacy’ while ‘mobilisers and organizers, by contrast, choose to build power through people’. This isn’t just an theory but based on lots of research from groups across the US.
2. It’s about taking learning from community organising and the Obama campaign approach as well – lots of campaigners are rightly excited about the insight that community organising approaches that groups like Citizens UK use, or the Organizing for America approach used in the Obama. But sometimes the application to the campaigning work of charities isn’t as easy to see. Hahrie’s work has looked at both of these approaches (indeed she’s written a whole book on the approach that Obama took in organising his campaigns) and helped to think about what it means for charities.
3. It’s bring new insight to an time honoured approach – For many the focus for charities over the last few years has been focusing on build the number of supporters who can take e-actions. That’s not a wrong approach, but it’s easy to see how building a network of activist can be deprioritised within that.
For Hahrie central to what works is understanding that there is a difference between activism and organising means and both are needed to deliver change. This from Joy Cushman sums it up well “The organizer thus makes two [strategic] choices: 1) to engage others, and 2) to invest in their development. The mobilizer only makes the first choice. And the lone wolf makes neither”. At the skillshare we’ll be able to dive deeper into understanding what this means for our work – something one of my co-organisers Natasha has written a cracking post on this here.
4. It’s about walking away with practical ideas that will help you build a better movement – When you read the book you have to do so with a pen in hand to capture the practical insights that come from the study, from the finding that the most successful groups were those that combined political and social activities, to the role of shared stories that get passed down within groups ‘do you remember the time when’ and much more. This isn’t research to file away, but practical lessons in how to develop activists.

Register for the lecture here.