Effective campaigning

1. Effective campaigning Welcome Philip Hadley, Campaigns Effectiveness Officer, NUS

2. Objectives • Principles of effective campaigning • Campaign planning models • Campaigning challenges and creative campaigning • Campaigns cycle • Contacts

3. What makes a campaign effective?

4. Effective campaigning “I request lobby groups remove my email from their systems – because they swamp MPs with automated emails, which detract time and energy from concentrating on those in real need.” • Dominic Raab MP, in reference to a ‘spat’ with 38 Degrees (August, 2010) Make it personalised and local, and you will not just have my real support, but that of many other MPs as well. • Robert Halfon MP, The Guardian, February 2010 ‘No revolution can take place without a methodology suited to the circumstances of the period’. • Martin Luther King

5. Campaigning or awareness raising? Kony 2012 • ‘We congratulate the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have mobilized to this unique crisis of conscience’ White House 2010 • ‘irresponsible to prize feel good, simplistic messages over complex history and to treat consumerist-consciousness raising as interchangeable with education’ Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland Clark University's Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies • Live Aid – Michael Buerk 2004 report – twice as many people, just about alive.

6. Principlesof effective campaigning • Select the issue which is right for you • Compile strong and compelling evidence • Develop a clear strategy – set a specific aim and impact • Understand your targets and how to influence them • Involve, (devolve power to), and empower beneficiaries • and supporters • Work with useful allies and coalitions • Communicate well and persistently – be creative • Stay with the issue through to resolution • Promote a campaigning culture – embed campaigning Adapted from Coe, J. and Kingham T. (20 ) Tips on Campaigning Practice (London, NCVO)

7. Sevendeadly sins of campaigning • Unclear aims and objectives • Activity planning happening before (or without) developing an influencing strategy • Action plans that run to an internal timetable • Lack of innovation • Messages that do not get noticed and move people • Poor monitoring and evaluation • Failing to focus

8. Create a creative campaign ACTIVITIES (what gets done) OUTPUTS (what’s generated by your activity) OUTCOMES (what gets done) IMPACT (changes in students’ lives) INPUTS (resources) Impact chain

9. creating impact creatively (New Statesman)

10. Creative campaigning? What does it mean to be creative? • Visually powerful activities? Rethinking strategies? New ways of creating an impact? Research • Theos survey – As many people ‘started, followed or supported’ a campaign using social media as have contacted a politician. • One fifth thought social media effective, 46% and 45% thought contacting politicians or the media, respectively, is effective. NCVO • Current trends - fluid activism, professionalisation & new technology - social media important as part of a wider strategy • Election 2010: relearn how to campaign – localism, coalition government, research-led, holistic campaigning

11. Campaigns cycle

12. Review of objectives Objectives • Principles of effective campaigning • Campaign planning models • Campaigning challenges and creative campaigning • Campaigns cycle • Contacts Contacts Philip Hadley – philip.hadley@nus.org.uk / 07585969854 Dani Beckett – dani.beckett@nus.org.uk / 07585969855 Hannah Charnock – hannah.charnock@nus.org.uk / 07585969853