The new model of policy influencing

The power has sapped out of the traditional model of influencing. The answer to that has got to be a wholesale theory of change shift away from a presumption that we can get the right thing done by drawing on the evidence base and doing government advocacy, in favour of movement building approaches aimed at building public constituencies who will actively defend the norms we believe in.

The golden poo was just one small element of a really great campaign that we ran with survivors and many other partners in civil society called Stop the Flights*. The motivating insight was that the government isn’t listening to us, so we decided to run a corporate campaign targeting the airlines on which the government was relying to make this scheme effective. We got that campaign launched within a month of the Rwanda scheme being announced. 

* for non-UK readers, this targeted the UK Government’s plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda.

We called up these 3D printers and said we need this thing done. How quickly can you do it? They said look, we’re busy, we’ve got no availability for a month, but what is it? And we said, it’s a golden poo “world’s worst airline” award to present to the airline that wants to fly the refugees to Rwanda and they said right, we’ll do it by tomorrow, and we’ll do it for free. 

One of my colleagues describes it as a surround system approach. We went for them in the public eye, we went for them in their own backyard and we went for them in their own communities of peers. Torture survivors were really keen to front this campaign and not just be in the background advising and helping to create the concepts. So we did things like have survivors over to the world’s largest aviation conference in Amsterdam, and they stormed the stage and they told the airline industry what was happening. The industry was horrified and of course we put that all over social media. We finally got this email through from the airline saying, “call your campaign off, we are out of this game.”