🧱 The components of a successful campaign

Good campaigning is all about momentum

Campaigning is always about building and sustaining momentum. It’s a thing people often forget about; you get excited about the launch and you forget about the next step and the next step and the next step after that. If you think about the media, how do you come back again? What is your second, third, and fourth story for the press? 

Esther Ghey has been campaigning this year on getting smartphones banned in schools. She launched the campaign in September, received loads of coverage, and ended up meeting the education secretary who basically said no. 

So she came back around again and got teachers on board, got more parents. There were lots of other groups in that space that just kept coming back around with more stories, and then you saw last month the government’s changed their mind on it. You’ve always got to think about how you sustain the work.

→ Explore what ministers want, and how to get secretaries of state to say yes

The components of a successful campaign

We talk about a five P pathway at Breakthrough:

1. Catalyse, so find people that have a similar problem to you.

2. Then Launch something; you get clarity on your ask and you launch.

3. Then there’s the Surge, that first breakthrough moment when you maybe get into the media for the first time.

4. Then Sustain; how you stay on the agenda.

5. And finally transform, where maybe you’ve got a commitment from your target audience and you’re negotiating to make sure it happens—which is often a much longer stage than people think.

Have you got a little big thing?

What we’re trying to find when we start working with someone is that small and tangible thing that speaks to the bigger problem at hand. That little big thing is the thing to focus on in the campaign: you build momentum by winning something small and doable.

Take Delivering Better. They were talking about how post-giving birth, mothers didn’t really have any check-ups: everyone asked them about their baby, but no one asked them about how they were. It’s that tiny bit of detail that then can become a policy ask that gets the ball rolling on wider maternity health policy change. So in this case, the first ask is a health check in for mums after birth.

Petitions only work if you don’t treat them as petitions

Unless it’s in the millions, the number on a petition can be quite meaningless. The power is in how you use the petition to build public support. 

Everyone that signed your petition is someone that’s saying, ‘I agree with you about this issue.’ And rather than just seeing their name on a list, you’ve got to think, ‘Well, there’s a group of people that I can ask to do more.’ So then you can go back to them with whatever that ask is, and it starts to become a powerful tool rather than just a list of names.

Save the Children’s approach is worth emulating

There are lots of ways that organisations could experiment a bit more. One way to experiment is for organisations to bring people with experience of injustice into the conversation early, and give up a little bit of power and control. Instead of holding the pen on a specific ask, think: ‘if we collaborate, we might get to something that’s more powerful.’

A great example of this is Save the Children’s campaign called ‘Mums on a Mission’ around people on Universal Credit having to pay upfront for childcare costs. I think there was a mum that had started a petition about it herself, and then Save the Children collaborated with her. 

It was a really powerful campaign, and the mums went to a parliamentary select committee to speak. When you looked at it, the mums felt very much like it was their campaign, and that Save the Children’s role was to give that campaign legitimacy, heft, and policy clout. 

→ Read Save the Children’s Meg Briody and Tom Baker’s Policy Unstuck on ‘How to engage disadvantaged groups in policy’

Stunts do not have to be expensive

We did a campaign some years ago with Caroline Criado Perez to put a woman on a bank note. The best thing she did was to get a bunch of her supporters to come down dressed up as women from history outside the Bank of England. 

It led to fantastic pictures for the media, with some women dressed as Boudicca and Amelia Earhart, and the Bank sent someone out to collect the petition and responded a week or so later agreeing to change. The best bit was that it didn’t really cost any money. Sometimes simple is better.

Be wary of coalitions

I have a slight aversion to coalitions. They can be brilliant and they can be important. I started at ONE Campaign, and they were part of Make Poverty History, so you can see in the past how coalitions have achieved change. But often coalition conversations get too much into negotiating who’s doing what, what the sign-off process is, all of that.

I like thinking with a more movement mindset, an organisation or a few organisations being like, ‘We’ve got this idea, we’ve got these values, we’re heading in this direction. We’re going to share it really widely. If you want to be on board with us, you’re invited to be on board. We’re going to share everything we’re up to. Join us.’

A group that’s doing that right now is A Million Acts of Hope. They’ve said to people, ‘These are our values, this is what we’re trying to do for this week. If you want to be a part of it, here’s everything you need.’ They didn’t try and get all the people that have signed up to them to agree in a coalition meeting what the rules were. And that means they can move fast, and get stuff done.

Thank you to the 115 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred this newsletter to a colleague. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view.