📧 Why your template email campaign isn't effective (and what works instead)

Westminster's narrowing outlook

You've got a system where often the minister, their advisor, their researcher, their official, none of them have worked in the field they're trying to make policy for. I'm not someone who thinks you need a doctor to run the health service because I think that comes with all sorts of problems, but I do think Westminster is increasingly a place where people have a very narrow outlook and field of expertise. And that means you come up with policies that are a bit divorced from people's real lives and their practical experience. You're coming up with things that people out there instinctively know are not going to work and are actually probably going to cause problems. But, they sound well thought out and very practical and so on. We need to change it.

You may work on one issue, but MPs are across thousands

When you're working in an advocacy organisation, often you do not understand why your cause is not everybody's number one cause. You are surrounded by people for whom it is the number one cause, and who have joined the organisation because of their interest in it. But, go to the other side, where every MP is getting hundreds of emails a day, and being written to about thousands, and I do mean thousands, of different causes. NGOs can often slip into this sentiment that if the MP is not talking about the issue the NGO cares about then that MP must lack compassion. It's not that at all. It's simply that no human being, not even the 650 combined MPs could adequately cover the many thousands of issues that affect people.

Related campaigns will impact how yours is seen

When you're in government, you've got this huge number of requests being made by different campaign groups. So, on paid leave, you have a variety of campaigning organisations campaigning for leave for a range of difficult life situations. And from the point of view of government, you rightly have to think 'Okay, but what's the overall weight of these on a business if we suddenly say right there's going to be 15 new categories now that people can have paid leave from.' 

Choose the right messenger

You may not be the right or best person to make the case. If it's change you want, you might be better off putting, in my world, a young person in front of me, you might be better putting a grandmother who's a kinship carer [who are friends or family who step up to raise a child when their parents aren't able to] in front of me rather than a very polished director of external affairs who's misreading what I want. Being low ego enough to think 'Actually, the better advocate won't be me, it will be this particular person' is not always easy to do. Often advocates want to control everything in ministerial visits, they give the people they are bringing in a written script, have them speak when they're spoken to. Actually, I might much rather speak to them, and you'll get what you want if that happens.

Instead of email blasts…

You'll get little to no value asking a load of people to send in the same template email that a campaign organisation has written for them. You are much more likely to get traction with some form of personal connection, either through a personal connection of the MP or by sending a constituent to go and see them. Kinship [the charity for kinship carers] ran a very good campaign when I was a minister. They had sent kinship carers–individuals–to an incredible number of MPs. So they typically had a grandparent come and sit in the constituency surgery with the MP, with some talking points from Kinship, to explain what it was like. That meant that when you had to do things cross departmentally, frequently the others had also had someone sent to them by Kinship who had made the case to them, and that made it that bit easier.

Use precedent, avoid setting asking for it

One of the things you are nervous of in government is setting a precedent for something that in turn might lead to a whole load of other people saying, 'Well, what about us?' Whereas actually, if you can draw on a precedent and say, 'Well, hang on. We've had this thing for this group for, you know, 20 plus years, it's been very successful, it's this amount of money, this is how local authorities run it, and this is the group that's left out of it' then you're much more likely to get people interested.

What can you suggest that doesn't cost anything?

There are things the government can do which don't cost a lot of, or indeed any money. There are things that you could do in legislation to tighten definitions, to widen scopes, to use the bully pulpit of government and so on. Any minister in any department would like suggestions on those things, because money is and has been tight for a considerable time.

Be self aware

I always remember, and this is less prevalent now, but in the charity world, there would be all these organisations campaigning on poverty, low pay, and so on, who'd have unpaid interns in their organisations. Well, hang on a minute. You're supposed to be all about poverty, making sure people have a decent wage and so on. You're stuffed with people you're not paying at all. So, how does that work?

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