The life essence for campaigning

Recently I had one of those moments of insight that just made me stop. Over the last 18 months I’ve spent a lot of time developing my practical approach to campaigning, and in particular trying to distil it all into three tools and one wraparound approach. And I have blogged about this in the past.

But then I was challenged by a colleague who asked me to consider why there have been times in my campaign career that I’ve been successful and why on other occasions a similar approach has been unsuccessful. This was quite a challenge! Now there are a variety of ways that I could respond particularly in terms of very often there having been internal challenges but also difficulties in the external context.

But this challenge made me think about one element that I have had in all my successful campaigns, and how I did struggle when I lacked this element.

And this vital element was people. Not just any people but a group of people utterly committed to the cause and bringing different skills and experiences. Whilst you may think this is a statement of the blindingly obvious, I am interested in how often this element isn’t always valued.

Over the last decade I have often used the line in my campaign training around the world that campaigning is a collective endeavour not an individual pursuit. And this is certainly true. But there is an absolute power in this statement for people who want to bring about change.

Whilst using practical tools can be incredibly useful, they are not enough by themselves. What is also needed is that group of committed people who can bring different skills and different inputs at different times, but are all united with a passion to bring about change.

When I think about my first national campaign at Oxfam, where we were campaigning against the use of supermarket vouchers for people seeking asylum, the critical element was a small group of people from Oxfam, the Refugee Council and the then Transport and General Workers’ Union. Yes, we used those practical tools (but I had yet to define those explicitly) but the critical element was different people bringing different skills united by a passion to bring about change.

And when I think about opportunities when I haven’t been so successful but I still had a good message and I’ve applied all of the practical tools, a common theme for me seems to be that I was so passionate that I was willing it to happen myself without doing enough to cultivate that group of people around me to help drive the campaign forward.

So as campaigners, yes, I would love us to use and apply my practical tools to campaign but that’s clearly not enough. We need a group of people around us, ideally from different perspectives with different skills, but who are all united with a passion to see change.

I have seen the opposite happening in organisations sometimes where a group of people are nominated to sit on the campaign steering group, and they are neither that different nor frankly passionate about achieving that change – and then there is just no momentum. However, if you could pull together a group of committed people with different skills and experiences, this then I think can be the essential element to drive your campaign forward – the life essence for campaigning!

Do let me know what you think. Even if what I have written is just blindingly obvious! But certainly for me, as I develop my campaign training and support for people around the world, I want to be making more of this insight that campaigning takes off when you can apply practical tools energised by a diverse group of committed people.