Blog
Obstacle 7 – individual agendas taking over
Here campaigning is undermined because individuals have their own agendas and seek opportunities to develop their agendas. This will always be tricky when you are dealing with passionate campaigners, but I think an astute organisation will try to work with those...
Obstacle 6 – lack of a theory of change
Have you seen this one? So much effort goes into producing the research report and maybe getting some media coverage, and then you just collapse exhausted with little idea of how all this action happens so that something else happens. But without your theory of change...
Obstacle 5 – lack of a common understanding of advocacy campaigns
This is another classic. With almost all of the advocacy campaigns consultancy work that I have done over the past 10 years or so this issue comes up. I find myself saying I really don’t mind what your definition of advocacy campaigning is, but I wish you had a common...
Obstacle 4 – lack of shared values
This is a sad one. The obstacle here to campaigning comes down to not having shared values. Again as with earlier obstacles, it can help to be explicit about these values and not to base your actions on assumptions. Are we really a campaigning organisation agitating...
Obstacle 3 – resources
This is a classic. We would love to campaign, but we need a full-time campaigns post. What rubbish! I say give me an hour a week and we can begin to make things happen. With a clear focus and plan, you can achieve so much with so little – if you have the will. But...
Campaigning Summit Switzerland
Just back from a weekend in Zurich where I was speaking at the Campaigning Summit Switzerland. What I found quite remarkable about this event was their success in attracting participants from across an array of sectors including both the not for profit and...
Obstacle 2 – nervous leadership
Here the campaigners are ready, but the organisation’s leadership is nervous and the campaign stalls. An explicit risk assessment can be a great tool to confront this nervousness and show how you are going to minimise any risks. The more I do campaigning, the more I...
Obstacle 1 – lack of research
I have seen this happen so many times – people say we would love to campaign but we need more research. Yes, research is vital for effective campaigning, but it can also be a major delaying tactic. Be wary of the call for more research. It can just push your energy...
Overcoming obstacles to effective campaigning
Back in 2011, I first wrote about a new area of interest in campaigning for me – the internal obstacles to effective campaigning. I had been struck, over the previous few years running training courses around the world, about how often this issue had cropped up. So...
Taking the plunge and diving in
Last month I spent some time in Prague running an advocacy workshop for an alliance of international NGOs based across Europe. After taking stock of progress made and lessons learnt to date, we brainstormed future advocacy priorities. Having developed a long list, we...
All change ….
So at the end of December I left the British Red Cross after four happy and productive years helping that great organisation to develop its advocacy agenda. I am now working on a number of international assignments supporting the development of advocacy campaigns...
So we’ve been doing advocacy for all these years ….
I’m just back from running an advocacy campaigns workshop for the International Federation of the Red Cross/ Red Crescent Societies in Hungary for national societies working across the Balkans and Central Asia. As ever my approach is always to try to de-mystify the...
I have a dream ….
I've just come back from Rome for a meeting of the International Federation of the Red Cross, and I was really struck by the words of one of my international colleagues. She'd been on a training course recently on strategic planning. Right at the start of the course...
Supporting movements
A few weeks ago I was at a European conference in Budapest attending on behalf of City of Sanctuary in the UK - there were people there from across Europe looking at positive ways to communicate the importance of offering safety to refugees seeking protection. The...
Passion and competence
Last week I ran a session for NCVO's Certificate in Campaigning. I have been doing such a session since the certificate first started in 2007. If you don't know about this course it is well worth a look - I wish it had been around when I first started campaigning. The...
Practical Politics
I have long admired Titus Alexander and his persistent quest to promote the need for effective teaching about politics in this country. How are people meant to learn about how politics works? I have often been surprised when I have run introductory campaigning courses...
Academics and campaigners in action
Well to answer my own question, I got an answer to my last blog post quicker than I had imagined. The answer or at last an answer hit me last week when I attended a conference on Refugee Wellbeing in Coventry. What made this event special was the wide-ranging...
Academics and campaigners
Recently I had the good fortune to be asked to be involved in the assessment for ESRC grant funding for their forced displacement research programme. I did start this assessment with, I must confess, the view that the majority of the proposals would have no relevance...
The best made plan
Reflecting on my last blog post made me think of a quote that I have started using in my campaign training. “No battle plan ever survives the first contact with the enemy.” This great line is credited to Helmut von Moltke. While it may have been constructed for...
The danger of infinite campaign planning
I’ve just come back from Lima where I was running a training workshop for NGOs from Bolivia, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala as well as Peru. I’ve done training courses across the world but not before with Spanish translation. So I was somewhat nervous beforehand to see if...
Storytelling and campaigning
Several years ago I was due to run a campaigns workshop in Thailand, and the organiser contacted me to say that they were hoping to combine my sessions with training on story telling and wondered if I felt that this combination might work. My view was that it seemed a...
The thorny issue of campaign reporting
One thing that I have been thinking a lot about recently is how you go about reporting on your campaign progress. How should you go about this when you are asked for your targets or for your key performance indicators? If you are running a project to build say a well,...
Campaigning Summit in Switzerland
I led some training in Switzerland recently for the Sheila McKechnie Foundation and met a great campaigner - Peter Metzinger – a former campaigns director of Greenpeace and author of the intriguing book: The AC/DC Strategy - Rock 'n' Roll and the 14 Strategic...
A Blog for City of Sanctuary
I did a blog recently for National City of Sanctuary, the movement to welcome asylum seekers and refugees, in the run-up to their AGM in Cardiff this month - Lets unite and speak out against the injustices to build an inclusive society