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 …
Category: My blog
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
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? …
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 …