Secondly, by going through the research process you’ll start meeting your lobbying allies, and only then will you really realise what it takes to get a citizen lobbying action off the ground. While you can go it alone, you may want to consider sharing your journey with someone else. Indeed, you will probably need a core team to challenge you to understand the issue properly, and to come up with a convincing solution. Your core team will also help you master the steps ahead. By thinking collectively, we create the right conditions to gather knowledge and act.8 Genuine dialogue transforms the quality of conversation and the thinking that lies behind it. As we’ll see on page 154, you first need to draw up a fully-fledged citizen lobbying plan which sets out the avenues and tactics you are going to deploy. Then you need to carry it out.
Thirdly, no citizen lobbying should be limited to a search for a political solution. Instead, it should aim to bring about a deeper change of attitude and perception. There is always a risk that without public support a policy change may not survive (or even be implemented at all). Smoking does not instantly become less popular through banning it. It is when the social norms around smoking change that people quit. A campaign to introduce restrictions on smoking in public spaces might bring this about because it makes lighting up less socially acceptable.
All these elements – speaking the language of policymakers, setting up a core team and changing public attitudes – make it crucial that you gather evidence before racing ahead with your plan.
The success of your lobbying will largely depend on the quality of your initial research work. Good research leads to informed strategies (Step 4 of the citizen lobbying framework), effective branding/communication (Step 7), exhaustive mapping (Step 3), as well as to smart coalition building (Step 5). At the same time, going through each of the following steps will call for further research – and this will feed back into your existing work, informing your overall lobbying strategy. Research is an ongoing task. Be sure to integrate it into your overall lobbying strategy.
ACTIVITY 3 – Prepare a Background Document
You’ve already identified the issue you want to work on and a possible solution (or set of solutions). Collect this first set of ideas, including the chart and its institutional implications, into a background document that you and your team will update. This will consist of bullet points summing up your major findings. To make collaborative drafting easier, create a shared document (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.).
Is Your Issue a Real Issue?
The first goal of your research phase is to sound out your issue with people outside of close family, friends and colleagues. Before becoming an advocate for any cause, you need to be sure that someone else feels the same so that you aren’t advocating for a change that no one else wants. To what extent do other people perceive your issue as a problem? If you can’t find anyone who seems to care about it much, then be ready to look a bit wider for potential supporters. This reality check is the best antidote against ‘groupthink’. This occurs when a group’s need for consensus supersedes the judgement of individual group members. Groupthink generally occurs when there is a time constraint and individuals put aside personal doubts so a project can move forward. Sometimes it is prompted by someone in the group dominating the decision-making process.
To be successful, you need to find people who can see your issue from different perspectives. Don’t be afraid of disagreement; the aim is not to find a consensus, but simply to test whether other people perceive the issue in a similar way, even though they might have different ideas about it. The sooner you discover this, the better. You don’t want to go into battle for a cause that’s doomed to failure.
TIP 1 – Pitch Your Issue
Don’t be afraid to be creative when testing your idea beyond your friends and contacts.
Think about recording a short video and circulating it on social media and YouTube to avoid the echo chambers of your like-minded friends. The feedback you get – in the forms of likes and/or comments – will help you understand whether your issue is of concern to other people and why. Another more conventional but still effective way is to write a letter or op-ed for a newspaper, local or national, to flag up an issue and attract supporters. You’ll be surprised at how many people contact you wanting to help and even to team up with you!
Team Building
The next phase of your research focuses on gathering facts and supporters. You need to build a case. For this, you need a core team of people willing to run and dig in on the project. Consider assigning tasks to different people who know the issue inside out – whether they are classmates, colleagues, friends or people you don’t know yet. Are there individuals, groups and other organisations already campaigning on the issue? Or are there existing citizens’ groups, non-profits or other organisations that have already produced research on your issue? You might have come across some of them during the previous, identification phase. They might have enjoyed talking to you, they might have heard about your plans and some may even have contacted you. Unlike you, citizens’ groups or other organisations generally have dedicated staff and funding. So if they embrace – or at least support – your cause, your chances of success increase. While it might be premature at this stage of your project to design a coalition (this will come up during Step 5), you could start preparing the ground for one. As I’ve already mentioned, the ten steps are often interrelated and may need to be undertaken out of a strictly chronological order.
These serendipitous encounters with other organisations, activists, academics and experts can turn out to be incredibly powerful, as they often make the difference between failure and success. It is only when you start scratching the surface of your initiative that you meet your allies – and find out what it takes to get your citizen lobbying action off the ground.
Be bold when you seek out people who will share your passion for the issue and want to help out. Think about calling a meeting, even if you don’t know whether anyone will show up. Rely on social media, such as Facebook, to circulate the call and then, if you can’t meet face-to-face, you can host it for free on Skype or as a Google Hangout. The online platform Meetup could help you plan an event like this, especially if you want it to take place in different venues across the world. Once the meeting is convened, you’ll need to introduce the issue, collect participants’ names and contact information, propose a brief round in which everyone introduces themselves and eventually chair a brainstorming session about what to do.
Without killing the spontaneity of the gathering, the brainstorm should be structured along a few simple lines, such as:
What is the issue?
What do we want to do about it?
Who will do what?
What skills do we have internally?
What do we need and who could help?
What is the timeline?
Regardless of whether you agree with your new colleagues or not (on the problem and/or the many other items that come up), your understanding of the issue and ability to think strategically about what to do will improve. This meeting might be the start (or indeed the end) of your citizen lobbying initiative.
Gather Your Facts
Once you’ve established an initial core team willing to dig into the issue, it’s time to move on to the next phase of your research. This focuses on collecting the facts documenting the issue and supporting your proposed solution. In particular, you must gather evidence on these three crucial areas, bearing in mind the following questions:
Evidence on the issue: Why does this issue matter?
Evidence on the solution: What do you propose and why will it work?
Evidence on the precedents: How has your solution already worked elsewhere?
TIP 2 – Work as a Network and Be Agile
As soon as the core group emerges, make sure you capitalise on your first brainstorming session and move the conversation to a dedicated platform. While basic email and Skype may serve their purpose at the beginning, they
will soon become too cumbersome to use in daily life. My advice – based on experience of citizen lobbying – is to use closed online communities, such as a dedicated Facebook group or, even better, Slack. Slack is a program that allows your team to export information to a chat app, such as WhatsApp; it also enables you to create thematic channels and share files.
While it’s a good idea to try to meet face-to-face once in a while, don’t waste time looking for an office space; you can work from home or in a café and meet others in public places, or online. If you can’t meet up in person, keep your Skype or Google Hangout open while everyone is working on the project from their own corner of the world.
Lack of resources means citizen lobbyists can rarely compete with the professionals when it comes to gathering evidence. But that doesn’t mean you should cut corners. Ensure that your work complies as much as possible with reliable research methods so as to avoid a challenge later in the process. If you don’t know how to conduct desk research (gathering and analysing information already available in print or published on the internet) or run a survey, you may want to rely on someone who does to help you design your research work.
Experts may, however, be beyond your budget. A way to get around that is to rely on experts who volunteer, providing research ‘pro bono’ – professional work undertaken without payment and for the public good.
Don’t be afraid to drop an email to an academic or an expert consultant who has been writing about or working on your issue. They might volunteer to share some of their knowledge with you. If some of them are like me (and I know they are!), they might even take up your cause. I regularly receive all sorts of queries from people across the world who are looking for help on both substantive and procedural aspects of their citizen battles. Because I find it very rewarding as an academic to share my expertise and support their causes, I generally agree to do so on a pro bono basis.
While the idea of pro bono has always existed, in particular among lawyers, a global pro bono movement has recently emerged. All kinds of professionals – graphic designers, communications specialists, accountants, business students and many more (including carpenters, plumbers and other trades) are dedicating a portion of their time and labour unpaid to help NGOs working for social causes. Their volunteering might be in the form of writing a business plan, drafting a press release or running a social media campaign. The key is to channel individuals’ skills and talents towards causes they believe in. In the US, the skill-based volunteering movement is in full swing, pioneered by organisations like the Taproot Foundation, which makes business talent available to NGOs (of which my organisation, The Good Lobby, is a global fellow); Pro Bono Net and Appleseed, which enable lawyers to both volunteer their expertise to individuals in need of advice, and to work on broader social justice initiatives; Datakind, which engages data science experts on projects addressing critical humanitarian problems; and the St. Bernard Project, which enlists tradesmen to rebuild houses for disaster victims. Some corporations have even been willing to use their public affairs departments to lobbying for good.9 If you’re interested in finding out more about any of these organisations, you can find further information and links at the end of the book.
In Europe, the movement has been patchier, but it is gaining momentum fast. In the legal field PILnet was an early player, linking lawyers all across Europe with not-for-profit organisations (NPOs) in need of legal support. National organisations providing a similar service have sprung up – like aadh in France and Centrum Pro Bono in Poland. Beyond law, organisations dedicated to enabling all kinds of business professionals and academics to volunteer their skills are emerging in Germany (Proboneo), Spain (Fundación Hazloposible), France (pro bono lab) and Poland (Fundacja Dobra Sieć). In the Netherlands, a highly innovative project was launched as long ago as 1996: Beursvloer. It is an annual ‘marketplace’ (or stock exchange) where companies, volunteer organisations and local authorities can meet and build partnerships, matching supply and demand.
Be aware that some pro bono volunteers who are actively looking for projects might be willing to join your core team.
TIP 3 – The Power of Pro Bono
Don’t be afraid to knock on doors (well, write emails!) when looking for independent experts. The more open you are about your issue, the more likely you are to attract them. Personal relationships and word-of-mouth work marvellously when amplified by social networks. Plus, today there are plenty of matchmaking platforms, often called clearinghouses, which connect experts with causes. In particular, you may want to check The Good Lobby, the organisation I co-founded.
ACTIVITY 4 – Look for a Pro Bono Matching Platform
As the number of skill-volunteering platforms continues to grow, make sure to identify them to be connected with experts on your cause. Check out the organisations we’ve just talked about and those listed in Resources section.
Evidence on the Issue
The first type of evidence you need is about the nature, extent and salience of the issue you have chosen. In other words, why has your issue become an issue? Why does it call for action? If you are lobbying against smoking, you’ll probably focus first on showing the scientific evidence proving it harms health, then will determine how many premature deaths are due to tobacco. If you lobby for LGBT rights, your evidence will focus on proving that, without legal protection, discrimination occurs – listing how often, and how badly. If you lobby against fracking, you must prove its negative environmental consequences. If you oppose the construction of a nuclear plant in your area, you must demonstrate the environmental and health dangers it will cause.
Most of this evidence is widely available and can be easily gathered via desk (also known as secondary) research. This is the summary, collation and/or synthesis of existing research. As research findings are increasingly (yet still not universally) ‘open access’, they are often freely available online. Sometimes, however, the evidence you need is not easy to grab from the web – and sometimes it doesn’t exist at all. That’s usually because your cause is relatively new. Let’s suppose that you’re the mother of a teenager who was killed by a car while playing Pokémon Go, the first location-based, augmented reality game. You will need to prove the negative consequences for society of playing this game – well beyond your own anecdotal evidence.
In these circumstances, you need to get out and produce the information yourself. This is generally referred to as primary research, i.e. data that is collected from, for example, research subjects or experiments. This may mean using techniques such as surveys, focus groups or door-to-door questioning. You might survey neighbours, students or colleagues to verify how many of them are facing (or feeling strongly about) your issue. These techniques may be demanding and time consuming. They therefore often require the involvement of experts, who might agree to work on a pro bono basis.
When discussing evidence in the policy process, it is crucial to distinguish between evidence on the causes of problems (e.g. smoking) and evidence on the solutions to those problems (i.e. policy interventions aimed at tackling smoking). The former refers to the causal link between a suggested risk factor – such as tobacco, discrimination, fracking or playing Pokémon Go – and an undesirable outcome, such as illness, exclusion from opportunities open to the majority, poisoning or premature death. The latter, evidence on solutions, refers instead to the potential of different policy interventions (also called policy options) to reduce harm or promote a positive outcome. These might be a prohibition on indoor smoking, a ban on fracking or a restriction on the use of Pokémon Go.
Providing evidence about the nature and/or extent of the issue you want public authorities to tackle may turn out to be quite demanding. This is all the truer when the phenomenon you’re worried about is relatively new, as novelty may explain the lack of empirical data. How can you prove that there are sufficient negative consequences from playing Pokémon Go to warrant restrictions? Did the game lead to higher mortality rates among teenagers in it
s first year of existence? Often phenomena are multifactorial (caused by several factors) and as such are complex to fully grasp. Think about obesity: it results from the combination of several dynamics – excessive eating, genetic make-up, brain-reward mechanisms and socio-economic factors – which all have different explanations. Furthermore, as many factors may contribute to a given condition, a causal link may be impossible to establish reliably. For example, how many injuries are caused by Pokémon Go as opposed to texting or the use of other apps? How many car accidents are directly ‘caused by’ alcohol? To what extent is obesity caused by advertising foods that are high in fat, sugar or salt? Any form of public intervention that you advocate has to acknowledge this complexity.
TIP 4 – Give Your Issue a Human Face
Never forget that abstract figures proving the existence of your issue are not enough. When you gather evidence, make sure you meet people who have been directly affected by the issue you’re concerned about. Their stories will give your campaign a human face: only when we hear their stories will we realise why that issue matters and think ‘that could have been me’. Don’t hesitate to get quotes from people (even anonymous ones if they don’t feel comfortable about revealing their identity). They speak volumes.
Lobbying for Change Page 11