Lobbying for Change

by Alberto Alemanno

  As far as citizen lobbying is concerned, campaigning can take place both on- and offline. The former approach relies on things like social media networks and mobile apps, while the latter can include snail mail, street protests, face-to-face meetings and sit-ins. Young people are increasingly adopting any means necessary to change the world.32

  A good illustration of a smart and effective way to combine on- and offline tactics is a citizen campaign against the mistreatment of animals in abattoirs in France. It was sparked by video footage showing livestock and horses writhing in pain while still conscious, which is against French law.

  STORY – French Abattoir Abuse

  Since it was founded in 2008, members of the pro-vegan group L214 have been staging shock tactic protests such as animal funeral processions and performance art displays. In 2016, the group attracted national attention when it released a series of undercover videos highlighting the shocking mistreatment of animals in slaughterhouses across the country. The videos went viral and were flagged up by major newspapers. The group launched a website and attracted over half a million followers on Facebook, as well as collecting over 150,000 signatures for a petition demanding transparency in the abattoir industry. The government has been forced to introduce new legislation to penalise guilty owners and put in place protection for industry whistle-blowers. It also announced that it would inspect every abattoir in France.

  Despite the rapid growth of digital campaigning and the explosion of social media, the most successful campaigning combines both online and offline tactics. One excellent example is the work of Color of Change, a citizen movement which has become the largest African-American civil rights group in the US.33 When it launched in 2005, very few people were using email to force the government to act. Today, it has more than 1.3 million members and, like the civil rights movements of the 1960s, Color of Change relies on the power of the media to draw attention to the daily injustices African-Americans experience. In a typical campaign, it asks people to sign petitions, write letters or make phone calls to officials and to post their concerns on various social media channels. In 2009, their campaign against Glenn Beck, a controversial television personality, attracted 285,000 signatures and persuaded 300 advertisers to pull their slots from Fox News, which broadcast Beck’s show. As a result, the network removed Beck. In another campaign, Color of Change succeeded in persuading the producers of Saturday Night Live to include black women in the show’s cast.

  Today the tool of choice for public campaigning is the online petition. Through any of the various online petition platforms – such as Avaaz, Change and WeMove.eu – you can easily solicit and express views on your issue and convey them to the appropriate decision-maker. There is no need to write an email, search for an email address, or ask for a face-to-face meeting. You can do it all from your desk and you will be able to reach virtually anyone with an internet connection. Free from the restrictions demanded by official petitions, these platforms provide a low-barrier entry to activism, allowing any citizen to directly influence policy. They dramatically cut the cost of recruiting supporters and massively expand your geographical scope. Furthermore, you no longer have to simply trust in existing civil society organisations to make their case. You can – even if it is not always a good idea – circumvent them. We discussed earlier how often citizen lobbyists’ efforts are discouraged or even resisted by established civil society organisations who claim a monopoly on your issue. Yet elected representatives often complain that they only hear from professional lobbyists, and want to understand their constituents’ preoccupations better. Petitioning platforms allow them to hear from more people – and with more diverse opinions – than in the past.

  Despite their advantages, digital campaigning and in particular unofficial, online petitions do have serious flaws. Firstly, not all citizens can use them. People without internet access are excluded, and the politically-savvy are disproportionately empowered. This gap is the result not just of the ‘digital divide’, but also a general lack of confidence in digital engagement and limited understanding of how it works. The ubiquity of digital technology and information overload have made it increasingly difficult to capture people’s attention, and engage your audience in meaningful ways. As a result, although digital creative technologies may seem accessible, not everyone can take advantage of them.34 Secondly, bottom-up digital campaigning like an online petition may get in the way of professional advocacy by civil society organisations that might actually be more effective in bringing about change. They run the risk of diluting messages and drawing popular support, media attention and money away from established NGOs.

  Thirdly, they can disrupt traditional policymaking and the privileged access NGOs enjoy. Fourthly, since collecting ‘likes’ or signatures generally fails to bring about real change, it is easy to dismiss as ‘clicktivism’.35 Some worry that the public sphere may pay a price in the long-term for these low-effort forms of activism.36 And their failure may dispirit the people who find their online petitions and comments ignored.

  But there is significant evidence to suggest that the sheer scale of online petitions has had tangible political impacts.

  For example, in 2012, an Avaaz petition which attracted 2.8 million supporters led Members of European Parliament to vote down the ACTA treaty as it would have allegedly limited fundamental rights including freedom of expression and privacy. Likewise, popular support for the Right2Water ECI prompted the Commission to remove water from its concessions directive.37

  STORY – ACTA

  The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is an agreement negotiated in the late 2000s that was intended to create new global intellectual property enforcement standards for the internet and its users. ACTA received a lot of criticism due to the lack of transparency around its negotiations and absence of public consultation. According to its opponents, ACTA contained ‘several features that raise significant potential concerns for consumers’ privacy and civil liberties, as well as pose threats to digital innovation and the free flow of information on the internet’.38 Despite this, the agreement was signed by the EU and 22 member states in January 2012. However, due to the public outcry, several of these member states raised concerns shortly afterwards and declined to ratify ACTA. Following the Avaaz petition, the European Parliament declined to give its consent to ACTA in July 2012. India and Brazil were invited to join, but refused due to its lack of popular support. So far, only Japan has ratified the treaty. Thanks to citizen lobbying, within six months of its signing, ACTA was politically dead.

  STORY – An EpiPen®omenon

  Mellini Kantaya is no professional lobbyist, nor a lawyer or a politician. She is an actress whose husband has an allergic condition. Insurance pays for his medicines in full. In early 2016, she made a lot of noise by lobbying Mylan, a US pharmaceutical firm that had hiked the price of the EpiPen by nearly 500 per cent in twelve years. There was no apparent reason for this increase, apart from the company’s monopoly (see Step 1: Choosing your Battle). Mellini was struck by this abuse of market power when she heard from a Facebook friend whose child suffered from life-threatening allergic reactions. She was facing a $600 bill to pay for two of these pens, which inject a pre-emptive dose of epinephrine.

  To try to fight against these price hikes, which forced the poorest and neediest to pay huge sums to pharmaceutical firms, Mellini started a petition entitled ‘Stop the EpiPen price gouging’ and launched a digital campaign. She posted it on the dedicated online service petition-2congress.com, which sends your petition to the right mailboxes so that it reaches actual lawmakers.

  What followed is a perfect example of the power of petitions and social networks combined: in just 45 days her petition was signed 80,000 times, and signatories had sent more than 120,000 letters to congressmen. By that time, staffers from Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ teams had already called Mylan’s CEO, Heather Bresch, who bowed under the pressure and increased the rebates offered to the most d
isadvantaged. But that wasn’t enough.

  This wave of popular support soon reached Robyn O’Brien, a long-time activist in the field of allergic conditions, who reposted it to her hundreds of thousands of followers. It then reached the ears of another activist, whose fourteen-year-old son had died from an allergy. This, sadly, fulfilled the fourth rule of petitioning: get people emotionally involved. The issue continued to snowball, until Sanders himself condemned the gouging on Twitter, explaining why the pharmaceutical giant’s behaviour could not go unchecked (third box checked).

  As I write, Mellini’s petition has now attracted more than 40,000 signatures and Congress has launched a Commission enquiry into the price of EpiPens, which is likely to make them less expensive. So a petition is only a start, and advocacy still has to follow.

  Be aware that – with rare exceptions – you won’t be allowed to pursue the ‘administrative avenue’ using an unofficial petition. In other words, you are generally not permitted to channel the signatures into official petition systems. They could, however, become one of the major tools of your public campaign.

  Regardless of how you intend to use them, informal petitions allow you to collect signatures at no cost, although some platforms may charge for certain services such as promoting the petition on your homepage, or granting access to the full list of signatures.

  For organisations creating one-off or infrequent petitions, these tools provide a simple and easy-to-use solution, but only basic petition functionality. Use these sites with care. Make sure you’re able to export data about your supporters from the website, check that the costs are set out upfront, and ensure that the site doesn’t retain the right to email the people who sign your petition. They will often regard this as spam.

  Popular platforms include:

  Avaaz (Avaaz.org)

  Avaaz is the largest activist site in the world, and takes its name from the Farsi word for ‘voice’. Operating in seventeen different languages, the platform counts over 41 million members who have signed at least one of its many petitions. Topics range from human rights abuses in Burma and FGM in Somalia, to war in Syria and African elephant poaching. His founder is my friend Ricken Patel.

  WeMove (wemove.eu)

  With nearly 400,000 members, WeMove is the new kid on the block. It aims to bridge the gap between European citizens and their representatives in Brussels by acting as a pan-European tool for linking together NGOs and online campaigning platforms.

  38 Degrees (38degrees.org.uk)

  Founded in the UK by a group of campaigners who were ‘determined to do something different’, 38 Degrees has 3 million members. As well as hosting petitions on its website, the group prides itself on holding MPs to account by actively pressuring them both in person and online.

  SignOn (signon.org)

  Recently developed by MoveOn.org, SignOn is still in the beta testing stage, but provides a simple, free petition tool that lets you download the list of names as a PDF file. This is useful when it comes to delivering the petition, but less so for a pledge.

  Change.Org (change.org)

  This popular and simple tool allows you to create a petition for free, but charges a fee for exporting or downloading the final list. It does have a sizeable, active community, which makes it an attractive option if you want more reach.

  The Petition Site (thepetitionsite.com)

  One of the oldest online petition tools, this site run by Care2 offers free basic features which are similar to those available on Change.org, but charges fees to promote the petition or download names.

  Causes (causes.com)

  Best-known as a fundraising tool, this site provides some basic petition and pledging functions. Causes is integrated with Facebook and therefore easy for its users to pass on, which is a useful feature for those with active audiences there.

  When you choose an independent online platform, be sure to pick the one that matches your aims and resources. The map on the next page sets out their different features.

  Effective public campaigns must be able to mobilise their supporters – both digitally and in the real world. Collecting ‘likes’ or signatures usually fails to bring about real change and is easy to dismiss as clicktivism. Public campaigning requires ‘deeper’ forms of engagement. Yet converting digital attention into meaningful action is not easy. The exercise risks sliding back into the old trap of powerlessness: people may end up passively taking in a campaign rather than acting upon it. The internet has made it easier than ever to find other, like-minded individuals, but it is also makes it harder to join together in a common goal. We send out more noise than signal. The very same (digital) tools that ought to empower us end up controlling our lives instead.

  © Alberto Alemanno

  Campaigning, like any other avenue, demands a targeted approach and a careful choice of the tools that will best promote your aims. To make things even more challenging, media exposure is becoming harder to control. Information jumps between networks. A campaign you may have prepared for one audience and one purpose may be accessed by a completely different set of people. This is often described as ‘context collapse’: an infinite number of contexts collapse into a single moment of content creation, be it a blog post or a video.39 While this means your message can reach almost anyone, it also makes it vulnerable.

  For a more detailed look at digital campaigning tools, see Step 7: Communication.

  TIP 13 – When to Launch an Online Petition

  Official petitions vs unofficial petitions: the things to consider

  Official petitions are procedurally constrained, unofficial are not. As a result, their geographic, policy and target scope is virtually limitless. However, the official ones generally guarantee a response from public authorities. The unofficial do not.

  Official petitions do not allow their creators to contact or mobilise the signatories to urge them to take more action. Unofficial ones do.

  From an internal management perspective, it is easier to rely on unofficial platforms as they provide you with many opportunities to engage your supporters and take further action. However, their support won’t be immediately channelled into a formal procedure.

  STEP 5: Pick Your Allies

  ‘A single bracelet does not jingle.’

  Congolese proverb

  ‘You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for people to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.’

  A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

  Once you have your positional maps and an overall lobbying plan, you should be able to work out whom to contact in order to persuade them to join you. There are several advantages in building a coalition around your issue: the more diverse your team, the greater its reach. But coalitions can have downsides, especially when they extend to professional organisations whose staff are – unlike you – paid for doing their job.

  The most important reason to build a coalition is that it will have a greater impact. The more broad-based your coalition, the more likely you are to attract policymakers’ attention. We live in increasingly polarised societies in which issues that are promoted (or merely supported) by one side of the political divide are often automatically opposed by the other. However, if you can attract bipartisan political support, your chances of success will inevitably increase. And the more supporters you manage to mobilise, the deeper your outreach will be. This is because by mobilising more actors, you boost your opportunities to appeal to people who relate to the issue, or who are influential in their own communities. For example, in my alcohol marketing campaign, we could team up exclusively with like-minded health promotion organisations, or we could widen our base and encourage associations for the victims of car accidents and domestic violence to get on board.

  Be open-minded. Companies may and should be brought on board if they can add value without undermining the legitimacy of your campaign. For this reason, you should consider putting together a cross-sectoral coalition (often defined as an ‘unconventional’ coa
lition), involving people and organisations from the business community, the public sector and other NPOs. It might be the right time for you to approach companies to test their appetite for supporting your lobbying action. In their drive for social responsibility, a few companies like Mary Kay, Royal Dutch Shell and General Motors are leveraging their deep pockets, government contacts and powers of persuasion for the greater good.40 While it is NPOs that typically promote social issues, as Kyle Peterson and Marc Pfitzer explain, corporations, ‘with their carefully cultivated connections, wider lobbying leeway and proficiency in influence, are often better equipped to make the case for stopping domestic violence, improving safety on the roads, thwarting climate change and fostering economic development – to name just a few social change efforts.’41

  A growing number of companies are trying to prove that corporate advocacy need not always be self-interested. If your cause aligns with their corporate social responsibility efforts, they might be willing to get on board.

  Mary Kay Inc., a large marketing and direct sales company that sells cosmetics products, is an example of a company that has used its contacts in government to lobby for good. Since the 1980s, it has worked to protect women from violence in the United States by focusing on domestic violence prevention programmes. Rather than just making donations, the company has lobbied the US government for more than $500 million in additional federal funds to combat domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. As well as teaching its cosmetics’ sales force about the issue, the company has educated legislators about domestic violence through its lobbying department. Combined with the advocacy of dozens of other groups, including many NPOs, Mary Kay’s efforts paid off: President George W. Bush signed the extra funds into law in January 2006.