Lobbying for Change

by Alberto Alemanno

  Remember the effectiveness of citizen lobbying depends on adequately exploiting the news media in order to project their influence into the public and legislative agenda.

  TIP 17 – How Readable is Your Press Release?

  To ensure your press release is fit for purpose, make sure the headline and one-sentence statement summing up your storyline have covered all the five Ws: Who, Why, What, When and Where. If it doesn’t, start again. Depending on the complexity of your issue, you might consider including a few notes on the back of your one-page document targeting journalists. These extra lines may give you the opportunity to share more information and details about the rationale of your action. Never forget that this is your chance to get people interested in your issue, and you don’t want to waste it.

  Prep for an Interview

  Interview requests are generally unexpected, but they shouldn’t catch you unprepared. Make sure you have ‘talking points’ prepared, so you remain in control of the message you want to convey. Use your press release and stick to it so as to avoid inconsistency and confusion. You need to be prepared and ready to look more knowledgeable than the interviewer; that’s where you can score points. If the journalist wants you to take a stance on a difficult or controversial point raised by your opponent, be proactive. Don’t let the interviewer box you into in a corner. You have a few options: if you feel like it, you can give a quick answer then move on to what you want to talk about; another, bolder option is to undermine the factual content of the question and provide your take. A final and less desirable approach is to avoid responding to it entirely by quickly switching to: ‘Well, the real question is…’ Being proactive is generally the best way to save you from embarrassment. We all know how frustrating it is when politicians avoid answering questions directly!

  What you should never do is lie. It will inevitably backfire, and you risk losing control of your issue, weakening it and threatening the work of the many people who believe in it.

  TIP 18 – Mock Interview

  Interviews are expected to be tough. The audience, especially your opponents, will want to see you grilled by the interviewer. Be prepared! Do a mock interview. Ask one of your colleagues to act as the interviewer (you can draw up a list of tough questions) and make sure they give you a hard time. Be ready to record yourself, watch it back and look at what works and which bits need fine-tuning.

  Digital Campaigning

  The internet has transformed civic engagement and activism and become a vital new avenue of political engagement. For the citizen lobbyist, it is a low-cost channel which allows you to control the quality and quantity of information and organise it in various formats. It enables you, your group and the public to communicate much more easily.

  This makes digital campaigning a key asset for you.

  Far more people are exposed to political content online than ever participate in offline politics and activism. Digital engagement is fundamentally different, too: it is proactive rather than passive. So it is conducive to political engagement. Connecting with others is inherently empowering, and the links and collaborations the internet enables us to make have the potential to boost civic life. Many people believe social media is improving the democratic process by encouraging more open discussion and greater access to public debate.

  Yet this is not always the case. Despite its potential to democratise the political space, the increasing sophistication of apps and online marketing tools can end up limiting our reach. Facebook and Snapchat allow a much more diverse group of people to post on social media. But there is a big difference between posting updates to friends and family, and sharing rich media aimed at a wider public. Nonetheless, while some people are still excluded from the digital revolution, social media are powerful tools – and they can bring the experiences of the marginalised into the mainstream.

  The essential online tools for any digital campaign are:

  Email

  Social media

  Online advertising

  Email

  Email is the tool of choice when it comes to mobilising supporters and raising money. It boasts the highest consistent response rate of any digital medium. Yet it isn’t for everyone. Given its intrusive nature, you need to seek your contacts’ permission in order to contact them by email. Apps such as MailChimp let you effectively handle and manage significant number of contacts (see Tip 19 below). Text messages have an even higher effective open rate, but are still more intrusive.

  Social Media

  While email might be the most powerful medium for your digital campaign, it can’t do everything. Emailing is private. If someone takes action by following up one of your emails, that exchange is only visible to you and them. Social media, on the other hand, offers a public stage where your supporters’ enthusiasm can inspire their friends and family to join in. In that respect, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram score higher than email in terms of engagement.

  Moreover, emailing has limits: at some point you will run out of contacts to email. On social media, however, you can post all day long, which gives you constant opportunities to keep your supporters engaged, motivated and involved. If you offer them good content, they will spread the word and do your outreach for you.

  Although you should be rightly wary of social media platforms controlled by corporations driven by profit rather than a belief in civic participation, social media can still empower you.

  Online Advertising

  Online advertising includes not only email marketing, mobile advertising and social media marketing, but also many types of display advertising, such as banner ads. Like ‘conventional’ advertising, it frequently involves both a publisher (who integrates advertisements into its online content) and an advertiser (who provides the advertisements to be shown there). Technology now lets us target ads based on users’ demographic characteristics and recent online behaviour. Admittedly, none of this is free. But online ads are no longer just the prerogative of large corporations. Facebook and Twitter ads are relatively easy to buy, as are ads on Google Search. DIY advertising platforms exist that can help you devise a digital campaign on social media, and buy banner ads or even video ads targeted directly at potential supporters.

  TIP 19 – Do-It-Yourself Digital Campaign

  The sheer number of email, social media and online marketing platforms can be overwhelming. The easiest way to get started is to open an account with one of the platforms offering these features:

  Customisable email templates that allow you to design an email in line with your branding and communication strategy;

  Personalisation, with your contact’s name in the subject line and throughout the email;

  Analytics to track open rates, click-through rates and overall newsletter success;

  Integration with your social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

  My preferred email marketing platform is MailChimp. It is free for up to 2,000 contacts. You can easily import your past contacts and feed in new ones, even from your own website. MailChimp allows you to preview what your email will look like in any browser and email service before you send it. It’s important to test this in order to make sure it looks good no matter where and how the subscriber reads it.

  Blogging

  The grassroots, low-cost nature of blogging makes it a particularly good medium for citizen lobbying. Less static and formal than websites and newsletters, blogs are a great way to express your point of view about your issue and promote the work you are doing. The lengthier format allows you to go into more depth than most other types of social media permit – yet you can publish new material immediately, and much more quickly than you can do with a traditional newsletter.

  You can either set up and run your own blog (see Tip 20) or get your posts published by an existing blog. You can even do both to maximise circulation.

  Publishing blog posts on your own site can also improve its search engine optimisation (SEO) ranking – the order in which y
our link pops up in a search engine.

  Blogs can have tremendous influence on public opinion. It was thanks to a post we ran on a couple of blogs that a New York Times journalist approached us and eventually decided to run a story about our citizen lobbying work calling for reform of the EU Court of Justice.

  Blogging can be used by citizen lobbyists in a number of different ways:

  To present your issue and proposed solution to the public;

  To build an audience around your issue;

  To popularise your work and make it accessible to a wider audience;

  To monitor and report on new developments;

  To keep your followers and supporters informed;

  To reflect on how to make progress with people who have experience of similar campaigns.

  Regardless of your aim, blogging is an increasingly important skill to have. And it can be an excellent way of getting your issue in front of the media while allowing you to remain in control.

  ACTIVITY 10 – Blogging

  Put together a one-page blog post discussing your issue. Publishing it is not required. You may just want to circulate it among friends and colleagues to get feedback. You can do so by email or through social media.

  TIP 20 – Set Up Your Blog

  Free hosting sites like WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger make blogs easy to set up and manage. Many design templates are available to manage the blog’s appearance and you can pick one to suit your issue and target audience. Blogs can also be hosted on your own website or that of your organisation. Once you have one up and running, make sure you update it regularly – an outdated blog is no use at all. There’s not optimal frequency, but a weekly update seems to be common practice. Followers of the blog can sign up to receive new posts when they appear. You can also manage all your followers via MailChimp or another email management site.

  Communication Events

  While digital dominates the advocacy communication efforts today, offline advocacy should not be underestimated. Events are another way to boost your media campaign. You might organise a press conference, a sit-in or a meet-up for volunteers who want to help your cause. Meet-ups can take many forms: an ice-breaker (a chance for volunteers to get to know one another), a world café (a structured conversation meant to facilitate frank discussion, and link ideas within a larger group to access the collective intelligence in the room), a hackathon (collaborative computer programming), or an unconference (an open, participatory workshop-event in which the participants provide the content). For example, your network could kick off with an ice-breaker for participants to get to know each other. It could continue with a world café (sometimes called coffee projects) for a collective reflection, then move on to a hackathon or coding-party (to come up with software) or a flash-mob (for artistic purposes). When you need to feed people, you could organise a ‘Disco Soup’ – ask your supporters to bring vegetable knives and peelers, get hold of fresh food that would otherwise go to waste, turn on the music and get cooking.51

  Events like these can help you get your issue in the public eye and mobilise large numbers of people. While a sit-in is generally associated with protesting, events such as hackathons provide a unique opportunity to not only get supporters together but also work on a solution to your issue.

  STORY – Burkini Ban

  After some French seaside towns banned the ‘burkini’ – a beachwear garment worn by Muslim women that covers most of the body apart from the face, hands and feet – dozens of British women held a protest outside the French embassy in London in the summer of 2016. Having created a makeshift beach party with tonnes of sand, beach balls and lilos, the demonstrators held up banners criticising the bans. A protest was also held in Berlin. France’s High Court lifted the ban shortly afterwards when a human rights organisation took the judicial avenue. Although the decision applied to one of the many French cities on the Riviera that had introduced the ban, the High Court decision is set to lift it completely.

  STEP 8: Face-to-Face Meeting

  This is the moment you’ve been waiting for! When your lobbying target invites you, or agrees to meet with you, face-to-face, it feels like a breakthrough. Meeting policymakers in person is the essence of citizen lobbying, and is a vital and ground-breaking moment for your campaign. The meeting is both your opportunity to connect with the decision-maker, and their chance to learn about your issue. Without all your earlier work, coalition-building and communication efforts, you would probably never have made it this far. But don’t take this moment for granted. You need to be prepared for it, even though sometimes you might end up talking to an assistant rather than the decision-maker themselves.

  Who to Meet

  By now, you have mapped all relevant stakeholders and identified your lobbying targets. Your job is to approach the latter, as they are the ones who have the power to bring about change.

  So, if you want to support or oppose a proposed law, you must target all the elected representatives (including its opponents) who are going to vote on it. You need to identify the members of the relevant parliamentary (or governmental) committees, as these are the people with the authority to initiate, oppose or even vote on the issue. If, on the other hand, you are lodging a request for access to documents, an administrative complaint or a legal action, you will have to respect the procedures for that particular avenue. Sometimes, a face-to-face meeting is not automatically granted, but can be requested. This is often the case in administrative procedures such as complaints to the ombudsman. You can also ask the relevant people to meet you informally. Public officials tend to be keen to meet, as you can give them useful information that helps them to decide on your issue.

  In a legislative process, you want to meet as many elected representatives as possible. In an administrative or political procedure, you will do better to target the key actors. The American DREAM activists (see page 100) successfully met and lobbied Senators John McCain and Harry Reid as part of their campaign. Sometimes you might even consider keeping quiet about your meeting so as not to put too much pressure on the people involved.

  The Approach

  Once you have identified the key actors, the next step is to approach them. Sometimes the publicity you have generated around your issue may land you an invitation. Generally, though, it will be you who has to take the first step. This means picking up the phone, sending an email and/or leveraging some friends or contacts you have in common so as to arrange a meeting. By now, you are well placed to ask for a meeting: you have done your research and condensed it into a factsheet, you have built a coalition that will give your demand more credibility, and you have publicised the issue, which ideally will have brought it to the attention of the people that matter.

  Make sure to prepare the initial approach with the same care as you would take before the actual meeting. Consider what information to share with the decision-makers before meeting them. Should you send them the factsheet, the press release or just a cover message? This depends on how well they know the issue. The more they already know about it, the more detailed and to the point your pre-meeting information should be.

  You must also consider the information that you want to share during the meeting. Bring several extra copies of your factsheet and press release as well as any informative or policy materials you might have prepared. If your campaign has produced a pen, T-shirt or toy, bring them along too: they might entertain your hosts while giving the impression of professionalism. Merchandise or freebies like these tend to stick around in the office of the people you meet.

  What surprises my students and fellow citizen lobbyists most is how easy it is to secure a meeting with an elected representative or an official. We regularly pay visits to the European Parliament as well as to national parliaments. While we are often invited to present our work to committees, sometimes we ask both members of parliament and officials to meet us. I often say – to my students’ and colleagues’ surprise – that it is the duty of politicians and civil servants to
meet us, fellow citizens, when doing their jobs. My students’ surprise about their welcome speaks volumes about the dire state of our democracies. Meeting officials should be perfectly normal, yet the vast majority of us assume it must be difficult.

  Prep the Meeting

  You’ve made it! Your name is in the busy diary of your chosen decision-maker. All your efforts were rewarded. Since you’ve worked hard to get all the way here, don’t waste it. Revisit your factsheet, prepare a few talking points and be ready to connect with the person you’re speaking to.

  How do you do this? Empathy – the ability to read people by placing yourself in another’s position – will help. Everyone can develop this kind of emotional intelligence.52 Start by asking yourself: Why should they be interested in my issue? What’s in it for them? Who is supporting whom? Who is (or might be) unhappy if they follow me? Where is the resistance? These questions might seem obvious, but they are not easy to answer. Sometimes your cleverest opponent may look like a supporter, but he is not supportive at all. He’s just smart and knows how to play the meeting game.

  Carefully reading people can also help you understand the conflicts that exist in a group. Often these conflicts have nothing to do with your issue or the proposed solution discussed at the meeting. Generally, hidden conflicts and tensions can be traced to very human dynamics: who is allowed to influence whom, the hierarchy among elected representatives and career civil servants, internal wrangling and even personal relationships. Learning how to be empathetic may help you decipher some of these subtle power struggles, and as a result you will be able to spot and manage them.