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Engaging the progressive grass-roots in the UK

admin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:19:27 +0000

The UK Labour Party have been widely decried as being on their last legs, out of ideas, dead ducks, etc. However, behind the scenes, a growing movement of vibrant progressives is building and organising. Much of it is being supported and encouraged by the Labour Party.

This rise of progressive online political action also coincides with the decline of the Tories polling – with Gordon Brown and Labour now in with a chance to win the election.

While I could talk about 38 Degrees (the UK version of Get Up! and Move On), the example that I really want to highlight is MyDavidCameron.com.

This is an example of Labour engaging with progressive grass-roots activists without trying to seize control. It challenges the traditional monopoly that the Tories have had on internet campaigning in the UK. MyDavidCameron taps into activists who aren’t necessarily pro-Labour, but who are deeply skeptical about David Cameron and the Tories, and do not want them elected.

CLARIFICATION (15/04/10): The MyDavidCameron website is independent of Labour, and was set up “by a left-leaning graphic designer… the Labour party quickly adopted its template.”

The point of my highlighting this is to show what can happen when a political party lets go control of their online space. They have successfully engaged with a group of online activists, who are now spreading the anti-Tory message. It’s a particularly simple, yet effective method, by asking progressive activists to come up with their own slogans to replace Tory propaganda.

This site shows that with political courage and risks comes great rewards. Remember – it could have all gone wrong. So kudos to the Labour strategists who had the foresight to allow this website to go ahead.

For a more detailed analysis, there’s a good article by WeAreSocial – a social media strategy company in the UK – who’ve written about MyDavidCameron.com.

Postscript: This blog post on MyDavidCameron.com shows the natural limit for this campaign, and also why it is probably most powerful during the 30 day campaign than necessarily the hard slog of continuous campaigning.

Oh, those naughty Tories. Stealing our ideas about co-ops (and messing them up in the process) was bad enough. But stealing our ideas about spoof posters (and messing them up in the process) is simply unpardonable.

Shortly after we spoofed the first Tory election poster, I acknowledged that this project had a limited shelf-life. And so the fact that the Tories are now trying to get in on the joke can only suggest one thing: we’ve reached our sell-by date.

There is a lot of talk in the online community on this site that most of the spoof posters have a shelf-life of 1-2 weeks at most. This seems to me to underline why this kind of campaign sight is most effective during the actual campaign period. It is during campaigns that most people become politically engaged, and there is also a large amount of Tory (or Liberal Party) material to spoof.

Despite this, the site was by all measures, a massive success. There are scores of spoofed posters, it received lots of mainstream media coverage, as well as coverage in blogs, Twitter and Facebook, and the website itself received over 250,000 unique visitors.

Five effective political lobbying tools for unions

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 04:41:09 +0000

Unions and union members are the largest voluntary associations in Australia, representing millions of workers in tens of thousands of work places. Legislation can have a profound impact on the rights and entitlements of working people, such as changes to occupational health and safety, tax, industrial relations, and trade and industry policy.

It is therefore entirely natural for unions and union members to lobby parliamentarians. Over the last few years, many unions have increasingly sent delegations of members to Canberra or State Parliaments to meet with key Members of Parliament, Ministers and advisors.

With the Federal election coming up this year, and state elections in Victoria in November 2010, it is timely to consider some effective lobbying tools. I’ve written here about two tips for union members to lobby their MPs – which is pretty general advice. Below are five more concrete tools for unions and union members to lobby their MPs.

1. Direct Contact

Direct contact covers a range of different tools, including letters, phone calls, emails, and faxes, urging a certain position on a specific issue.

Letters: Letters are fairly effective, but only if they are written by local constituents. Members of Parliament tend to ignore letters from people outside their electorates. They also tend to ignore “form letters” – since it is obvious that they are from the same campaign. Far better to get union members to write their own letters but provide “taking points” or an issue briefing so that members can easily see the main issues, but write the letter in their own words.
Phone calls: Again, phone calls are only valuable from constituents (this will be a theme), and it is unlikely that any callers will be able to personally speak to the MP. However, the electorate officers will take notes of calls, especially if there are lots of calls about the same issue. Unions considering this should provide talking points for their members, as well as some simple Q and As so that the members can rebut any party or government lines.
Emails: Email campaigning was originally thought of as revolutionary. Supposedly you could get hundreds or thousands of people to press a button and send an email to a boss or politician. However, recently it’s become clear that for email campaigns to succeed, the volume of emails must by truly massive. Eric Lee suggests that an email campaign needs a minimum of 5,000 or so emails, and from my experience in organising several email campaigns, this is about on the money. Politicians get so many emails that its easy for them to ignore email campaigns of any size except the truly massive. Filtering technology allows MPs to easily partition their inboxes to that it doesn’t impact their work. Similarly, by emailing MPs, Ministers or a boss, you hand over the contact details of your supporters. In several cases, I’m aware of Ministers and bosses emailing each of the protesters back with a carefully written rebuttal of the campaign. Unions should be aware of this eventuality and plan for a contingency. Nevertheless, email campaigns are great ways to build your email lists. Personal, custom written emails from your supporters are far more effective, and a letter has more power than an email.
Fax: This is a fairly old-school lobbying technique, and mass-fax campaigns do little except waste paper. I’ve spoken with several MPs who’ve been subject to fax campaigns, and in each case they advised me that their electorate officers disposed of the mass faxes. The net impact: zero.

The general advice, which is fairly standard, is that personal emails, letters and calls from constituents are more effective than form emails and letters. Phone calls are more effective than letters, which are more effective than emails. Faxes (in my view) are least effective.

2. Personal Intercepts

Personal contact is most effective of all. The contact need not be with the politician, but can be with their electorate officers and advisors. There are several places that this personal contact can occur: meetings in the MP’s electorate or parliamentary office, at fundraisers, debates, or public events like street-stalls or town-hall meetings. Unions in Australia can also try to make contact with Labor MPs or advisors at branch meetings or policy committee meetings.

This kind of contact can be either union members, or officials. In either case, the person making contact should be properly briefed on the issue, and, most importantly, seek some kind of commitment. This could be a formal meeting, a pledge (see below) or some kind of assistance or statement.

Contact can then be followed up – and the union should consider whether this follow up can be made public. For example, the union could write a letter to the local paper reporting on the meeting and any outcomes. They could write a blog post on their website. Or they could get the union member to call the local talk-back radio to recap the encounter. Of course, the union and union members should make sure that they are not revealing discussions that they undertook to keep confidential.

3. Pledges and Surveys

This is a tactic used often in the USA, and sometimes by conservative groups in Australia. They are surveys or pledge letters sent to MPs asking them for a public statement on their position on a particular issue.

The pledge can be useful for both political persuasions. For example, the union could send a pledge asking the candidate or MP to pledge that “I, candidate X, pledge not to vote to to remove the rights of working people…” If the candidate or MP responds in an unfavourable way (or does not respond at all), that is an opportunity to get some local news.

Similarly, MPs or candidates that respond positively can be future allies on that issue, and could be followed up with a letter or personal visit.

4. Social Media

I’ve written extensively on how unions can use social media. During elections, social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can be useful as both a media aggregator for campaign media stories, and also to disseminate key messages.

In my view, email is the most effective way to get your message out and to have supporters actually do something in the real world. Email is also useful in building a following on Facebook or Twitter. Analytics can ensure that you can see how effective your efforts are.

Importantly, social media is not a magical solution, but it can make a small campaign look much larger than it really is.

It is also useful platform to get free media. Political parties do this all the time by releasing a campaign advertisement on YouTube rather than on television. This ad nevertheless gets played on prime-time news, amplifying its effect much more than it ever would by itself. A key element to ads like this is production quality – the YouTube ads should be television quality in both sound and vision.

5. SMS/Text Messaging

Smart phones are becoming ubiquitous and almost everyone with a mobile phone knows how to send and receive text messages. The technology to use SMS effectively is also becoming affordable, giving supporters and union members instantaneous updates, event details, campaign messages and links to online campaign websites.

Similarly, unions can also encourage members to send text messages to MPs or bosses.

It boggles me that the ACTU Rights at Work campaign doesn’t have an iPhone app or apps for Android or Blackberry phones (UPDATE: I’m advised that work is being done on an iPhone and Android app – although there is not one currently). Similarly, I’m aware of no Australian political party with an iPhone app (although that’s the subject of another post).

Iphone apps for unions could have a range of uses, including making campaign videos and other media available on a member’s phone, as well as make facts and figures available immediately, and allow members to be directly “patched” to an MP’s office to have a phone conversation. Iphone apps could also allow union members to sign petitions and send emails on the go.

Most of the tools I’ve gone through here are fairly standard and mostly low-tech. I hope to see some innovation from the union movement, both in Australia and for the mid-term elections in the United States.

With most Australians online and owning mobile phones, even unions that cover blue collar industries, or low-paid service sectors will find that their members have regularly checked email addresses, Facebook accounts and oft-used SMS capable phones.

The problem of crowd-sourcing campaigns

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 06:04:36 +0000

I’ve written previously about a very successful grassroots campaign – Save VCA – and how it brought together a diverse group of people. A key element to the success of this campaign has been its coordination at an early stage.

There is a very interesting discussion about the No Clean Feed movement by Mark over at Larvatus Prodeo, discussing the limitations of the campaign so far:

It’s a bit of a case study on the limitations, as well as the benefits, of crowdsourced campaigning.

Alex Schlotzer, an ACTU online campaign officer and senior Greens Party member has a good analysis of the No Clean Feed movement to date:

The kind of fundamentals a campaign needs to sort out before launching into the next wave of protest emails; electronic petitions and rallies.

This isn’t about a brand, marketing, customers or what halo strategy should be employed; this is about cold, hard politics. It’s about finding the right kinds of messages and ensuring a focussed, evolving and sustained dialogue with Australians so they either get on board and help make their marginal MPs paranoid and/or they change their vote. (The first is probably easier to do since an election makes all MPs a little paranoid at the best of times.)

Then there has to be a coordinated effort of engaging and organising concerned Australians through a combination of online and off-line methods. What happens online and off-line should compliment each other.Â It is truly amazing that for so-called Internet geeks and social media professionals that what matters politically is totally ignored in favour of the fancy, pretty approach and more banging on (analysis some will call it) about the evils and flaws of Conroy’s Internet censorship regime. A lot has to be done to make sure that the Government doesn’t use a victory in the next federal election, as fodder (read “mandate”) to push through with something that only serves to further erode and impinge on our civil liberties and human rights.

Who cares which of the 4 (to-date) anti-internet-censorship website looks the best or is the most plugged in to web2.0 or SM, when the basics for any political campaign are forgotten at best and completely ignored at worst.

So before the Australian Interwebs embarks on its next un-coordinated and ill-conceived round of “campaigning” with poorly timed rallies, can there first be a single coordinating group formed, with a single focussed message and a real plan for political action?

I’ve seen today that Electronic Frontiers Australia, the online liberties group, have appointed Peter Black as a campaign manager for the No Clean Feed campaign (which will be getting a name change soon).

Peter Black is a lecturer and lawyer from Queensland. I wish him well, and hope that can turn the NCF movement into a organised, coordinated campaign.

Explaining cap and trade

admin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:21:33 +0000

An interesting little video from the creators of the Story of Stuff, this has an explanation of how “cap and trade” (emissions trading) works, and the major pitfalls with the system.

Unfortunately, the video is one of those preachy, moralising videos that is full of criticisms but no solutions. The closest it comes is proposing a “simple carbon tax”, without recognising that a carbon tax has as many policy hurdles as carbon trading (just look at tax avoidance and minimisation by big companies as it stands).

LabourStart Photo Competition

admin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:28:44 +0000

For all you inspired unionists out there, I strongly encourage you to enter the LabourStart Photo Competition.

It’s a great initiative, and there are already some really good photos that have been submitted.

This year I entered the photo you see here.

It’s a picture I took in December 2008 of a protest out the front of the Victoria University Council meeting in the Melbourne CBD, following the University’s announcement that it sacking hundreds of jobs.

Needless to say, there was an enormous outcry and public campaign to stop the job cuts – the largest ever in Australian university history. The job cuts were stopped, thanks to threats of industrial action by staff, and the community campaign that was run in support of staff and students at VU.

Link: Friends of VU.

Online social activism and Twitter

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:07:27 +0000

A large part of my job is online communications: blogs, social networking, and new fads like Twitter.

A big challenge is how to use these tools in a meaningful way to support the campaigning and organising activities of the union. How can we engage our members and supporters using the social networking tools they are comfortable with?

A new service, called Twitition (Twitter + Petition) may aid in this.

Twitition allows Twitter users to create and sign short petitions. These petitions can be easily re-Tweeted by friends and followers.

The goal of so many not-for-profits using the Internet and social networking is the Holy Grail of “viral”: a video, email, image or similar that takes on a life of its own and receives massive circulation.

A service like Twitition could help not-for-profits to make their campaigns go viral.

To experiment, I created a Twitition calling on Rudd and Gillard to abolish the ABCC. We’ll see how well that goes.