Campaigning v Lobbying

Recently I was asked about my approach to political campaigning and lobbying.   As the question was asked well after my bedtime, the answer probably sounded incoherent. So, in case I am asked it again, here is the less sleep deprived version.

If you are serious about campaigning, you are going to have a worn out copy of Chris Rose’s ‘How to win campaigns: Communication for Change’.

I am surprised at how few campaigners and lobbyists have read this ‘bible’. 

When asked about campaigning, I simply resort to going back to the source and reading it out loud.  When the original is so good, why bother adapting it?

I am a lobbyist and campaigner. I do a lot less campaigning today than I did. Instead, I spend a lot of time playing defence.

Campaigning is vital to get the issue on to the political agenda. Lobbying is vital to get the idea you are campaigning for into the statute book.

 

My simple lobbying checklist

As a lobbyist, I look to chunk things down into this simple checklist:

1. is there a clear issue
2. is there  a clear solution
3. is there a  convincing story/case
4. is the story/case understandable to an official and politician
5. are there resources at hand to get the issue adopted – this can take 2-3 years
6. is there an opportunity to raise the issue
7. is there supporting evidence
8. is there supporting  text: policy, legislative and legal text
9. are there political allies to co-opt your agenda
10. is there political support within the Commission to table the proposal
11. is there political support within the European Parliament and the Member States to adopt it
12. is there a legislative or policy opportunity to have your issue tabled

The fewer questions you can answer objectively as yes the less your chances of success.

Most capaigns fail

As Rose notes  ‘most campaigns fail’ (page 1). This is important. 

There is plenty of campaigns that never really get off the ground. They tend to fail because they have a bad strategy, the facts don’t support the message, or they no resources or skilled campaigners to execute the campaign.

Many political campaigns fail because they don’t achieve their end game. The endpoint should at the least be changing the law or policy. If the campaign does not succeed in getting the law or policy changed, it failed.

A lot of people must revel in the sweet taste of failure. I found the taste bitter.  Getting your issues taken up in an amendment but not adopted into the final law is a failure. Not getting the change you worked for is a failure.  

Failure is not a bad thing. From it, you learn a lot. Indeed, you are going to need a lot of resilience to failure to make it in campaigning. Your win v loose rate is going to be skewed to loosing for the first few years. 

That campaigns fail is not a bad thing.  I’ve learned a lot from loosing. It teaches you not to repeat it. 

 I recommend, whether win or lose,  you perform a brutal autopsy at the end of the campaign. Look at what went well and what did not. Success – and failure –  leave clues. If you want to increase your chances of winning next time, it’s good to focus on what works 

Strangely, hardly anyone does this.

 

What’s is in a Campaign

‘Campaigns mostly involve communication: a conversation with society’ …. ‘ It’s about borrowing power from the public, in the public interest’ (Rose, page 1)

It’s about harnessing the public’s will to change actions,  corporate or government decisions, policies and laws. 

At times it looks like PR – it’s about persuading people – but PR looks to sell something, or make a something or somebody look better.

‘Campains are wars of persuasion’.  It’s not about issue expertise. Most organisations are full of issue experts.  Issue experts usually can’t campaign. They are often dreadful communicators outside their narrow circle. 

What a campaign is  not 

• PR
• Media Strategy
• Social Media Strategy
• Issue Management 
• Report launch

What’s your campaign communication strategy

A good campaign communication strategy needs to be:

1. Keep it short and simple;
2. Be Visual;
3. Create events;
4. Tell stories about real people;
5. Be proactive – don’t just respond
6. Get your communication in the right order; and
7. Communicate in the agenda of the outside world – don’t export the internal agenda, plan, jargon or ‘message’

(Rose, p.4)

By that checklist, there is very little campaigning happening in Brussels. 

Campaigning compared to advocacy

Rose contends that the difference campaigning and advocacy is public engagement. 

Lobbying is focused on getting the law or policy changed and adopted.  It is rarely played out in the public gaze.

I  use the toolbox of campaigning and lobbying, sometimes together, often quite distincly.

There are many campaigners who don’t know how to get their issue taken up into a new law or policy. There are a lot more lobbyists who can’t campaign, or communciate in public. There are a few who operate in both camps, but they are not many.

Your campaign checklist

Rose produces a helpful checklist about a campaign ideally needs. I have the following  creased in my wallet, and on my moments of tiredeness, used  to make sure my brain is seeing straight:

‘1. Be multidimensions: communicationg in all the dimesnions of human understanding and decision-making. Political, emtional, economic, spirutal, pyschological, tecnical, scientific, maybe more. 

2. Engageve by providing agency – it needs to give its supporters greater power over their own lives. It must be credible, feasible, and an attarctive way to make a new and addittional difference.

3. Have moral legitimavy, which it gets not by whom it represents but by a meeting of a need. Campaigners and their supproters have to be convinced the camaign is needed to make something in society that ought to be happening but that is not. The more widely shared this feeling becomes, the greater the moral authorutiy of the campaign and the mre that can be done. Most campaigns are planned in the mind, won in the people’s hearts and rationalised in the mind.

4. Provoke a conversation in society. I say they provle a conversation rather than conduct it because, to be really effective, campaigns often need society to rething its views and actions on a particular issue.

5. Have verve, elan, infectios energy. It may feed aspirations, or provide security but, alove all, it needs an inspired vanguaged. If your campaign doesn’t exvite you, then it probably won’t engage others.

6. Be strategic. It must plan a way to assemble enough forces to change what it wants to change. …

7. Be communicable, first verbally, as a story …second, visually.’  (page 11, Rose).

This checklist  helps identify if you have a  campaign or something else.  Against this checklist, most efforts fall short. What’s actually being done is  PR, issue management, media or social media engagement,  public affairs, but it’s not campaigning. 

Most industry find it hard to deal with a well prepared, executed, and resourced campaign against them.  If you read Rose closely enough, how an industry can effectively respond to a campaign jumps out.  Most have not read Chris Rose.