Kyinzom Dhongdue from Australian Tibet Council shares the story of a campaign win and the lessons that can be taken from it. The country’s oldest university cancelled a talk by the Dalai Lama. Within a week, the University of Sydney backtracked and released a hasty statement welcoming His Holiness on campus in June. The short campaign shows the value of rapid response people power tactics.
Aidan Rickett’s The Activists’ Handbook is a powerful guide to grassroots activism. Naomi Blackburn reviews the early chapters of the book which are particularly relevant to Theories of Change.
Getting clear on our theory of change can be personally empowering as well as important for alignment within organisations and campaigns. These notes are from a workshop by Naomi Blackburn, drawing on the Resource Manual for a Living Revolution and Australian Student Environment Network curriculum.
Denisse Sandoval shares insights from Amanda Tattersall’s book Power in Coalition: Strategies for Strong Unions and Social Change. We may have seen token coalitions with simple community support in the form of logos on letter heads, but how do we build real power to live out the values of the organisations involved in alliances?
Insights from the history of unemployed activism. Includes an overview of the history of Australia’s welfare system and stories from the 1920s, 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s – plus creative, humorous and confrontational tactics.
Joel Dignam reviews Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s ‘The Starfish and the Spider’. The book delves into ideas and language around decentralisation with useful examples from history, social movements and commerce. It also includes practical tips for putting decentralisation into practice.
Joel Dignam analyses two campaign moments: Stop Adani’s targeting of the ALP in the 2018 Queensland state election and the UK women’s suffrage campaign targeting of Liberals in 1905. The lesson? Target those most likely to give you what you want, and sometimes that means creating political risk for them.
The Mobilisation Cookbook is a guide to answer (almost) everything you wanted to know about “people-powered” campaigns at Greenpeace but were afraid to ask. Developed for Greenpeace staff, volunteers, and allies, this guide will help anyone cook up effective people-powered campaigns.
Is your campaign about people, or staff? Distributed, or centralised? This worksheet outlines six factors to think about when analysing how ‘open’ your campaigns are, from the participants of MobLab’s Open Campaigns Camp.
An overview of the tools and tactics Greenpeace offices around the world use to ensure their office teams are working seamlessly together. Explore by Country/Region and Trait to find the successful practices or “bright spots” highlighting ongoing experiments in team integration.
Bring People Power into your next campaign or project with MobLab’s online course. Based on the Mobilisation Cookbook, drawing on Greenpeace’s expertise, the free course covers core elements of a ‘people-powered’ campaign, when to use them and what to mix them with. Based on real-life campaign examples, you’ll also cover practical tools needed to create your own campaigns.
Whether you are looking to recruit members or talking to voters in far-flung electorates, these are some basic guidelines for getting the most out of phone conversations.
Can’t find a photographer for your event? Want a new designer for a project? Looking to rebrand? Need some rapid-response campaign design work done? The Australian Progress crowd-sourced register of creative industry providers is a great place to start.
Looking for the right supplier for your organisation’s custom-printed products can be time consuming. Australian Progress has searched the internet far and wide to compile a list of miscellaneous suppliers so you don’t have to.
Some rules, principles and tips for how to successfully set up a remote office and have staff working in diverse locations around the nation (or the world!), synthesised from best practice around the OPEN Network.
Exit interviews (the interviews you have with outgoing staff) are really important, but you only get as much out of them as you’re willing to put in. Here are some guiding principles, and questions to get the interview started.
360 degree reviews are a helpful survey tool for peer-to-peer staff evaluations. Here are a set of stock questions that are often used, with an important mix of quantitative and qualitative questions.
Primark, the international clothing chain, famously does not have an online store. So when EU-wide campaigning organisation WeMove chose to target Primark in a sustainability campaign, they started by launching a parody site.
Sam Mclean was National Director of GetUp for three years, and he learned a lot about leadership and campaigns. Here are 10 pearls of wisdom he delivered at a presentation to Campact in 2015.
Advice that can easily be adapted to your needs whether it’s meeting with an MP (or Senator) yourself or helping your members do it.