The struggle between the developers of unconventional gas (coal seam, shale and tight gas), farmers and communities has struck a chord with people all over the country and has rightly been referred to by Lock the Gate as ‘the fastest growing social movement in the country’. This short case study shares some of the keys to success of the LTG approach.
The story of how GetUp successfully organised in the seat of Bass to remove sitting MP Andrew Nikolic at the 2016 federal election. Lessons include the power of mixing online and offline; the power of mixing local with national; and have the local lead the national.
Joel Dignam reviews Paul and Mark Engler’s 2016 book This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century. TIAU is an analysis of social change, how it has occurred, and how contemporary campaigners may make it occur again.
“Personalized political communication” refers to when the medium for a message is a person, not media such as television, pamphlets, or billboards. The electoral arms race is seeing a renaissance of PPC and greater engagement of voters in campaigns and the political process.
Joel Dignam reviews Hahrie Han’s How Organizations Develop Activists. A key finding of Han’s research is that high-engagement organizations practise both organizing and mobilizing. The Voice for Indi campaign is considered as an Australian example of combining these two approaches.
The Greensboro student sit-ins had nonviolence at their heart and succeeded, not only in their immediate goal, but also in building a lasting organisation in the SNCC. It stands now as yet another example of the successful use of nonviolence to stand against oppression.
The Your Rights at Work campaign ran from 2005 to 2007 and included some of the largest mobilisations in Australian social movement history. This article draws out some of the lessons in relation to ensuring strong turn-out at rallies and other events.
Nonviolent direct action can play a powerful role in campaigns. This article summarises some of the characteristics that can make NVDA either effective or ineffective, and encourages the use of clear tactics criteria in developing campaign strategy.
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.
Occupy Melbourne case study shares some of the lessons from Occupy Melbourne & why more effective skill-sharing would have made a difference.
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.
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.
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.
Decentralised, grassroots-led digital campaigning has taken off in the last decade. This report looks at the impact these campaigns are having, what lessons we can learn from them about success, and what these new campaigns platforms mean for the future of social change.
This MobLab report examines innovative volunteer engagement work by 35 organisations empowering people to scale change and win by learning and doing more. Featuring video and audio from the practitioners.
This 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.
Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Founder and former Executive Director of SumofUs, at Progress 2015 with a series of movement case studies challenging us to be technological innovators and to bring our social change work to the cutting edge of the current century.
Film can be one of the most powerful mediums for getting ordinary people interested in social change. Australian Progress has put together a crowd-sourced list of films that are about activists, advocates and social movements, or have in of themselves provided impetus for social change.
Examples from the UK, Europe and Australia of how maps have been used to effectively communicate complex data in campaigns.
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.