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.
At Progress 2017, GetUp!’s Shen Narayanasamy shared the strategy and critical lessons learnt during campaign work to protect the rights of people seeking asylum. To be effective the campaign needed to engage many different stakeholders across the movement and centre the lived experience of people most impacted.
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.
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.
Accelerate the campaign planning process with this toolkit to get campaigns out the door faster to create more effective campaigns.
5 tools to help you plan your campaign strategy including templates on calls to action, ladder of engagement, timelines, team culture, campaign canvas…
3 tools to test early versions of campaign ideas with target audiences starting with deciding on what to prototype. These tools are by Mobilisation Lab.
6 tools for creative idea generation for your next campaign by Mobilisation Lab e.g. mind maps, idea generation, picture prompts, prototypes, etc.
9 tools to deepen your understanding of the people you want to engage in campaigns e.g. personas, framing worksheet, questioning guide, by Mobilisation Lab.
7 tools for defining your campaign problem come from The Campaign Accelerator Toolkit by MobLab. Where will your campaign go? Which problems will you focus on solving?
This Context Map template allows a team to foster a collective understanding of the overall context in which a campaign is happening.
Use this worksheet template to determine how you will talk about your campaign to inspire and motivate people to take action.
Drill down into the root cause of a problem a campaign aims to address. Shift focus from the event into underlying societal structures.
Use this Engagement Pyramid to visualise the different ways a person might get involved with your campaign.
From vision and strategy to storytelling and metrics, this template ensures you’ve touched on all the essentials of an effective campaign.
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.
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.
The “8-Fold Path” is a list of eight operating principles for building a progressive people’s movement in the 21st century. It is used by all the members of the OPEN Network, which includes organisations around the world like GetUp (Australia), MoveOn (United States), and Campact (Germany).
Trying to get your campaign moving fast and need your thoughts in one place? This is a simple template for designing an advocacy campaign that should help.