What we can learn from the LGBTQ movement’s 50 years of achievement
Despite pain, loss, disruption and grave threats, the LGBTQ movement — decade after decade — launched new campaigns for more advanced goals and won.
Topic
Campaign Strategy
Resources to enable groups to plan effective campaigns and other social change projects. These tools will help you assess the social and political situation, identify opportunities, map stakeholders, develop clear objectives, and come up with creative and powerful tactics.
You will find additional strategy guidance and inspiration in the case studies section.
Climate Resistance Handbook: Or, I was part of a climate action. Now what?
If you’re wondering how to build a powerful movement that can make big wins for climate action, then this is your guide – the Climate Resistance Handbook by Daniel Hunter from 350.org
TED talk: What the gay rights movement learned from the civil rights movement
TED talk about the overlaps & tensions between the gay rights & the civil rights movements & how the 2 struggles intertwine and propel each other forward.
Campaign Strategy Planning Template
This planning template prompts you to apply a number of different campaign strategy, community organising, and civil resistance concepts and tools. Copy the template into your own document. As you complete each section delete the instructions (text in italics) until you have your own plan, or initial document to discuss in your organisation.
Elements of Campaign Strategy
This overview of campaign strategy elements is offered to clarify language shared by campaigners. The elements include campaign focus and goals; vision; situational analysis; critical path analysis; organisational considerations; allies, constituents and targets; objectives; tactics; evaluation and success indicators.
The Building Power Guide
The Building Power guide is for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who want to change the world. It includes several training resources to build capacity for campaigning, such as explorations of change-making, power, strategy and leadership development.
198 Methods of Nonviolent Action
Stuck in a rut when it comes to campaign tactics? Explore Gene Sharp’s 198 methods of nonviolent action which are classified into three categories: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation (social, economic, and political), and nonviolent intervention.
Tactics analysis
A process guide to be used in training workshops and planning sessions to develop campaign strategy. Activists often love our tactics! We can even be wedded to our favourite tactics. Here’s a tool to help move from tactics to a larger strategy conversation by analysing tactics.
Networked Change
Directed-network campaigns combine self-organized people power with enough centralized structure to focus on clear political and cultural targets. The Networked Change Report maps out the strategies and practices that made today’s most successful advocacy campaigns work.
Frameworks for Winning Change
Social change can be messy and challenging work! It helps to have frameworks to make sense of the situations we find ourselves in and plan for the way ahead. This article outlines four models, by Martin Luther King, Jr, George Lakey, Bill Moyer and Tim Gee.
Moving The Rock: Shifting Power for Sustained Change
This article explores the ‘moving the rock’ concept put forward by Daniel Hunter in his book Strategy and Soul. The concept has been valuable for campaigners and organisations reassessing their theory of change and particularly how they engage politicians and supporters.
Critical-path analysis: Process Guide
A process guide to be used in training workshops and planning sessions to develop campaign strategy. Critical path analysis can shift focus to outcomes rather than tactics and provide experience and skill in defining clear objectives. The process also deepens understanding about how change happens and clarifies key threads running through a campaign.
Time to move the rock
A follow up article from a workshop presented at Progress 2015 by Holly Hammond and Sam La Rocca with a video presentation from Daniel Hunter. The workshop explored Daniel’s metaphor ‘politicians are like a balloon tied to a rock’.
Tactical Timeline Guide
A process guide to be used in training workshops and planning sessions to develop campaign strategy. A tactical timeline can support the development of a strategy designed to win over third-party support. This exercise needs to be used after the spectrum of allies exercise. It can also be used to enrich a critical path.
Power Mapping Guide
A process guide to be used in training workshops and planning sessions to help campaigners consider the social and political context within which they are developing strategy and creatively consider allies, opponents, targets and constituents prior to embarking on a campaign.
How to cut the issue into bite sized chunks
A process guide to be used in training workshops and planning sessions to develop campaign strategy. This process will help reduce the scope of campaigns in order to focus efforts on where change can really be achieved, and consider the possible consequences of working on one part of a problem rather than others.
Campaign Strategy Guide
Social movements become more powerful as more people are equipped to analyse their political context, consider paths to change and mindfully plan tactics. This Campaign Strategy Guide equips activist educators to facilitate a range of participatory exercises with activists, organisers and citizens. It can also be used as a do-it-yourself guide for campaigners.
Campaigning to Solve Our Issues
This is an introduction to campaigning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Campaigning involves activating, mobilising, and organising people to make change and influence others to make change. This is an excerpt from Building Power: A Guide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Who Want to Change the World.
Problem tree analysis: Visual workshop resource
This exercise is used to analyse the root causes of a problem and to identify the primary consequences. The tree provides a visual structure for the analysis
This is an Uprising
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.