Campaign strategy and lobbying

So your employees go from meeting to meeting with policymakers, but change remains out of reach. And despite your best efforts, you’re struggling to make meaningful progress and influence policy. Navigating against the current can be a challenging, complex, and isolating task. That’s why we’re here: to help you work out a decent campaign strategy and lobby effectively.

Strategies and Leaders helps organisations define their campaign strategy. Because contrary to popular belief, campaigning isn’t just about raising awareness. A campaign strategy encompasses much more than just communication—you should also prioritise tactics, power-building, mobilisation, absorption, volunteer organisation, taking action, and forming alliances.

Here’s how we can help.

Step 1 - When to talk, when to fight

When you want to influence policy, flexible tactics are key. Let’s dive right into the most controversial aspect of campaign strategy: knowing when to talk it out, and when to put up a fight.

Many organisations rely on negotiating as their primary (and sometimes even their only) tactic. However, negotiations aren’t effective unless you’ve accumulated some power. And resistance only becomes meaningful when you’re sufficiently independent from a government.

Another controversial topic: power. We examine yours, and offer you an understanding of its diverse manifestations. We introduce you to the theoretical framework of power-building and match it against your organisation’s reality.

Step 2 - Tactics and campaign strategies

We map out the tactics your organisation currently uses and determine whether they form a cohesive entity. Does your organisation have a campaign strategy, or just a set of individual tactics?

We teach you the fundamentals of campaign strategy: how to get what you truly need to achieve your goal, building upon your existing resources.

Otherwise put: you learn how to set up a campaign that leads to more than passive public support. A campaign that fosters active mobilisation, volunteers, funding, and influential allies to boot.

Step 3 - Assumptions about change shape your strategy

Each individual harbours unconscious assumptions about realising social change. Some believe change arises from a significant number of individuals modifying their behaviour. Others are convinced we need to persuade the elite or government to adopt different policies. 

Worldwide, there are eight major streams of thought on how change is accomplished. We explain them to you in a single workshop. Because believe it or not, even in your organisation, these assumptions exist—even if they’re not always voiced. We make them explicit and facilitate a dialogue, offering our own insights and theoretical frameworks.

Finally, we determine which assumptions to adopt for your organisation. Each assumption has different consequences for your campaign strategy, and requires a different tactic.

Step 4 - Joining forces to build a sound campaign strategy

Crafting an effective campaign strategy can be rather complex. Think of it like playing chess: with each tactical move you make, you need to chart out the foreseeable reactions. This way, we automatically construct a framework of strategic escalation.

Together, we develop a campaign strategy for the issue you want to change. Guided by a designated ‘tactical North Star’, if you will, we select the tactics you want to employ for lobbying. We carefully consider your resources, while taking into account other elements as well: timing, message, tone, and target.

Success rarely comes from using one single tactic. To help you accumulate power, we create a campaign strategy made up of different tactics in a logical sequence.

Through power mapping, we chart out which stakeholders wield power. We direct our tactics towards enhancing or weakening their influence, based on their positive or negative stance towards the change you want to achieve.

Step 5 - Mobilisation, absorption, and volunteer organisation

Like many organisations, you might be focusing on tactics that mainly reach the ones who are already convinced. Yet, breakthroughs usually come by getting new people involved. This is called absorption. We teach you:

• how to draw more people to your website
• how to persuade people on your website to sign a petition
• how to get people who signed the petition to come to an information session
• how to motivate these people to get involved and help you execute your next move
• how to encourage them to become committed volunteers
• and, even better, how to get them to support your organisation or campaign financially, too

We develop a campaign plan and coach you during its execution. Using modern ‘community organising’ techniques, we enable you to grow in terms of people and resources.

Step 6 - Coaching during the execution process

Campaign strategy goes beyond intellectual exercises. A successful campaign sparks reactions. Even if we predict these reactions well, reality tends to throw us some curveballs.

Some campaign strategies are executed at a scheduled time. However, many campaign strategies rely on an external ‘trigger event’: something that happens to make the population more susceptible to your message.

That’s why we’re there to coach you intensively throughout the execution process, too. We work together to figure out the next move, after evaluating the response to our previous one. And if necessary, we camp out in your office for a while.

Step 7 - Coaching during policy negotiations

Negotiating policy remains an essential tactic.

We coach you for discussions with ministers, other policymakers, and government agencies. We work together on writing your pitch. We anticipate what the other side will bring to the table, prepare your responses, and practise through role-play. In short: we make sure you’re well-prepared and never find yourself at a loss for words.