Verden is a sleepy North-German town known for two things: Germany's third biggest horse-husbandry centre, and Germany's most awesome and innovative online campaigners. OK. Maybe just one thing.
I've been looking forward to hanging out with Campact for years. Founded in 2004, they've been pivotal to ending nuclear energy in Germany, and now they're the centre of the campaign against the TTIP trade deal.
The language barrier has made Campact a bit of a Galapagos island of online campaigning; they share roots with MoveOn and GetUp but have evolved some great ideas in near-isolation. Here are the top 10 things campaigners around the world should be learning from our awesome German sisters and brothers.
1. Balloons!
Just like the Hindenburg, but without the... uh.... massive loss of life, those Germans LOVE their helium* balloons.
Campact will often ask you to donate to a demonstration by sponsoring a balloon, or a brick, or a chunk of ice (but mostly balloons). If you donate a few euros, Campact will buy another balloon to be part of their stunning demonstrations. So the more people who donate, the bigger the demonstration. Obviously the success of the demonstration depends on having something so huge that it will create a great image and news coverage. So there’s a really strong and tangible theory of change for your donation. Genius.
2. Recurring donor development
Campact’s finances are very strong, mostly as a result of their recurring donor development. They started early, and other organisations can learn a lot from them. Here are a few lessons:
a - actual representation!
Every Campact donor gets emails inviting them to an in-person meeting where they may stand for election to its Board, and vote on who is chosen. That has to be great for member-ownership.
b - “success receipts”
Campact take their report backs very seriously. They send quarterly success receipts outlining what donors have achieved, and printed annual reports to every donor with detailed and audited financial accounts.
c - books
About 60% of recurring donors for Campact join on asks where there’s a gift. Usually it’s a book on a relevant campaign, or a DVD (people still watch those?). When I was sitting on the train back to Frankfurt after leaving Campact, the woman next to me was reading the TTIP book Campact sent her as a donor. When I asked her about it she loved it! She had dozens of notes on the book, knew all about the campaign, and was really thankful for Campact putting her on to it.
3. Governance
Campact was founded in 2005 by Felix, Christof, and Günter, who remain its co-executive directors. As founders, they initially established a tight Board comprising themselves and trusted friends. This resembles the approaches taken by GetUp, 38 Degrees, and other sister groups.
However, in 2011, the leadership team decided to significantly change Campact’s governance model in order to make it more accountable, transparent, and diverse. As Campact became more influential, they figured that it would be a more stable and accountable organisation with a more independent Board. Campact’s governance reform saw the Directors remove themselves from the Board and give up a considerable amount of their own governance power, and open themselves up to the possibility of being replaced as Directors. Four years on, they consider it to be an essential decision. All three directors agree that reporting to an independent Board has made them consider decisions more thoroughly, and lead to better outcomes for the organisation.
It appears to be a very popular model with members, who are given legitimate representation over the organisation they power and fund, if they are a recurring donor. Their structure as I understand it is summarised below:
4. Worldly thinking
Last week, Campact hosted a gathering of Executive Directors from startup campaigning groups across Europe as part of the OPEN network, and invited me to facilitate.
To begin the gathering, I asked everyone to go around to circle and share their biggest challenge at the moment.
In a nutshell, here's what Günter said: power is changing. International flow of capital and power means that many of the decisions Campact's members care about are made in ways that it’s impossible for one country to influence alone. So the biggest challenge for Günter is that Germany is a large country, but in the scheme of things, it’s very hard to see progress on the most important issues like trade and climate without pan-european and global campaigning collaboration. A centralised approach to this, Günter said, was bound to fail because we believe in real social movements and representing citizens. So one of the most important things Campact can do to achieve long-term change is to foster other independent movements across Europe.
To their great credit, other sister organisations have helped startups: GetUp, 38 Degrees, and MoveOn all contribute to this. But Campact articulate this more clearly than anyone I’ve heard, and see it as a central part of their impact. Their actions play this out: many of the organisations we gathered would have struggled to exist without financial assistance from Campact, unconditional on Campact’s control or influence.
I think Günter’s argument is very strong - and even more so for those of us working in countries smaller than Germany. It made me reflect on how little strategic weight I gave this approach when running GetUp. We definitely considered it important, and tried to help, most noticeably so through building technology that lead to the start of ControlShift Labs. The difference is that we didn’t see it as a core part of our strategy, and never brought our members in on the importance of this. Why not? Mostly because we didn’t trust that members would see the value of it. On reflection I think we didn’t give our members nearly enough credit to see that argument if we put it as articulately as Günter does.
5. Stringent theories of change
Günter basically turns into star prosecutor and puts every idea through rigorous paces before it is allowed out of the campaign strategy meeting. They will sometimes send a more performative, values-based ask, but overwhelmingly, they put every membership ask through a really stringent examination for theory of change without compromise.
6. Mature staff
Campact’s staff are about a decade older on average than the GetUp or 38 Degrees team. That’s not inherently a good thing, but it definitely has some advantages. I hypothesise that the younger staff at the latter organisations contributes to their keen social media focus, and a stronger aesthetic in video and graphics.
The advantages of Campact’s maturity are clear though. Their office is simply a calmer, more stable, and more thoughtful place to work. It feels, to me, to be labouring significantly less under the weight of ego, pride, and emotion than other NGOs I’ve seen. Sure, you can say they’re just German. But that’s not it. Working under a team of three co-directors must be hard: staff could be forgiven the temptation to play directors off against each other to get what they want, or to use the space to evade accountability. But the staff at Campact have generally come from other established careers, before deciding that they’re willing to take a pay cut to campaign for what they believe in. They’re school teachers, journalists, and engineers. A ridiculous number of them have PHDs. Almost all of them seem to have considerable experience in social movements like the anti-nuclear movement.
7. Agenda-setting
Campact aren’t scared to take an issue that’s not on the national agenda at all and try to put it there. Think about nuclear energy. Campact campaigned on ending nuclear energy in Germany for half a decade. Then the Fukushima disaster happened, and they had a huge breakthrough and massive success. I don’t think that would have been possible without their determined effort to keep chipping away and build a movement. It meant that when the moment came along, they were ready for huge impact.
Now, watch them doing it again on TTIP. When they started, it was off the agenda. Now, they’re forcing parties to respond, and driving partner organisations to join the fight.
8. Campaign focus
About 80% of Campact’s efforts at the moment are going into TTIP. That’s incredible. I don’t know another multi-issue organisation that is so focussed. Consider how long they’ve been campaigning on TTIP: it’s a huge amount of time. Interestingly, that’s largely because almost all of their growth over the last year or so has come from that campaign. So they didn’t start with that intensity of focus, but followed the member energy there.
Reflecting on my time at GetUp, I think 90% of our impact came from the 10% of campaigns we put ongoing effort into. One lesson I take away is that we should have said no to a LOT more campaigns and focussed more energy on the ones that we really wanted to win. It’s those campaigns, like mental health and climate change, that we really made progress on.
There’s a risk in this approach for Campact, of course, because so much of their funding is linked to one campaign and when they win, as I’m confident they will and they did with nuclear energy, they will see a dip in fundraising. Obviously, they’re working on diversifying their campaigns and preparing those donors for other efforts!
9. Partnerships
No other OPEN group I’ve seen is nearly as good at partnerships as Campact. Their relationships with other NGOs are just far stronger than other groups. GetUp has come a long way on this front in the last three years, and I think particularly on campaigns like the Reef, we build incredibly strong alliances. Partly, this is a function of the age of the organisation and increasing ability to work in collaboration. Mostly, though, I think it’s because of the wisdom of Campact’s leadership team, and their understanding that big wins often come through alliances. I’d love to hear more of their thoughts on this.
10. Being comfortable to play the outsider game
I wouldn’t say that Campact are less political than GetUp - they’re willing to play hardball. But it’s quite obvious that they’re simply less interested in partisan politics. It’s in their DNA: they’re located in Verden, not Berlin — and their founders have just never really believed party politics is the best way to make change. Until recently, they received comparatively little media coverage - but that was fine by them: they’re more focused on the actual, rather than the perceived, power of their campaigns. That’s the inverse of many campaigners.
They’re still very connected and do more lobbying than 38 Degrees, for example. However, they’re quite happy to be considered politically irrelevant by parties, as they were on TTIP, betting that eventually they’ll get their way. A lot of this comes down to Germany’s political system, in which the Greens, Die Linke, and the SPD (the major left parties) each have huge blindspots and differences with Campact’s progressive base.
*OK smartass so, yeah, the Hindenburg was Hydrogen. A proton here, an electron there....