In 2016, Southwark became the second council pension fund in the UK to commit to fully divest from fossil fuels. This victory was won by local campaign, Fossil Free Southwark, who chose to target the council’s Pensions Committee. They won the backing of the councillors and union reps that sat on the committee by demonstrating widespread community support, and directly lobbying the committee members.

In the Divest Parliament campaign, the goal is to get the pension fund for the UK Parliament to divest from fossil fuels. However, local groups working on this campaign aren’t targeting the pension fund directly – instead, they are targeting local MPs, and signing them up to support divestment.

As local campaigners with no direct connection to parliament, opportunities to have influence on the pension fund are limited. However, everyone has a local MP who is accountable to them; we can use this to build a groundswell of support for divestment in the halls of power where we don’t directly have a voice.

Divestment is simply the opposite of investment – it means getting rid of stocks, bonds or investment funds that are unethical.

We want public institutions like councils, universities, faith groups, charities and more to divest from fossil fuel companies within 5 years. 200 publicly-traded companies control the vast majority of coal, oil and gas reserves. Those are the companies we’re asking our institutions to divest from.

The aim of the fossil fuel divestment campaign is to weaken the political influence of the fossil fuel industry, which keeps holding back action on climate change. Every time an institution publicly breaks its ties with fossil fuel companies, we chip away at their power to carry out their immoral business plans.

Ask most people how they got involved with a campaign group, and they’ll tell you that someone talked to them and asked them to get involved. It can be effective to do general call-outs, send notices on email lists and give out flyer, but really, to get most people involved, we have to ask them to help us!

The easiest way to do that? Have a conversation with them. Check out this guide on using ‘one-on-ones’ (otherwise known as conversations!) to recruit people.

Are there any existing networks or organisations that you are part of and who might be interested to join you? That could be a faith group, trade union branch, local club, political party, university society – or any other kind of social network (including the online kind).

Although it’s natural to rely on existing contacts at the beginning, it’s important to remember that if you just rely on your own networks to build your team, eventually you’ll stop growing. Tight knit social groups can start to become insular or unwelcoming to outsiders, making it harder to get new people involved. So, as much as you can, recruiting outside of your social circles is important too.

Some channels you could use to reach new people:

• Host stalls or give our information at relevant local events – even better, do an action in a public place and give out information about your next meeting. You could use your petition to sign people up.
• Get an opinion piece or letter published in the local paper, with a way people can get in touch with you.
• Research groups, clubs and organisations that exist in your community already and might have an interest in your campaign. Reach out to them and see if there’s some way you could collaborate, or if they will advertise your group to their members.
• Social media can be a great way to find new people. Try joining local Facebook groups, and getting other local organisations to advertise your event and meetings to their followers to build up a following of your own. See the section on ‘Growing your support’ for more on this.

Make sure to regularly open your organising meetings up to new people by advertising them publicly. It’s also a good idea (especially as your campaign progresses) for some meetings to only include people who are already involved.

Consciously balancing these two types of meetings – often called ‘open’ and ‘closed’ will allow you to continue to support new people to participate, while also making progress towards your campaign goals.

To get new people involved in your work, making your meetings, actions and events accessible and inclusive is key. One thing you could do is designate a group member as ‘meeter and greeter’, someone with specific responsibility for welcoming and getting to know new people.

Accessibility basics:

• Don’t hold meetings in places that are inaccessible to disabled people (e.g. no lift access) and always advertise the accessibility arrangements in a space.
• Try to find places to meet that are in the community you’re organising with. If you’re organising in one suburb, but expect people to travel to the town centre, that might send signals to potential group members that you aren’t that committed to their community.
• Are your meetings at a time that makes attending really hard for some people? Think about people with young children, or with work or care responsibilities. One solution is to alternate when meetings take place – perhaps between a weekday evening, and a weekend afternoon.
• You could also consider providing childcare, or explicitly welcoming children to meetings.
• Also consider other ways that spaces may be inaccessible – for example, pubs are not accessible spaces for under-18s or people who don’t drink for religious or cultural reasons, and generally places where you have to buy things to be welcome (cafes etc) may put off people with less disposable income.
• Think about the language you are using in your meetings. Lots of jargon, acronyms and technical language is not a great way to include newer people in your campaign.

Power-mapping can help you to identify targets and focus your strategy. The idea is to map out your potential targets, and the institutions and individuals who influence your target, so you can begin to understand possible ways to impact them. A power map can be a useful visual tool to help your team understand power, and see possibilities for campaigning.

Check out the Powermapping exercise on the 350 Trainings website.

The ‘Spectrum of Allies’ is a tool to map out the range of individuals and groups, spread across a spectrum, from those who are the most dedicated opponents to those who are the most active supporters.

The key thing to understand about the spectrum of allies is that we don’t need to spend our time convincing our sworn enemies to support our campaign. If we can just move different groups one ‘segment’ towards being our allies, we will unlock campaign success.

Check out the Spectrum of allies exercise on the 350 Trainings website.

After you’ve mapped out the spectrum, you can spend a bit of time brainstorming:

• What tactics could we use to move each actor/group on the spectrum?
• What arguments and messages would be most effective in reaching this actor?

Campaigns aren’t won all at once; instead, they are won through a series of actions. Yet, too often, we design only one action ahead of time. That can be a problem – when that action is over, people want to know what comes next. Right after the action they are energised and ready to do the next thing, and we lose that energy if we don’t have the next step.

It’s worth considering in this timeline whether there are any events or moments already happening that you could use in the campaign. That could be a key meeting of decision-makers, a local festival, a national day of action…

One way to think about your timeline is in terms of critical paths. Find out more about critical paths.

Try out this ‘Paper Plate Challenge’ with your group to build a campaign timeline.

Marches, occupations, street-parties, petitions, blockades, neighbourhood canvassing, press conferences, art installations, strikes, etc: these are just some tactics you can use.

A losing campaign

A winning campaign!

Deciding on what tactic to use at what point in your campaign can be difficult. Check out the ‘Take Action’ section for more advice on how to plan your tactics.

Looking for some new ideas for tactics? Check out these resources:

• Beautiful Trouble and Beautiful Rising tactic databases
• Global non-violent action database

• The best place to start is an email or a letter. Introduce yourself and ask to meet with your target to discuss your demands. Politicians get a huge amount of emails everyday – so you may have to chase up your email with a phone call to make sure it gets read.
• Meet up with decision-makers individually to get them onside – finding and working with potential allies is crucial.
• If you’re not getting through, try asking ‘influencers’ to approach decision makers on your behalf – this might be leaders in your community, or people that you know your target is interested in.
• Try attending public meetings with decision-makers and asking questions. Find out their schedule and show up places they’re going to be.
• As much as possible, provide short, simple and ‘neutrally-written’ briefings on your campaign for decision-makers to help them get up to speed quickly.

Here’s a checklist of things to think about when planning an action:

• What is the goal of the action? How does it fit your strategy?
• Who is the target? What is the location? What timing? How will you ensure that your target sees, or is made aware of, your action?
• What is your message? What is the tone (angry, calm, funny etc)?
• What resources do you need (people, time, skills, stuff)?
• What impact will the action have on your group?
• How will you debrief and celebrate afterwards?
• What is your follow-up plan?

Using art and creativity can transform your actions from good to great. Art, music, theatre and performance can all be tools to get our message across, and to engage more people in our campaigns.

Art is also a great way to get people involved. Hosting an art-making session before your action can pull new people into your group who might not like coming to meetings but who have lots to contribute. Here’s a guide to hosting a good ‘art build’.

Check out these ‘how-to’s on building and creating great visuals for your actions.

Check out the Tactics section for advice and resources on choosing the right tactic to build participation in your actions.

The first step to getting media coverage is giving the press something to cover. While your campaign might seem to you like the most interesting thing happening in your community, a journalist who isn’t involved might not agree.

Some ways to make your campaign, action or event newsworthy:

• Uncover something new (e.g. some research)
• Make something the ‘biggest / longest / oldest / …est’
• Highlight unusual alliances or participants, make stories personal
• Link to current events – for example, by timing your action to coincide with a big local or national event that is relevant to your campaign
• Make sure your action is visually eye-catching and take good pictures
• Find a good messenger / spokesperson
• See more ideas here.

If you want to get your story covered by local media, there are some key things to remember:

• If you have any trusted local contacts, you might want to contact them ahead of the release date to let them know about the story – you could also send them the press release ahead of time under embargo (agreement they won’t publish until a certain date/time).
• Research and compile a list of local media contacts ahead of time – don’t forget to include different types of media; radio, newspapers, even local TV.
• Where relevant, find out what day your local papers go to print, and make sure to get them the release before the deadline. Send your press release in the morning for the best chance of coverage.
• Once you’ve sent your press release, follow it up with phone calls to key press contacts – rehearse your pitch and keep it clear and concise.

Doing an action or planning a photo opportunity?

• • You might want to send a media advisory to key local press contacts ahead of time, to encourage them to attend. View a template media advisory here.
  • Journalists are much more likely to cover a story if they have one or two high-quality, interesting photos.

A useful resource for your campaign will be a media contacts list. Here’s how to compile one:

• Brainstorm all the different media outlets in your area – think newspapers, radio stations, TV news, magazines, blogs etc.
• You can usually find contact details for the ‘news desk’, ‘newsroom’ or even individual editors/journalists on outlets’ websites – it might just take a bit of detective work.
• For newspapers it’s worth looking at a couple of issues or going on their website and figuring out which particular journalists write about your issue or might be sympathetic to your campaign. Find their individual contact details.
• Keep this all in a spreadsheet so whenever you do an action or have a story to tell, you know who to reach out to.

Check out some top tips for building great relationships with journalists.

Whether we like it or not, Facebook is the most widely used social media platform. It is intended to be an online network – where people can connect with friends and family. It is also a leading provider of news. These functions can make it very useful for campaigning.

Facebook best practices:

• Leave a few hours between posts, try to post at least once a day
• Keep it snappy! A few sentences of text.
• Video content is the most engaging
  • Longer videos (3 minutes or more) now perform better
  • Live video is also good
  • Square or horizontal format is better for people using phones
  • As much as you can, add subtitles to videos
• Share only the best photos – not big albums
• Share diverse links (not just the Guardian!) and remove the URL
• Use your personal account – people trust their friends
• Respond to comments and engage with people
• Remember you can schedule posts.

Twitter is a fast-moving, news-oriented platform. Most politicians, journalists and influential figures use it to share their opinions and connect with others. This makes it a great platform for reaching decision-makers, as well as getting your campaign noticed.

Twitter best practices:

• Post much more often, and don’t worry about repeating
• The character limit has increased! But still – as short as possible
• Maximum of 2-3 hashtags per tweet
• Tag relevant people -including your key decision makers- ideally only one per tweet
• Each tweet should be a standalone piece of information – with little/no context required
• Mix of tweets and retweets is good
• Respond to other peoples’ tweets
• Offer your own analysis.

Petitions are a useful way of showing public support for your campaign. When used well, they can grow to an impressive size, grant you access to decision-makers, and build you a supporter base in the process.

But – don’t assume that just because you’ve set up an online petition, anyone will sign it or take notice! Your petition should form part of a wider strategy.

Petition best practices:

• Keep the text short and snappy. Don’t worry about including every detail, but link to other places where people can find out more.
• Celebrate milestones in your petition, and use them as opportunities to promote your campaign.
• Email petition signers regularly giving them opportunities to get more involved in your campaign and encouraging them to share the petition with their networks.
• Use petitioning to get the word out about your campaign and build your campaign team – there’s nothing like hitting the high street with a clipboard to energise your group. You can print off paper collection sheets from the Fossil Free petitions platform.

You can start a Fossil Free petition at campaigns.gofossilfree.org.

1. Influence – your work becomes inspired by another group(s). This might involve researching and getting to know their work, sharing it, and integrating some of their ideas into your campaign.
2. Direction – you get more specific about how your campaign and others’ could fit together. This might mean starting to reach out to another group by responding to a call to action, or attending one of their events.
3. Leadership – you establish a direct relationship with another group(s). This could involve taking guidance from your new ally and doing something new in your campaign like an event or action.
4. Accountability – your relationship deepens and becomes more mutual. Here, all partners become accountable to each other for getting things done and making progress. This might involve sitting down together and making a long term plan.
5. Collaboration – your groups are now working together to create original work, greater than the sum of its parts. Hooray!

Taken from ‘Organizing Cools the Planet’ by Hillary Moore + Joshua Kahn-Russell

Training is a great way to share skills and experience, and grow the number of people taking on active roles in your group. When done right, it will build everyone’s confidence, enthusiasm and trust.

A training could be as simple as running refresher sessions for newer group members on your strategy – helping them see how they fit into a bigger picture. You could also sit down with your group to identify skills you want to develop: it could be action planning, petitioning, public speaking, social media, or any number of things.

Check out the 350 Trainings website to find lots of workshop plans and training ideas you could run with your group. And get in touch with ellen@350.org if you’d like some specialist training that you think would help your campaign.

Burnout happens slowly, over a long period of time, which can make it difficult to recognise. Here’s how to spot some signs and symptoms of burnout in yourself and others:

• A creeping feeling that activism is taking over your life
• Difficulty in making decisions
• Inability to stay focused
• Insomnia, difficulty in sleeping, or getting enough sleep
• A growing tendency to think negatively
• Pervasive feelings of hopelessness
• A loss of sense of purpose and energy
• Physical indications of burnout include muscle tension, headache, backache and exhaustion
• A loss of pleasure in food, friends or other activities that were once exciting and interesting – a general sense of running on empty
• Other warning signs of burnout include temper tantrums over trivial matters, not wanting to get out of bed in the morning or becoming accident prone.

This list is adapted from the ‘Sustainable Activism and Avoiding Burnout’ leaflet

Sometimes, even when we do everything right, our campaigns lose. This can be really hard to deal with, and can be a big challenge to groups who have invested loads of time and energy into a fight. Here are some top tips from organisers around the world about what to do when we lose: