What is it?

In general, campaigns are programs or initiatives intended to achieve a certain goal. There are many different types of campaign an environmental civil society group can hold. This can range from getting people to reduce their carbon emission, to getting them to use more bio-degradable materials.

What to look out for when planning for a campaign?

Goals

More than just a clear aim to your activity, for a good campaign, it is important to have a SMART goal. Your campaign should be:

• Specific: Clearly explains the purpose of the campaigns
• Measurable: Success can be measured, qualitatively or quantitatively through interview or surveys
• Activating: Compelling and exciting, getting people to be involved.
  • Using social network sites with #Fornatureforus.
  • Getting a lot of different levels of engagement. Those that are already interested can get them to do more, those that are not really interested, try to get them to do a little. One of the ways campaigns fare better than speeches is due to the fact that they have the ability to be more activating.
• Realistic: Ambitious but achievable
• Time-specific: Set a time frame for the campaign

Target Audience

You should look at stakeholders who have the power to affect the campaign goals. Try to pick a few different specific target audience so that you can alter the way you frame your campaigns so that it attracts your specific target audience more. you should also consider what would move your target audience to start acting.

For example, if you are targeting members of the parliament to change a particular policy, getting the voters’ attention would be important.

Allies and Opponents

Consider who are your potential allies that would help your cause. It is important to note that for a campaign, you can choose not to convince your opponent. Those who are already set on going against your cause is difficult to convince. You could mobilize allies, turning passive allies into active ones, and turn neutral parties into allies. Making people like your cause a bit better can be considered effective too.

Using allies to help with your campaign can create a sort of participatory approach to get more people on board. You can get artists to help create posters and design the campaign. Making them involved makes them more committed to the cause.

Targeting prominent individuals can also help with your campaign. Making key individuals change their attitude can help to influence others through social norms. People don’t often realize that social norms can drive behaviour and they generally report they are doing things for the cause even though the reason may be group social norms.

Framing

Framing of your campaign is important. Using words like “efficiency” rather than “conservation”. Efficiency sounds more desirable to people and conservation sounds like a sacrifice and not everyone is willing to sacrifice for the environment while most people tend to want to be efficient.

Methods

Using the foot-in-door method to first get people to start doing something small is a good way to make people commit to your cause. A public commitment, even if they do not believe in the cause that much at first, can work well. Behaviours can lead to attitude development. The fact that they did something to support the cause even though they might be neutral at first can lead to developing positive affect about the cause.

It is important to remember that in Singapore, marches not really as effective because of the cultural difference. Furthermore due to the history of Singapore activism as can be seen in the History tab and the current laws, many would be afraid to do so. Many activist would consider it to be not that pragmatic. Very confrontational strategies may very well cause backlash especially if not supported well socially. It is crucial to stay within the bounds of actors’ tolerance.

Evaluation

It is important to continually monitor the responses to see the feedback and comments on your campaigns and then adjust the programs accordingly.

For example, looking at social media to see what people are saying about your campaign can help get a better sense of who is saying what.