About Change, Campaigns and Strategies

Once a year the TRIALOG “Training of Multipliers” (ToM) gathers representatives of EU13 CSO platforms, all partners in the project, to meet for two and a half days full of sharing, learning and networking. The participants of the ToM are EU13 Liaison Officers, who are responsible for coordinating the TRIALOG supported capacity building plans of their platforms, co-write Policy Digests and support their members to actively engage in development cooperation issues. The group decided that this year the thematic focus would be on communication strategies and European Elections.

“It’s all about change” 
TRIALOG invited Matthias Schickhofer, an expert on campaigning who worked with Greenpeace for many years, where he was Campaign Director and also involved in the establishment of regional offices in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Romania. The participants explored with him innovative ways to engage with people and the media. With many examples Matthias Schickhofer illustrated how to create a campaign and what works i
n communication, how to define objectives, target groups and dramatic plots of a campaign and how to evoke reaction to messages and to find supportive followers. He gave the participants practical tools to achieve the desired change with means of campaigns and communication.

Campaigns: How can it work?
The Austrian NGDO platform Global Responsibility is running a campaign http://www.mirwurscht.org/ to stop the government from cutting the budget for development cooperation and calls upon reaching the 0.7% target for ODA. Valentin Schmiedleitner, campaign coordinator of the platform, shared the experience of the campaign, first successes and good practices. The personal lobbying towards Members of the Parliament (MPs) turned out to be a very successful tool, as well as public actions attracting media attention and an interactive website where everyone can engage and send a letter to MPs.

From CONCORD Sabine Terlecki, Head of Policy, joined us for a session to give an update on the European Election Campaign of CONCORD and to identify with all EU13 platforms how they could will further engage in the campaign and plan activities on national level. Therefore the platform worked on their own campaign strategies based on the tools of the morning session with Matthias Schickhofer, who then gave feedback to the ideas.

Food for Thought: Post-2015 
Our guest Daniel Bacher, Advocacy Officer of the DKA, a member organisation of TRIALOG's lead agency HORIZONT3000 opened up the space for discussions on the Post-2015 Agenda focusing on the question how to anchor Human Rights in this framework. He underlined his thoughts with practical examples of organisations and institutions engaged.

Additionally the Training of Multipliers provided plenty of space for EU13 Liaison Officers to share their experience with the capacity building plans (supported by TRIALOG) and to present their activities planned for 2014. We thank all participants and resource persons for their input and openness to share experiences and look forward to the next ToM in 2015!


Photo by TRIALOG: Participants ToM 2014
Find more pictures on our website.

Information provided by Elisa Romero and Ulrike Bey, TRIALOG