1 What is campaigning?

In its most fundamental sense, campaigning is a process of mobilising resources towards a specific goal. Campaigns can aim for almost any goal (think of promotional campaigns in advertising for instance) but often campaigning is associated with a social or political issue – and the term issue should be examined here.

Think of ‘issues’ as different to ‘problems’. For instance, the Midwest Academy was founded in the 1970s and has trained organisers and campaigners across multiple causes, such as Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, and education unions. In their approach to campaigning (Bobo, 2010; Whelan, 2002), they think of problems as broad areas of concern, something really complicated that it is hard to imagine a single solution to. Things like climate change, poverty, or racial discrimination. Issues, on the other hand, can be thought of as partial parts of problems. So, a decarbonisation plan, living wage, or specific equality legislation, would all be examples of solutions to specific issues. Campaigning, then, is about coordinating activity in order to achieve a desired outcome on a particular issue.

You will now explore how campaigning can be applied to different contexts, before considering how you might apply it in your own context.