Running a CampiagnYour guide to running a successful election campaign

This Campaign Guide has been produced to assist election candidates and their campaigners with their respective election campaigns.

What is Campaigning?

Campaigning raises awareness of the issue that you are trying to get supportfor and will help members un-derstand how they cancast their vote and make their opinion count.

Why is it important?

Campaigning is importantto make sure that studentsunderstand your manifesto,motion or objective in orderfor them to want to voicetheir opinions.

A good campaign is onethat can win a vote.Students are more likely tovote when someone hasapproached them andhelped them to understandthe issue.

A bad campaign is onethat can lose a vote. If youpester and annoy students;try to influence their vote orpressurise them, they willoften vote the other way orfor another candidate. Theymay not vote at all. Evenworse, they could tell theirfriends about their badexperience, their friends willtell their friends and so on.Before you know it, massesof students are votingagainst you in protest

Your CampaignBe imaginative (but stay within the rules)!

• Getting elected and winning a campaign is all about being seen and remembered, (preferably in a good light). Talk to students as much as possible about yourself, your campaign and your manifesto. This not only benefits them but also enables you to polish up and perfect your speech.

• Talk to students in the halls of residences. First years are often more likely to vote than other years. They are less cynical and are likely to be on campus at some point in the day.

• Go to student events and talk to people – students are more likely to vote for you or your campaign if they can put a face or image to the name.

• Get an invitation to any party going – any opportunity to get known is worth taking!

• Target main entrances of buildings with computing facilities or Voting Stations – students are likely to vote as soon as they can when they come in to get it over and done with, so get to them early. Be careful to not become a health and safety hazard by blocking the entrances

• Make an exhibition of yourself – you will be seen and you may even get a sympathy vote for having done it! But do be careful for your personal health and safety and the law.

• Target areas close to the Voting Stations (but not too close – not within three meters) – students will vote just to stop being bothered, so get them by a Voting Station.

• Lecture shout-outs – during voting week stand up at the end of lec-tures and let people know that you are standing. Ask your campaign supporters to do the same. You should ask the lecturer for permission first, they might even give you a warm introduction.

• Take flyers and manifestos to lectures – actually keep them with you at all times, as you never know when a canvassing opportunity may ap-pear. But remember not to litter.

• Remember, don’t harass students – you may lose a vote instead of gaining one.

• Be friendly and genuine; listen and respond to your voters.

Your VotersVoters can be broadly split into six types:

The Friendly Apathetic Voter They do not know or care much about their Union but if you can impress them in any small way. If you help them see why they should care and what the Union provides, they will make the effort to vote. They are generally easily convinced and can be persuaded quite quickly. It isbasically a case of ‘who gets to them first, gets the vote’. Theretends to be lots of these voters and you should make these yourmain target.

The Unfriendly Apathetic Voter They also do not care about their Union and will take a long time to be convinced to vote for an one. It is your complete campaign and publicity materials that will convince them to vote for you.

The Educated Voter Unfortunately these are few and far between. They will rely mainly upon your manifesto, and a chance meeting with you, to make up their mind.

The Confirmed Non-Voter No matter what you do you will never convince them to vote. Do not waste your time with them. Move on quickly but politely.

Friends, and Friends of Friends They should know that they are going to vote for you. But a quick reminder does no harm at all!

Confirmed Voters for Other Candidates If there are more than two candidates running in the election, make sure you ask them to give you their 2nd preference vote. Every vote counts under the single transferable voting system.

Remember:

• Good planning is essential, otherwise you will lose track of where you are up to and what you have done. Make a realistic campaign plan and stick to it.

• Choose groups that you want to target and ensure that you have done something to try and secure their votes.

• Plan the people you want around you and how best to use them.

• Use your time wisely. Time is an essential resource. Do not waste it. You can sleep when you are elected but not before! Every minute you spend not campaigning you are losing time spent talking to potential voters and remember, past elections have been won and lost on a swing of three votes!

Your Campaign TeamFriends are your greatest assets.. So get yourself a good Campaign Team:

• Get as many people as you can who are reliable and prepared to give up their time for you.

• Go for people who have strong personalities and can get your campaign message across.

• Use people from different courses and/or those who are involved in a wide range of activities.

Tips for working with your campaign team:

• Allocate areas of responsibility and ask them to commit to times when they will work for you.

• Get them to learn a campaigning line that they can repeat topotential voters.

• Encourage them to ‘engage’ with voters. There is nothing more pointless than campaigners who just thrust a manifesto or leaflet into voters’ hands and walk off. It invariably does not get you the vote and can turn people against you. The election rules and regulations are available at www.londonsouthbanksu.com/election2013

• Make sure they have an understanding of the rules, as you are responsible for their conduct and can be penalised if they break them.

• Encourage them not to partake in ‘dirty tricks’ campaigns such as pulling down opponents’ posters or spreading unfounded rumours. This inevitably leads to bad feeling and complaints during, or at the end of the election and referendum.

• Encourage them to re-cycle campaign material (manifestos and other publicity), as you will invariably have run out before the end of the campaign.

• Try to ensure that their spirits are kept up throughout the whole campaigning and voting period.

• Try to allocate a central point where your campaign material is kept and to where they can return at any point for more instructions throughout the period of the campaigning and voting.

• There are rules on where you are allowed to place publicity material. Get as much guidance and information on what is acceptable before wasting time and resources on something that will only stay up for five minutes.

Combating Student ApathyOK, so now you know what you want to change and achieve – buthow are you going to get around “student apathy”? “If students’ unions have always believed that students have a right to control/influence their own lives and surroundings (if not future), then we must ask how and why people come to care enough to take that action. The action is action outside of the confines of usual routine, outside of the realms of what everyone does or what we do each week. We eat every day. We don’t vote.” Using the four steps outlined below you can – in a conversation, a speech or even in a campaign strategy – beat student apathy for good!

1. The first step is experience. Students must first reflect upon the experience they have as students, or perhaps the experience others have as poorer students, or as poverty stricken inhabitants of the third world, etc. This is, in itself, a difficult step. For a start, we as people rarely have the time to reflect upon our own experience. So packed is the busy schedule with work and play, that the time to reflect upon it all is going and gone. This is truer the further down the financial ladder we go. Add in modularisation of courses and increased density and mobility of the population (no longer do all on a course live in hall – many may live off-campus or at home), and the time and space to chat about it all in a public forum is gone. Students’ unions can and should provide a platform and space simply for people to explore and understand the nature of their own experiences, as well as introducing them to others.

2. Secondly comes the notion of injustice. Take the email conversation of the two school friends separated into two different universities. After the usual “how’s it going?” stuff, one may ask how much the pints are in the other’s union bar. Whoever has the lowest one will get a sense of injustice about that experience. Yet in the public forum and sphere (i.e. where the students’ union is hosting a meeting or printing the pa-per), there is rarely a sense given to students that their experience is unjust. It is hard to find a Freshers’ publication proclaiming that one stu-dent having to work 30 hours a week in the nightclub, while another spends 30 hours a week in the club drinking, is immoral and wrong. This may be because there are other things to say or print; it may be because the officers have no view or don’t think it’s wrong; it may be because there is a greater need to poster-promote the nightclub to the spender, than to appeal to the worker to keep the union afloat. Either way, meetings, posters and publications rarely build upon any experience stage with an injustice stage. If done well and properly, this is the stage that can put fire in the belly and passion in the heart -this is the stage that makes people care. If involvement has its barriers to be removed, then the injustice stage is the moment where the car is fuelled up to drive through them. You can open up all the doors -but you still need a passionate reason to come on in. Caring about some-thing that you believe to be unjust and wrong is perhaps the way to do that.

3. The third step, then, is organisation. Before you can take action about something, you at least need to believe that you are not wrong for thinking it – and most people will want to be supported, to have others with them or behind them. This can take many forms – it might be the union declaring its policy or belief,

An officer outlining what they and others think, or the organisation declaring that thousands of students are feeling the same. Again, this stage can be difficult – many unions and officers may themselves have not taken a position on the issue, or at least not thought it through or debated it. Rarely is union policy on an issue debated or agreed; rarely do student officers have a view on what the rights of students should be in a given situation. We might say “Grants not Fees”, but what does this mean? The belief statement must match the previously identified injustice, and the support around it must be tangible and real.

4. Only then, once the other stages are complete, do we move to the fourth step and take some action. Even then the action must be clear and possible within the first stage -the students’ situation. Often people reach this stage but are so unfamiliar or unprepared for the given action that they opt out, feeling powerless and aimless. Tragically though, most of the time students’ unions, and politicians in general, simply bemoan the fact that when they present action to people, they don’t take it up. The reality is that the converted are doing the preaching.

When an officer says, “come on the demo” they have, via their own involvement, already gone through the other stages. Yet students have invariably not had this treat or luxury. At an NUS National Convention a while ago, the opening plenary from an Oxfam activist was 30 minutes long – and an observer timed 11 minutes of experience, 12 minutes of injustice, 6 minutes of policy and 1 minute of action. For the organisation, the action was the most important bit but was given the least time – signing the postcard was obvious. It is also clear that Oxfam itself values education as well as action, and that they understand that education leads to action.

They understand students better than students’ unions. There is a psychological reason for this; we underestimate the thorough processes we go through in order to come to see certain actions as normal and desirable. We know why we should care about student hardship or student council – others don’t. But there are other reasons for avoiding the lower steps on the staircase. They can be, on one level, pretty hard work – fraught with conflict and upsetting conversations. Who wants to talk about bad things? Who wants to discuss pain and suffering and poverty and powerlessness and misery?

Talk to them about their experiences

Inject some injustice

Talk about your beliefs

Then – and only then – ask them to vote.

So the trick when talking to students is to take them up that staircase too:

London South Bank University Students’ UnionStudent Centre,Borough Road,London,SE1 0AA

Tel: 020 7815 6060Email: su.general@lsbu.ac.ukwww.londonsouthbanksu.com/election2013