In this interview, SMK Grants Programme Manager Sana Naz interviews Justlife’s Influencing Coordinator, Morgan Tebbs, about how SMK’s Campaign Carousel has changed his messaging approach in his campaign.
Q: What campaign or issue are you working on?
A: Justlife’s goal is to make stays in temporary accommodation (TA) as short, safe, and healthy as possible. In other words we want to bring the number of homeless households in TA down but also improve people’s experiences of TA while they are there.
Q: What was your biggest campaigning challenge before SMK training?
A: I think convincing government to act on TA is particularly difficult because successive governments have failed to tackle the problem, and poor provision of TA has become the norm. It will also require significant upfront investment, which is always a hard thing to convince government of the need for.
Q: What’s one thing/things you learnt that has stayed with you? (new connections, used new strategies, tools)
A: The introduction to campaigning session did touch on some of the above, and how optimism is a real tool for campaigners in the face of potentially stubborn government. I think the Social Media to Win Campaigns workshop was the most useful session for me though, as I’m not the most tech savvy person, and the session introduced me to a lot of new concepts on how to grab attention. It taught me to keep messaging simple – we work with complex subject matter so we can tend to ramble on with unnecessary detail. Being aware that simplifying things is actually more convincing for government and public audiences, has been useful for me as a campaigner and us as an organisation.
Q: Have you done anything differently, created an impact or made progress in your work as a result of the SMK trainings?
A: On the above, we’ve really begun simplifying our message. We’re now asking plainly for an independent regulator for temporary accommodation, which I think is something that resonates with people, as we already have regulators for other services (e.g. Ofsted, Ofcom, etc.)
Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d give another campaigner?
A: Be open to learning new things – even if you’ve worked on campaigns for years, these kinds of sessions always reveal something new or novel to you, and help you grow as a campaigner.
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