The Campaign Company Blog

'Ninging' the debate on healthcare back to life...

Having been commissioned by the Cumbria PCT to consult the public on changes to health care services, we recently embarked on a tour of different locations in North Cumbria to obtain responses to the proposed reforms.

To keep TCC staff, the PCT and interested parties updated on our progress, I created a 'ning' site.  Ning is a DIY social networking site, rather like a Facebook group, on which you can post blogs, forum discussions, photos and videos to discuss with an invited audience.  It proved to be a fantastic small-scale project management tool; a great way of keeping in touch and facilitating debates on different aspects of the health service that were, perhaps, particularly prevalent in the days engagement activities.

The question of whether 'nings' are best suited for internal discussion or public consumption was brought into sharp perspective when members of the public were inadvertently invited to join the site.  Ultimately, it sparked off an interesting debate between professionals and local people on the changes proposed under the consultation.  I would have no hesitation using a 'ning' again for a similar purpose, but it is vital to establish exactly what its purpose is to be before beginning...

Do as I say, not as I do?

We were recently engaging with a community where they were asked to express their views broadly for or against an issue. The issue as such was one where people in the office would also take differing views, if only for a spot of light-hearted banter.

The point I made in our discussions was that what was far more interesting was that those who were critical also expressed their views on the benefits and the same applied vice versa. Very few people were either completely for or against on this issue where you could actually express a clear yes or no. Clearly the depth of our engagement showed that people hold complex views on the subject..

I think one of the interesting areas that one discovers within community engagement is the difference between what people say and their actual behaviour: eg people say they disagree with something and then, when given the choice, behave somewhat differently.

We see this in people's views and actions with recycling, gambling, healthy living, using big shops when they say they really prefer smaller local shops etc. The current debate on the future of local post offices is a good example. People say they want a local one but usage is declining as people vote with their feet and use other service provision - some on the internet..

Some of this may be due to people weighing up incentives against what they perceive to be commonly held views. Thus we see people say they like their community to stay the same and will oppose an over-development next door to them, but if a developer offers them £50,000+ on top of the value of their property they don't then say "no, this will ruin the neighbourhood I am moving from, so I won't accept this extra money.

Organisations like the RSA are currently studying the dichotomy between views and behaviour as a driver for challenges such as "private activity, public despair", which we have previously blogged and its an area that there will clearly be more debate. As we are discovering in some areas we are working in, people have very complex views on "entitlement" both for themselves and others. The challenge for politicians and society is how much should we actually restrict people's choices and potentially damaging behaviour or how much should we debate with it in a slower process  of engagement?

In other words - how far do civil liberties go and how possible is it to impose one approach to areas of personal behaviour in a single state, let alone a complex global society where some people in future may see their on-line community as far more important than their local community. .

I used to think you could impose such an approach but now I am not so sure?

This is why social marketing is such an interesting area with much wider applications than what it is being used for at present and why I think TCC are well positioned to be at the centre of that..

I suspect it goes back to the point I made at the beginning that people rarely hold a single view on these issues (see The Political Brain for more info - it has much wider application than politics) and that immediate influences at any point in time are really important.

McCain and Ming and the age thing..

I am sure that this will have been written about and I've missed it but what is the explanation for the trashing of Menzies Campbell(aged 66) and the lionisation of John McCain (aged 71) on the basis of their age?

Is the demographic profile of the US and UK so different? Are the US media just biding their time before turning on McCain? Is there genuinely a more mature(!)attitude to ageing in the US?

And doesn't it appear that in the UK that far from becoming more enlightened about the role of older people in public life etc, attitudes are actually moving the other way?

Jonathan(aged 53)

Googling Alone! - A quick way to assess local social capital

You may have heard of the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam where he surveys the decline of social capital and suggests how it can be revived. The evidence base is generally drawn from American sources, however the points he make are very much applicable to other developed democracies.

Putnam conducted a lot of research for his book, but many working in their community trying to assess social capital for their area do not the time or the academic resources Putnam had.

Perhaps there is a web 2.0 solution?

If you are reading this article, there is a good chance you use Google or another good web search engine. If you use Google a lot you may be aware of many of its search facilities. One of the most interesting is if you type a full postcode in you get many internet entries associated with that geographical area.

As someone who was a Councillor for 20 years, I was fortunate in having a pretty good understanding of the social geography of my area. As a result recently I started typing in postcodes for some of the wealthier areas of my borough and some of the poorest.

The results were reasonably predictable. In areas that were quite wealthy you would find postings for people who ran their own businesses or were in community groups. In poorer areas you would generally find websites that related to wider public sector bodies but little community or small scale enterprise activity. At times I found up to 10 times as many pages for a relatively well-off residential road with no other facilities compared to a poorer area of flatted social housing.

Of course some might say it is all about access to home computers between poor and well off areas and that in poorer areas it is the mobile phone that has much more usage. A fair point. However in this much more connected world access to and participation on the internet can be a reinforcing factor for developing social capital in wealthier areas. The fact that the gap is so wide in the number of Google pages is a useful proxy indicator for quickly assessing levels of basic social capital and social connectedness.

What can we do about this?

One idea I had was that Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP) could trawl every postcode in their locality and ensure they are connected with every group listed. I suspect there is good software that can automate much of this process. This in itself might go some way to increase the overall stock of social capital across a local authority area as more groups and individuals would be connected to key local stakeholders. A far-sighted LSP might even seek to connect people within a community together through encouraging the development of geographical based social networking software similar to Residents HQ that I have previously blogged about.

Another thought was for Local Strategic Partnerships to identify 10-20 postcodes with low Google pages and perhaps conduct a pilot survey of them regarding internet access. It may be that residents are not using free facilities in local libraries? Some extra publicity and perhaps even the sort of doorstep engagement that TCC recommends for many projects could be easily provided. This could be linked to an offer of simple computer training.

This sort of approach might go some way to connecting people up and creating the sort of network effects that can perhaps start to increase the stock of social capital in some poorer communities.

Registering to Vote - Making you Count!

Never having learned to drive, means I use the bus a lot which means I get a bit of extra time to devour more of a newspaper - that way giving me a few extra new thoughts on a wider range of subjects. Being in TCC also means I like looking at how other people get their message across and also how we can Make Democracy Work!

When you combine this together you get blog postings like this!

As I got off the bus stop I always look at the bus stop advertising. This is not because I am an avid consumer - indeed I am probably quite a non-materialist really. It is because social marketing campaigns - an area which TCC works in - are often advertised at bus stops.

This time I saw an advert for registering to vote for the London Mayoral election. I didn't think it was a good poster - it wasn't a great design and didn't really encourage you to register, though I suppose it was helpful as an information item. There is clearly a need to advertise registration as up to 1 million Londoners might not be registered to vote in May in the GLA elections. As I walked on to the library I then mentally challenged myself as to what I would do instead!

It struck me that what real incentive was there to make young people want to register? Having your say is hardly tangible in a mature consumer democracy like the UK. It is not as if a young person is going to struggle like many South African voting for the first time after a lot of queueing in 1994.

Many young people may also make the ostensibly rational consumerist calculation, that "will my single vote make any difference"? Until we teach more about the science of change at an earlier age and that small acts really do make a difference either by making a big change on its own or being part of an amplification of a change this rationalisation will continue to exist. As Bobby Kennedy said in South Africa in 1966:

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

In addition for some sort of Tipping Point to occur, such as the collapse of a pile of sand, it needed a single grain of sand to move.

Collapsing sand and Bobby Kennedy's soaring rhetoric might be an interesting explanation to me, but are not a great incentive for others leading busy lives in a reasonably secure democracy where voting and politics in general are lower down their priority list.

The insight I had at the bus stop and on the way to the library - where I am now typing this blog posting - was that it was the act of registering itself that was the problem. For all the centuries of developing democracy, is a vote every few years a great return on filling in a form?

Unlike the past when the registration form was one of the more important things you filled in every year, we all now fill in hundreds of forms a year, many online and many much more exciting or important than the humble electoral registration form. In other words, in an era of mortgage applications, bank loans and overseas holidays, the poor old electoral registration form had fallen down the hierarchy of important acts that you do.

What we need is to make registering to vote a lot more of a key thing, not just for young people but for citizens of all ages.

In recent years the main debate on registration has been on security and voting fraud and whether there should be individual registration or household registration. As one can imagine, this has not been a great encouragement to either registering or voting.

I think this is a false choice as with all the digital databases we now have we can actually have both types of registration, with one acting as a check on the other. Where an individual registration conflicts with a household return, the local authority electoral registration unit should check the issue out. This might require greater resources to operate, but my other suggestions below also recommend more resources being spent on this key entrance point to democratic participation.

Below are a few of my ideas for reforming the electoral registration process for all voters that not only assists with registration itself but also encourages voting:

• Should first registering to vote be done at schools like an internal Citizenship ceremony. With the school leaving age soon to be 18, this could be a key role for them and the culmination of years of PHSE lessons.
• The registration form should come with a standard booklet explaining all your opportunities to participate. Some would be things that already exist. Some extra forms of participation are suggested below.
• The registration form should offer you text message and email notice of public debates hosted by your local authority where Councillors are available to answer questions a few times a year.
• Many people say they want to have their say. The registration form should offer you an online local authority level discussion area where the local strategic partnership and your MP will hold online sessions so they can be questioned, with online votes on issues etc.
• It should offer you an opportunity to register for annual free draws to meet the Prime Minster and the cabinet and opposition party leaders perhaps with a few days holiday in a London hotel thrown in to make it more of a holiday.
• For young people how about a free draw to enable some to have their child trust fund topped up or your university tuition fees written off. Over the next few years we will see people realise how valuable the child trust fund is and that adding to that will become an increasing incentive to many families.
• You could request to join a political party and specify which one you wanted to join. This would have to be a party registered with the Electoral Commission, but the local authority would then pass your name on to the relevant national party to follow up if they wished.
• You could request to become a school governor or to sit on a local government outside body or a local community group or charity. The local authority could then add you to a list that the Councillors could use to draw from a wider range of experience. This approach might even help with improving political party recruitment and making them more representative of their communities.

Some might disagree with some of these ideas or might have other, even better, suggestions. My fundamental point is that filling a form for a single democratic purpose that has been unchanged for many years, is not enough in these more complex times. The form should be transformed into a gateway into a whole range of participatory democratic activity. That way we all should have more opportunities to make democracy work!

An E-Bowl of Sugar!

An interesting new approach to social networking, which is normally associated with widely dispersed communities.

This time it is to reinforce a real geographical community.

Residents UK is a social network site for people living within modern blocks of flats to communicate with each other. In other words people don't ignore their neighbours or have a chance meeting on the landing but actually move in and check out who lives in the block and who might share an interest with them or who can help them.

It will be interesting to see whether it takes off and whether developers of these blocks encourage it? The danger is that it might increase social segregation by making such electronically "gated communities" even more cohesive and less connected with surrounding poorer communities.

I would therefore love to see a local council kit out one of its own housing blocks with home computers and encourage people to join a local block social network - a sort of "e-tenants association". Could such a network go some way to tackle the generally lower levels of trust in poorer communities and perhaps enhance community cohesion?

You tube becomes "Viewtube"!

Youtube has brought all the UK Political Party Youtube sites into one portal to make them easier to find.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched the site appropriately through a Youtube Video!

This should be a useful resource to all citizens or "netizens" in the coming years and is likely to receive a lot of hits at the next General Election. It should reach out to groups such as young people, who are hard to reach through other campaign techniques.

It will be interesting to see whether unofficial videos made by individuals rather than political parties are also placed there?

TCC uses web 2.0 systems such as Youtube and wiki sites for community engagement where the public can add their own content on websites. We believe this has a lot of potential for social marketing and community cohesion work as well as more general campaigning.

As online video becomes easier and cheaper to upload, we could see entire debates conducted through video blogging (Vlogs) and through sites as Youtube. This has potential to revolutionise how the public express their views and could make politicians much more accountable to the public they serve.

The Death of Communities?

The Independent on Sunday has coverage of a study by the Prince's Trust about community decline. The report claims that a third of people are predicting the death of their communities as traditional social networks decline in the face of rapid change in the composition of communities.

The report claims that:

"Most people believe the days of face-to-face contact are numbered, with 65 per cent saying that people in the future will have more contact through the internet than in person. Almost one in 10 Britons, nine per cent, admits to failing to meet other people socially on a weekly basis. And 15 per cent go a week without speaking to any of their neighbours."

More significantly from a community cohesion perspective the report claims that:

"Poorer communities are the least confident about the future of their community and the least satisfied with life in general. More than one in five people here said they had not spoken to a neighbour for at least a week, while eight per cent have not spoken to a neighbour for at least a month."

The Independent also reports on laudable actions by government and the voluntary and private sector to support those poorer communities. Whilst one can always argue for more resources, a more important issue is how we use existing resources better. Two things come to mind:

• Investing in community assets so they draw in a wider community of people to increase social interactions and strengthen social networks.
• Supporting people in the community to act as local champions and advocates - perhaps through a relaxing of some inflexible benefits rules to enable them to be better supported in the work they could do talking to a range of local people.

TCC, working with the New Deal for Communities (NDC) Network as well as with local authorities on community cohesion, has come to the view that it is investment in some of those smaller changes that can make a bigger change in the long-run.

If we are to either sustain or rebuild social networks and community cohesion, it can only be through engaging with the people in a community and helping them to identify the shared challenges that face them and their neighbours. Only when you identify those challenges can you create a potential for dialogue across other cultural and social barriers.

Shameless Marketing

The Chatsworth estate is heading for its second election (remember shopowner Kash was elected to Chatsworth Council at the end of series 3) and this time, if I've viewed the preview clips correctly, this gritty Mancunian housing estate will be electing their own Young Mayor.

As a programme, that I'm a great fan of, which has taken social commentary to, occassionally unbelieveable, dramatic heights I can't help wondering what might be in store for our candidates and what the writers have decided should be the moral tale told with this next election.

Previews of story lines for the episode (5) suggest that 'Debbie spots a chance to provide free egg and chips to everyone on the estate' (courtesy of the Radio Times) - could it be a bribe to help her chosen candidate get elected? Well, like me, you'll just have to wait and see whether the writers have decided that participation in elections should be equated with spoils politics - even if the spoils, in true Shameless style, is free egg and chips.

On a more serious note though, well done to the Shameless team for a piece of Shameless marketing for youth empowerment and participation. With any luck there'll be new young mayors or young leaders springing up in local politics all over the country - joining those already in post in places like Lewisham and Newham. And, as its the biggest focus in the UK for all those politicos this year, we can only hope that the candidates for this years London Mayor and Assembly elections are tuning in and thinking of new ways to involve young people, not yet able to legally vote, in the decision making that affects their lives.

Private Optimism, Public Despair - What can we do?

It has been long known that there is a general perception gap between what people might think of their local hospital and what they think of the NHS in general.

Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, writing in the New Statesman has talked about these difficulties but goes much further with an important and insightful article which looks to the future. He says:

"This perception gap is not restricted to public services, as a recent BBC poll on families confirms. Some 93 per cent of respondents described themselves as optimistic about their own family life, up 4 per cent from the previous time the survey was conducted, 40 years ago. Yet more people - 70 per cent, across race, class and gender - believe families are becoming less successful overall."

He also adds to the point by Polly Toynbee, that we have blogged, on the lack of advocates to tell good news in the public services when it happens:

"In the burgeoning industry of reputation management, it is generally argued that people are much more likely to tell others about bad experiences of services than good ones (5:1 is the usual ratio)."

He argues that trends such as the rise of individualism and the decline of some forms of collectivism combined with the rise of pretty much self-organising global capitalism moving at a rapid pace have created this private optimism and public despair, adding that:

"Globalisation is the gravity of modern society: an unstoppable force that will knock us over if we try to defy it."

Since the collapse of the cold war two systems in 1989 no single person or authority is in control even if some parts of the world are more powerful than others.

He points out that people still see the same broad problems as they did 100 years but now see rapid change as a challenge and seek greater comfort in those close to them.

However, he strikes an optimistic note saying that people are more affluent and healthy and yet there is a danger of some missing out on the celebration:

"Progressives want the world to be a better place. We bemoan its current inequities and oppression - yet if we fail to celebrate the progress that human beings have made, and if we sound as though the future is a fearful place, we belie our own philosophy. Instead, we need to address a deficit in social optimism that threatens the credibility of our core narrative."

Addressing social optimism is clearly a project for everyone. We have previously blogged about Richard Layard's case for increasing overall happiness and David Cameron has talked about the government having a mission to improve people's general wellbeing.

Matthew Taylor makes the case for a New Collectivism to tackle what he describes as the social optimism deficit:

"It is in working with others on a shared project of social advance that we can be reconnected to the sense of collective agency so missing from modern political discourse. It is the attitude of the spectator that induces pessimism, the experience of the participant that brings hope. The problem is not that change brings fear and disorientation (there's nothing new in this), it is that we lack the spaces and places where people can renew hope and develop solutions."

It was challenges like this that brought TCC into being and where we try to assist organisations. He then refers to the sort of change making we should all be attempting together:

"The institutions of the new collectivism must be devolved, pluralistic, egalitarian and, most of all, self-actualising."

This is the sort of approach that this blog argued for and it good to see the arguments so well set out here. He gives a number of examples of where this happening:

"Today, there are signs of a yearning for new ways of working together. There is the growing interest in social and co-operative enterprise and the emergence of new forms of online collaboration. Gordon Brown's citizens' juries are a tentative step in the right direction, albeit without much fun or risk-taking..."

and

"Tackling climate change offers a fascinating opportunity to interweave stories of action at the individual, community, national and international levels."

TCC is working in places like EC1 in London on increasing recycling whilst linking it firmly to the whole issue of climate change through initiatives that engage with young people.

He concludes by making a call for people to build the institutions of the new collectivism:

"Despite the huge impersonal forces of the modern world, people are prepared not only to believe in a better future, but to work together to build it......This potential will be fulfilled only when we provide spaces for collective decision-making and action that speak to the same vision of collaboration, creativity and human fulfilment that progressives claim to be our destiny."

Many of these new institutions of this new collectivism already exist: NHS Foundation Trusts, New Deal for the Communities (NDC's) aspiring to run community assets, social networking sites like Ning, Facebook and Myspace. These are a different set of institutions to perhaps those of the 1945 welfare settlement, but they are a potentially strong mixed economy of institutions nevertheless, and they and other new institutions need support to build a collaborative new collectivism for the future.

In addition there is also challenge for long established institutions, such as local government, to respond to this agenda and to ensure they can relate more effectively to the places where people are optimistic such as within the family unit, whatever size or shape it now comes in. That also means they have to make themselves more accommodating to the places that people are optimistic so they can engage within that space.

Institutions, in whatever form they come and new or old are the arguably finest piece of (social) technology we have created. The Saturn 5 may have put men on the moon, but it was the institutions of the state and their agencies and contractors that put that immense machine together, and educated and trained the men for that mission. Institutions or whatever age encourage collaborative and collective action so as Matthew Taylor has stated the more we strengthen them through peoples involvement in them the more likely we are to rebuild trust and social optimism.