Our services

Successful campaigns can change the world.

We help our clients to develop high-impact lobby and public campaigns to influence government and corporate policies, for a greener and fairer world. We work together with our clients to help them optimise their policy influencing and advocacy campaigns through tailor-made services, developed in co-creation. These can be roughly categorised under the following services:

Lobby and Campaign Training and Coaching

We provide lobby and campaign trainings on beginner and advanced levels. The basic lobby and campaign training is available both as a standard and custom made training. The advanced training is always custom made. Coaching sessions can be provided face to face as well as online, for all levels. For all types of trainings, we also provide Train the Trainer modules. All trainings and coaching modules are available in English, Spanish, French and Dutch and on all continents.

Basic Training

This training is suitable for members of a campaign team such as policy officers, lobbyists, campaign strategists, campaign project leaders, communication- and media officers, social media staff and mobilisation coordinators, and for management. This three-day training helps to understand the basics of influencing, and strenghtens the basic skills necessary for developing a campaign strategy based on a logically coherent set of tactics. The training provides tools and techniques for analysis and strategic design, such as Problem-, Power and Actor Analysis and Theory of Change design, as well as practice with developing communication and mobilisation strategies. It also addresses Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning as critical steps in the campaign cycle.

Advanced Training

The advanced training is intended for more experienced lobbyists, campaigners, communication experts and others who are already working on campaigns. This training goes back to our Basic Campaign Model but offers advanced techniques for various campaign elements, for example:

• Practical guidelines for effective lobby
• Campaigning in post-conflict areas and fragile states: how to strategise in a highly complex and dynamic context?
• Campaign communication: how to work with concepts such as ‘Value Based Segmentation’ and ‘Frames and Values’?
• Public mobilisation: How to activate a critical mass, online and offline?
• Monitoring Evaluation and Learning integrated in the campaign cycle
• Coalition building for campaigns

Strategy Development

Effective lobby campaigns have one thing in common: a clever strategy. We help to construct clever strategies by facilitating the problem-, power- and actor analysis and designing a Theory of Change.

Sometimes we develop strategies ourselves together with the client’s team, in the role of interim Lobbyist or Campaigner, or we provide coaching to Campaign Leaders to be able to facilitate and coordinate these processes themselves.

Additionally, we support the mapping of political and socio-economical processes, and the gathering of information on specific stakeholders, if necessary through collaboration with local consultants.

Capacity Development and Coalition Support

Campaigns are increasingly developed and implemented by coalitions or alliances of partners. To ensure that all members have adequate skills and expertise in the field of joint campaigning, we offer tailor-made services to help identify the capacity development needs of the partners and offer capacity strengthening services.

We have developed a Capacity Assessment Tool to help appraise the capacity of a campaign coalition by assessing the individual and joint capacity of its members.

Monitoring Evaluation & Learning

Lobby and Campaign Effectiveness Evaluation

We work with various evaluation methodologies to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns. Together with our client we select the best methodology and adopt it to the specifics of the campaign.

Process Tracing

Process Tracing is a technique which is used to identify the key outcomes of the campaign and then identify all plausible ‘causal stories’ that may have contributed to these outcomes. The evaluation aims to assess to what extent the changes can be attributed to the various campaign interventions and external dynamics. It also aims to provide an in-depth understanding of which elements of the campaign were the most and the least effective and to identify opportunities for future campaigning.

Outcome Harvesting

Outcome Harvesting collects evidence of what has changed and works backwards to determine whether and how the campaign has contributed to the change. This participatory tool helps the campaign team to verify the outcomes and make sense of cause and effect relationships.

Monitoring and Learning

We help clients develop a monitoring framework for their campaigns to identify milestones and SMART (Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic and Time-bound) indicators of success, to assist campaign leaders and management to monitor progress against objectives and to make the necessary strategic adjustments during the course of the campaign.

We offer several types of support for strategic and institutional learning. To avoid evaluation reports ending up in drawers and folders, we help clients to ensure that lessons are learnt, shared in an attractive format and followed up with action.

Our Clients

Our clients include, amongst many others: Oxfam (Novib, Kenya, Great Britain, America), Greenpeace International, Plan Nederland, War Child, Foodwatch, Cordaid, SNV, Rutgers/WPF, RAIN Foundation, and CNV International. Some of these assignments were carried out under Sloot Consult, Beck on Track, Tenders2Go, Bureau Tij, BBO or The Coalition Factory.

Examples of Our Work

Examples of Evaluations

Oxfam (for various offices, 2012 – 2015)

• Behind the Brands: Mid-term evaluation of the global Behind the Brands campaign (Oxfam America with The Coalition Factory)
• Rights in Crisis campaign in Afghanistan: Evaluation of campaign on strengthening women’s roles in the peace process. Based on Process Tracing Methodology. (Oxfam Great Britain with The Coalition Factory)
• Pan Africa Strategic Framework: Evaluation of the 3 year strategies across Africa on the issues of Democratic Governance, Gender Justice and Economic Justice. Based on Systems Theory; with case studies in Kenya, Senegal and Ethiopia. (Oxfam Novib with The Coalition Factory)
• Using Frames and Values for Development Aid: Evaluation of international use of communication frameworks in campaigns. (Oxfam International)

Greenpeace (for various offices, 2013 – 2016)

• Bees campaign (Greenpeace Switzerland)
• EU Fisheries and Cars campaign (Greenpeace European Unit)
• Toxics campaign (Greenpeace Belgium)
• Polar campaign (Greenpeace International)

Foodwatch Netherlands (2013)

• Evaluation of 4-year strategy with a special focus on 2 campaigns between 2010 and 2013: ‘Child Marketing campaign’ and ‘Misleading Food Marketing' (With Bueau Tij).

Examples of Trainings and coaching

Training on Lobby & Advocacy for Centre for Development Innovations
Training and workshop for participants of the international course on HIV/Aids and Food and Nutrition Security (Netherlands, 2016)

Basic campaign training for CNV Internationaal partners in Central America
Training for labour unions from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, followed by 14 months of coaching (Guatemala, 2015 with The Coalition Factory)

Basic campaign training for War Child Colombia
Training for new campaign team and partner organisation (Colombia, 2015)

Training and coaching programme for CNV Internationaal in Colombia
At distance training and coaching for the lobby- and campaign team of CGT, a labour union and programme partner of CNV Internationaal in Colombia (2015 – 2016)

Training and coaching programme for Cordaid DRC
At distance training on lobby & advocacy for staff members of AAP (partner of Cordaid) in Democratic Republic of Congo (2015)

Training and coaching of various Oxfam Novib partners in Angola
Training on lobby & advocacy, communication and coalition building (2015)

Basic campaign training for Oxfam Novib Pan Africa Programme
Training for Oxfam Pan Africa team and partner coalitions (Kenya, 2012 with The Coalition Factory)

Basic training on Lobby & Advocacy for Social Watch Coalitions
Tailor made training for participants of the Social Watch Coalitions (Czech Republic and Italy, 2010)

Advanced Campaign Training for Oxfam Novib
Tailor made training for Regional Campaign Officers from Oxfam Novib on campaigning, alliance building and M&E (Netherlands, 2009)

Examples of capacity development & coalition support

Oxfam Novib in Kenya, 2014-2015 Capacity development project for Pan African campaign coalitions. Development of capacity assessment model and Guidebook Implementation of capacity assessment scan Coalition strengthening and building of campaign skills (with The Coalition Factory)

Oxfam Novib in Bangladesh and Pakistan, 2011-2012 Creation and redesign of campaign coalitions Co-creation with coalition partners of campaign strategies and plans (with Tenders2Go)

CNV International, 2014 Course for strategic alliances Congo: strategy development for cap bld – at distance course

Examples of strategy development

Greenpeace International, 2013 Facilitation of strategy session for the Pan African Food for Life campaign in Kenya

Oxfam Novib in Pakistan, 2011-2012 Facilitation of strategy workshops and development of fundraising proposal for SRHR campaign (with Tenders2Go)

War Child Colombia, 2015 Facilitation of strategy workshop for campaign