Activists adopting satire, micro-targeting to reach government in new ways

Social advocacy groups in Canada are employing new tactics in a bid to influence a government they said has been unresponsive to traditional activism.

Mass rallies, satirical campaigns and “micro-targeting” are among the methods being used or considered by some of the most recognizable groups advocating on environmental, social and animal rights issues, spokespeople said.

Micro-targeting—compiling contact information for thousands of individuals across the country, segmented by demographics and political persuasions— is the future of activism in Canada, said Will Horter, executive director of the Dogwood Initiative, in an interview.

Horter described micro-targeting as grouping people into segments “that, with certain treatments, will take [political] action.” The Victoria-based Dogwood Initiative is focused primarily on rallying public opposition to pipelines to the West Coast and oil tanker traffic that would come with them, he said.

The group targets Conservative voters with its anti-tanker messaging, framing its position as “normal” instead of radical or leftist, said Horter. Support from Conservative donors and voters gives Dogwood leverage over a government that would otherwise ignore its positions, he said.

“If you walk into the room and you have leverage with them, then it’s easy to have a government relations conversation. If you walk into the room and say, ‘Please do this because it’s the right thing to do,’ that’s not going very far,” he said.

The group held “Defend Our Coast” rallies against pipelines in Victoria and at the offices of 72 B.C. MLAs in October. Dogwood volunteers used its database to organize people in each of those ridings, said Horter.

The group also used its micro-targeting database to raise opposition to the Canada-China foreign investment promotion and protection agreement (FIPA), he said. Dogwood staff and volunteers contacted 7,000 Conservative party donors, framed the FIPA issue for them, and then polled their support or opposition to it. A strong majority opposed the FIPA, and Dogwood sent the poll script and results directly to the PMO, Horter said.

Those individuals were found using Elections Canada documentation, but Dogwood has primarily used volunteers to fill its contact database, he said.

The Conservative Party and U.S. Democratic Party have already mastered micro-targeting for their own ends, he said, and activist groups could employ the technique to influence future elections.

Politics has become about determining, “Can this particular person help me or hurt me?” and “How can I mobilize them?” he said. The “Enlightenment model” of informing the general public about an issue and hoping it sides with your group is no longer an effective tactic, he said.

Dogwood has been training other social advocacy groups in the use of micro-targeting techniques, he said. “Too many” are still using old-fashioned methods of activism, trying to “make a big ruckus” and make gains with the resulting media attention.

Graham Knight, a professor emeritus and activism expert at McMaster University, said activist groups must change their advocacy tactics as an issue develops.

Traditional methods of activism like physical demonstrations can help these groups get an issue into the public spotlight, he said. Once that happens, activists should supplant their efforts with government relations work.

Social and digital media have been “a huge boon” to activists in terms of saved expense, “but they don’t necessarily replace good old fashioned face-to-face campaigning,” he said.

“Anything that happens too fast also un-happens too fast,” he said. “One of the things that you’ve got to do is sustain interest over time.”

Early messaging directed toward the public should be framed in terms of right versus wrong, but government relations work needs to involve compromise in order to find a pragmatic solution, he said.

OpenMedia, a non-profit that advocates on Internet and telecommunications issues, has used micro-targeting to rally its supporters for the past few years, spokeswoman Lindsey Pinto said in an interview.

The group segments its supporters based on which issues they have expressed interest in, she said. This helps ensure supporters aren’t barraged with information on issues they may not care about, or a level of detail they don’t yet understand, she said.

“We’ve used this targeting, in a way, to help… strategically bring people into the wider community and then be able to talk to them about other issues,” she said.

OpenMedia staff members send more detail to Facebook supporters and treat them “more like insiders” than those on the general mailing list, and use Twitter to address more technical issues, she said.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) also used micro-targeting during the 2008 election to raise issues and “make MPs aware of their constituents’ opinion,” spokeswoman Michelle Cliffe said in an email.

The group has also recently changed tactics on its lobbying against the seal hunt, said Sheryl Fink, the group’s seal programme director.

“We’ve tried to move from protesting government to working with government,” she said in an interview.

The IFAW decided not to gather footage of this year’s hunt, the first time it has not done so in many years, Fink said. IFAW officials have been meeting with MPs, so far primarily from the opposition parties, “just looking at the economics” of the hunt, she said. Gory pictures of dead seals weren’t resonating with MPs, she said: “Maybe economics will.”

Some IFAW supporters have told the group they are “burned out” and tired of traditional protests that haven’t swayed the government, she said.

The group recently hired marketing companies Wildrun Productions and Hypenotic to design a campaign satirizing the rhetoric around the seal hunt, Cliffe said.

“We need to get away from this situation where we have the three main political parties arguing with each other about who supports the seal hunt more. We’re using this humorous parody approach to encourage politicians to also take a step back, take a fresh, realistic look at the seal hunt, not get caught up in the emotion,” Fink said.

The campaign includes a satirically-themed website for the “Department of Obsolete Industries,” as well as a 30-page booklet and letter sent to each MP.

Another collection of activists is using a more blunt form of satire to rally young voters to take action on political issues. Shit Harper Did (SHD) recently re-launched its website, which was first established in 2011. The website uses videos, links to news articles and pictures—for example, a hand flipping off a pair of swans—to rail against government decisions on environmental and other files.

A team of comedians is also touring “strategic communities” and universities to poke fun at the government and urge youth to take “creative actions” to protest its policies, said Brigette DePape, SHD’s lead community organizer who rose to fame in 2011 as the parliamentary page that held a “Stop Harper” sign during the throne speech.

“Young people are the largest un-activated powerbase in this country,” DePape said in an interview. “Politics can be boring” and satire can make it accessible to an otherwise disillusioned young generation of Canadians, she said.

Like the IFAW, progressive policy non-profit the Council of Canadians is also currently debating how to better get its point across to a government that “has changed the climate on a lot of this discussion,” executive director Gary Neil said in an interview.

“There’s no evidence at all that they’re interested in what popular opinion says about [certain] topics,” he said.

The Council hasn’t made any headway using classic public and government relations techniques, he said.

Last fall Neil met with representatives from about 60 social interest groups from “across the whole spectrum of civil society” and discussed the possibility of a mass protest in Ottawa on a range of social issues, he said. “Can we bring 100,000 people into the streets in Ottawa? Would that have an impact?” he said, describing the meeting.

The groups determined that such a protest “wouldn’t be appropriate” at the moment. They'll coordinate their lobbying at the local level with the hope of building a broad, grassroots movement, he said, and continue the discussion about whether a mass protest would be appropriate in the future.

Sierra Club Canada (SCC) president John Bennett said in an interview his group is currently experimenting with online campaigning “to see whether we can motivate people and whether that actually results in some change.”

“It’s a marvellous tool for reaching people,” he said, but “the jury’s still out on, ‘What does it mean to send 10,000 emails to the government?'”

Bennett said a source within the government told him the SCC’s 3,000 interventions, generated online, in support of saving the caribou helped scuttle government plans to change the Species at Risk Act last year. Other online campaigns have had no effect, he said.

Online campaigning does not require a smaller staff than organizing traditional campaigns, he said.

The group has largely abandoned traditional door knocking and letter-writing campaigns because the federal government doesn’t respond to them, he said.

-With reporting by Peter Mazereeuw at peter@lobbymonitor.ca and editing by Mark Burgess at mburgess@lobbymonitor.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said Dogwood Initiative staff had organized rallies at Vancouver MLA offices. The rallies were organized by volunteers, said a Dogwood official.