Apologies for potentially a drawn out response in advance.. may be a while
Typically street campaigns are lucky to get 1%, but this isn't your "typical" street campaign.
Here are a list of questions I would ask myself to guesstimate risk / reward
1) Expected attendance
2) # of stalls / volunteers
3) Static or mobile
4) time to campaign
5) Demographics
6) strength of message
7) focus of message
8) publicity availability
9) weather
10) terrain
11) equipment availability
12) accessability
13) utilities
14) Authorisation
15) financial capacity
Sure there can be more, but this is enough for a start!
1) Simple enough between 1,500 - 2,500 (Best case 3,000)
2) Only you can answer that
3) Are you going to set out a stall or mingle with the fans? If you mingle how are you going to coordinate to ensure you don't miss out people / overlap
4) How long before / after the game are you going to be doing this? leaflets at half time? How many people do you expect to turn up 10 minutes before the game / how many 1 hour before
5) How many are old enough to sign? Older people are more likely to vote
6) How clear is the message
to your audience - campaigning to fund cancer research is no good at an animal rights rally for example.
7) Focus of message - shouldn't be a problem, as it's a football based campaign
8) Are you going to advertise - Forums will have limited impact. EVERY success you have had is due to being advertised in the telegraph (no chance the march in the city would have worked or the votes you have achieved so far without mass media advertising)
9) People aren't going to stand around and sign a petition in the rain / cold
10) are you standing on the hill? Is it going to be muddy? Wheelchair access? Near the toilets / food vans?
11) Are you going to need pens / iPads? If you need signatures you need min clipboards, ideally tables with canopies
12) Are you in their face / out on the fringes? as with homes its location location location
13) If they need to sign on electronically, you are going to need electricity. If it's cold you need hot food & drinks. Are you offering those that sign drinks?
14) Authorisation - are you going to need a pass? Do you need to let the police know? I suspect you do incase of scammers
15) This is key. Can you afford any of this? who pays for the leaflets? Are they professionally made / printed off? The more amateur the less likely to look.
Personally, considering the numbers likely to attend, it will be a drop in the ocean. Sure there are more city fans, but those fans that are going are more likely to have
already signed! It's a double edged sword!
My advice is to
seriously reconsider the entire strategy. You are starting to go down the road of forking out money.
How much money are you prepared to spend on this campaign? If you have no funds then it will be a waste of time money and effort to hand out leaflets. Be honest how many times have you been handed a flyer and it has gone straight in the bin?
ePetitions sound good, but are a nightmare - and here is why in my view. With a regular petition, you can simply ask for a signature, photocopy /print a few reams of paper, a clipboard some pens, some well intentioned people, then when you are happy with the results, at a time of
your choosing, you can hand it to the PM with a nice photo op. But then they generally get ignored.
With an ePetition, dead easy to set up, then the nightmare starts. 97.5% don't even reach 1000! But those that get over that hurdle assume its only a matter of time. Prime example the #1 trending petition. First week it was getting at one point nearly 3,000 / hour. Week later, it has dropped off the cliff and is getting 120 per hour. This campaign at best was getting 250 / hour!
But after the first few days of frantic action, then you have to rely on activists, advertising to get you to the finish line. The Finish line is not under your control.the duration of the petition effectively is not under your control.
The whole concept of ePetitions is designed to male it easier for the
politicians to process. Simply to simply close an ePetition with 60,000 signatures than a paper petition with 20,000 - it would need to be physically stored somewhere!
As I hope I mentioned, the first two weeks are key. ePetitions are like viral youtube vids. Take the Twist & shout vid. 540,000 in the first week or so. Currently 558k! And it takes nothing to watch a youtube video!
I cannot emphasise to you strongly enough Michael.
Seriously consider your next move. You are within a week maybe two of contacting every football forum / fans group in the country. You
might achieve 100k that way - if so well done move on to stage two. But judging by the fact that the rate of signatures has hardly shifted in over a week (around 30-40 an hour), contacting the forums hasn't increased the rate. So unless you are going to contact every forum every day for a year, then that source of signatures is going to dry up in 2 or 3 weeks. Then what?
Bravado is one thing but exactly how are you going to achieve these signatures? Word of mouth just isn't going to do it. Going on size of local community and assuming a % of those will sign just isn't going to do it!
So sooner or later you have to accept you need to advertise or thank the volunteers for their help! And if you bawk at having to pay insurance for campaigning on the streets, it would feel like a kick in the love spuds to advertise!
Haven't asked but for a full page spread in the CET I expect could be close to 4 figures just for one day!)
But even if it was "just" £100, that is one page one day! You need a different page at least once a week! How many people would read the page, then go onto the link? Remember not every phone has that bar code app, so they would need to type in the link!
Honestly, leaflets for an ePetiton as a rule are a bad idea. Indeed ePetitions are bad news, as they give false hope to those that generate them!
To advertise this, you will need to have a web page with an
easy to remember web addresssand is attractive to the eye. Just having a webpage with a link on will not cut it.
So already you are looking at paying for a website for at least a year, a web designer to do the graphics / mechanics, and paying to advertise!
I thought you would appreciate a detailed breakdown of my reasoning, rather than just say it's a fooking bad idea. If I lay out
why I thought it was a bad idea, at least then you can pick apart my reasoning, and see I am not just anti this campain.
for
any campaign you need weeks and weeks of planning. You need funds, or at least a fund raising strategy. You need everyone involved onboard and have a fully detailed strategy
before you start!
Hopefully you now realise you have reached a crossroads with this. and I hope all those attacking me for being sceptical or a coward or a defeatist understand why I am so concerned at your attitude to my comments!
Sure campaign
can succeed, but 99.99% of those are backed up either with a mass personal reason to want the campaign to succeed, or have deep pockets to fund the campaign. You think it is a coincidence that the RNLI for example only gives 10p in the pound to the lifeboats? The Lifesavers charity deems it a sense of pride that they give over 50% of their fundraising to the actual cause! (how many people have heard of this charity btw?)
Sorry I have written so much, but in answer to your question I would step back, and think long and hard at the next step. What would you put on a flyer anyway? the exact web address for the epetition? Doubt very much anyone will ever type that in manually - do you?
So you need bare minimum a barcode. How many people have that app on their phone? I don't - haven't had it on my last 6 phones! Are you expecting people to install that app just to sign this petition? If so there goes the dead easy 15 second process argument up the swanny!
Sadly you cannot assume people are as determined to get this signed as you. If they were, then you would already have achieved the first step.
No doubt you will be totally deflated by my answer and for that I apologise. But you need to stop with the bravado. You need to get the % amount of population will sign BS out of your mindset. The petition is real, you need to deal with reality.
You need to spend money -
LOTS of money to move it forward. Can you afford this? Is spending that amount justified by possibly getting considered? Even if you get past those hurdles, and even if they do investigate, no guarantees they will act on the findings any more than they have done; so you could end up spending thousands personally, millions of taxpayers money - and even then their might be no action!
ARE YOU 100% CONVINCED YOU CAN ACHIEVE THIS GOAL?????
Personally when it gets to spending money, I would leave it to chance. But if you want to spend
Thousands on this then I tip my hat to you!
You may consider this a success, but you haven't got anywhere near where you need to be at this stage. Can you afford to spend thousands on this?
