Meetings Whilst every campaign group may choose to organise itself differently the main format by which you will coordinate your activists is by holding regular meetings. Regardless of whether these meetings are weekly, fortnightly or monthly the regular meetings of your new campaign group will be the mechanism by which your activists come together and…

Before you consider the logistics of actually setting up a group it is important to consider how someone can go from being apathetic, to being a campaigner. Whilst the notion of apathy is itself a debatable term we should define it here as being “indolent of mind”, someone who is unaware and disinclined to join…

The words campaign and activist are words that can instantly conjure up images of scruffy students wielding homemade placards clothed in well worn Che Guevara t-shirts. Whilst it would be untrue to suggest these people do not exist they certainly don’t have the monopoly over the phrases. Before this book takes you on to the…

The inspiration for this book has slowly matured during my past four years coordinating campaigns and working alongside campaigning organisations, both during and after my time at University. Many believe that activism and campaigning are the soul preserve of the young and the militant, that to be an activist you have to hold far-fetched notions…

Have you ever got a postcard in your morning’s post and not read it? Me neither. There’s something compelling about that small, stiff piece of card that says “Read me.” So why not consider putting that factor to work for you in your marketing campaigns? Postcards have a number of advantages over traditional mailpacks. They’re…

The idea From an international research consultancy One of the best offers I ever ran for a client was a pocket calculator that we bought in for £3 as an incentive on a £550 reference book. We had librarians falling over themselves to place their orders and saw a big uplift in response. For a…

Take a random group of 1,000 sales executives and ask them to arrange themselves in a very long line, according to how much commission they made last year, big hitters on the right, Willy Lomans on the left. After a bit of a wait (OK, you could fi nish reading this book), they’re done. I…

Perhaps because a lot of people who write copy do it because they love words, they can sometimes forget why they’re writing in the fi rst place. Here are a few things we’re not doing. Impressing our reader with the depth of our vocabulary. Making them laugh. Producing literary fi ction (or any other kind…

Where face-to-face selling isn’t an option—because your total pool of prospects is too big or geographically dispersed, or you don’t have the budget for a salesforce, or it just doesn’t fi t with your business model—the answer is copywriting. I wrote my fi rst sales copy in May 1986. It was for a market research…

Gerard Vroomen will tell you that he is an engineer, not a marketer. He will tell you that the company he co-founded, Cervelo Cycles,1 does not have any marketing experts. But Vroomen is wrong. Why? Because he is obsessed with the buyers of his competition bikes and with the engineeringdriven product he offers them. He’s…